Food sovereignty: a contested concept

Emerging out of two major conferences and with a background reading list of more than 90 papers, a special issue of the Journal of Peasant Studies has just emerged on 'critical perspectives on food sovereignty'. This is free to view for a limited period (here: http://www.tandfonline.com/r/fjps-41-6 – click to articles via this link if you don't have a subscription), and contains a number of important papers and commentaries by both academics and activists, and many hybrids. It is an important moment, both for the food sovereignty movement and for the debate around it. For far too long there has been an absence of sustained critical and engaged debate about the meanings and implications of food sovereignty. These papers discuss, among other things, the origins of the concept, its connection to other food justice movements, its relation to rights discourses, the roles of markets and states and the challenges of implementation. It demonstrates a maturing of the movement, and a growing willingness to debate from a position of confidence and strength.

The most visible representation of the food sovereignty movement is the peasant movement, La Via Campesina. This has grown through combining diverse campaigns for changes in the global agri-food system. Some claim that it is the world's largest social movement. 'Food sovereignty', is a term, as Marc Edelman notes in his paper that has a longer genealogy but has become very effectively popularised. This is an argument for peasant autonomy, local food systems, fairer more environmentally-sound, agroecological production and trade and much more besides. As a vision and political programme it is one to which many would subscribe.

For a while I have been intrigued to find out where the food sovereignty debate had got to, what political strategies were emerging and whether, in different and diverse contexts, the ideals were in fact realisable. I attended one of the conferences early this year in the Hague. Elizabeth Mpofu, a Zimbabwean farmer from Shashe resettlement area near Mashava and now the General Coordinator of La Via Campesina and a leader of the movement, opened the proceedings with a passionate rallying call.

What are my reflections on the debate? In many ways I remain rather confused as to what food sovereignty is, and how it is to be translated into a political struggle. The concept has evolved, and the movement has adopted many different angles as more and more elements have been incorporated. These included the move from a focus on small-scale production and markets to concerns with gender, indigenous peoples, environment, workers, consumers, migrants, trade relations and more.

Through accreting issues and agendas, the movement thus offers an all-encompassing vision where nothing is left out it seems. This helps build linkages between different areas of activism, but it also makes it very difficult to get a handle on what the core issues are, and where to focus intellectual and political energies. This is made more challenging by the lack of clarity over the focus of the key concept – sovereignty. There is much focus on 'the local', but this may not be sovereign without addressing the role of the state, or indeed the relationships between states in international trade and global politics. A populist appeal to locality may miss the importance of defining the arenas for political action that necessarily impinge on what happens in local settings.

It is clearly intensely political issue, part of an assertive political project, but it often lacks a solid political analysis. As many argue in the Journal of Peasant Studies issue, a more thorough-going engagement with critical agrarian studies might help address this gap. Three areas of politics, I felt, are missing.

The first is the politics of peasants. La Via Campesina – the peasant's way – asserts the rights of peasants. But who is the peasantry in the context of a globalising world, with dynamic patterns of differentiation across sites? Classic issues of class formation and differentiation are raised, ones that Henry Bernstein so effectively elaborates in his 'sceptical view' paper for the issue. What is the relationship between the peasantry and workers, or indeed worker-peasants, with one foot in town and another in the countryside? Are petty commodity producers or even emergent commercial farmers part of the peasantry, or separate? What differences of gender, age, race for example cut across these class differences, and what conflicts and tensions arise? These are old questions, but highly pertinent to the formation of the emergent solidarities that must define a movement. Creating an idealised vision of a peasant, seemingly independent of context, makes the political project problematic, as the contradictions and conflicts that arise between and within groups may act to undermine the alliances required for a movement to gain traction.

The second area of missing politics is around the politics of technology and ecology. An important strand of the food sovereignty movement is the advocacy for an agroecological approach to farming. Low external inputs, organic production, rejection of biotechnology and so on are all hallmarks. Yet in the advocacy of agroecology too often there is a resort to an essentialist, technical argument, thus falling into the same trap as the advocates of the technologies that are opposed. As Jack Kloppenberg puts it in his paper in respect of agricultural biotechnology, the argument should be less about the particular technology but instead around the terms of access. An open access approach to research and development may generate a range of productivity-enhancing technologies that improve efficiency and reduce production costs, without being at the behest of large-scale corporations. New technologies are of course essential for improving agriculture. Improving the yield of crops through high-tech genetics or the use of chemical fertilisers and pesticides may be essential, yet seem to be rejected by agroecology fundamentalisms.

The bottom line is that farmers want good prices, and consumers want cheap food. This structural relation between producers is crucial. The current agri-food system involves much distortion of prices, and a distribution of value in corporate-controlled value chains that often benefits agribusinesses and retailers, and neither producers nor consumers. Yet too often local food systems can only produce expensive food for elite markets. Clearly internalising the costs to the environment and to labour of the current agri-food system is essential, and this will doubtless produce shorter commodity chains, more localised production and marketing, better conditions for workers and a more equitable distribution of value, as well as more ecologically-sensitive forms of production. Yet, even with such measures, a diversity of innovative, technological responses will be necessary that should not be limited by a technically narrow definition of agroecology.

The third area is the politics of capital, and in particular the relationships between capital and the peasantry. Again, a very old debate. Peasants, however they are defined, are never disengaged from the historical processes of capitalist development. Indeed they are mutually constituted by such processes. The debate is not therefore how to disengage, but how to negotiate the terms of incorporation. There are many examples of adverse incorporation, where poor, marginalised farmers are disadvantaged. But the solution is not to go back to earlier forms of production and market relationship, but to organise for a better deal. Re-embedding markets in social contexts, following Karl Polanyi, is essential if a more democratic control of the food system is to be realised, and this means a political struggle around the terms of trade, the rejection of monopolistic market behaviours, and the opening up of markets to a wider range of players. In many ways, this is an advocacy for a better functioning capitalism without the distortions of corporate concentration, not its rejection outright. This means developing a more strategic engagement with capital around the terms of incorporation and the relationships between markets and societal values, much as the fair trade, organic certification and other movements have done.

The progressive ambitions and utopian ideals of food sovereignty are clearly evident, and ones that many can easily subscribe to. You only have to visit Elizabeth Mpofu and her colleagues on Shashe farm to get a sense of the vision. But how to translate this into a political programme and strategic advocacy around which clear solidarities and alliances can build is less evident. Perhaps with a tighter political economic analysis of the nature of the problem, always necessarily contextualised by history and place, then a more targeted, more effective approach might emerge. I am inspired by the passion and vision of the movement participants and their academic allies, but I am perhaps more sceptical about the practicalities of how, in any setting that I know of, such a vision might be realised in practice, including in Shashe (a question asked by Tania Li). This is of course not a reason to reject trying, but it also suggests the need to think harder about both political possibilities and strategies, and be less dogmatic about approaches, technologies and economic arrangements for more sustainable, people-centred agriculture than sometimes the agroecology and food sovereignty advocates allow.

This blog draws from an earlier reflection on the ISS conference published by Future Agricultures

The post was written by Ian Scoones and appeared on Zimbabweland

Contested agronomy: low-level evidence, high-level claims

Image: success rice, from nauright's photostream on Flickr

Demonstrating 'impact' has become a strong imperative for those involved in agronomic research. An important part of the new dynamic of contestation about the outputs of agronomic research in the developing world arises from this imperative. That’s one of the themes of the book Contested Agronomy and in a recent paper.

 

Whether couched in terms of ‘success stories’, ‘value for money’ or ‘impact at scale’, this pressure is now a critical part of the context of agronomic research. It affects how it is prioritised, funded, managed, implemented, evaluated and communicated.

 

There is nothing new in agronomists and their institutions labelling emergent findings and technologies as ‘promising’ – or using these to attract public attention and make the case for further funding. However, there is something qualitatively different between a claim of ‘promise’ and a claim of future ‘success’ or ‘impact’.

 

‘Success making’ within agricultural research in the developing world, therefore, deserves further attention. What are the links between the data generated through agronomic experimentation, and claims of actual or potential ‘impact at scale’?

What happens when ‘impact’ takes over? An important part of the new dynamic of contestation about the outputs of agronomic research in the developing world arises from the imperative to demonstrate impact. That’s one of the themes of the book Contested Agronomy and in a recent paper. Whether couched in terms of ‘success stories’, ‘value for money’ or ‘impact at scale’, this pressure is now a critical part of the context of agronomic research. It affects how it is prioritised, funded, managed, implemented, evaluated and communicated.

There is nothing new or even noteworthy in agronomists and their institutions labelling emergent findings and technologies as ‘promising’ – or using these to and using labels such as this to garner attract public attention and make the case for further funding. However, we have previously suggested that[NO1] there is something qualitatively different between a claim of ‘promise’ and a claim of future ‘success’ or ‘impact’.,

and because of this the current dynamic of ‘Ssuccess making’ within agricultural research in the developing world, therefore, deserves further attention. What are the links between the data generated through agronomic experimentation, and claims of actual or potential ‘impact at scale’?

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[NO1]Link to the Sumberg Irving paper

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We can think of both agronomic research results and impact claims as being distributed along a continuum of levels: in Africa, for example, from the level of the trial plot to that of the sub-continent (see picture).

The foundational level at which applied agronomists work is the trial plot. Whether these trial plots are located on experiment stations or in farmers’ fields, work at this level characterises much agronomic research. Relatively few agronomists work at the field and farm levels, often by combining an element of modelling with their experimental activities, and all too rarely by working in close collaboration with social scientists. Agronomists have a long tradition of using experimental design, and repeating similar experiments over different locations, seasons and years in order to make their findings more robust and to increase the level at which they can be applied.

In contrast, in order to be taken seriously, a response to the pressure to demonstrate success and impact must be made at levels considerably higher than the trial plot, field or farm. A recent paper by Kassam and Brammer illustrates how claims for the System of Rice Intensification (SRI) and Conservation Agriculture (CA) are being made at these higher levels:

“...in the coming decades, both CA and SRI appear to offer the best hope of increasing food production rapidly, at low cost and without adverse environmental consequences in developing countries where human populations are increasing most rapidly. CA principles can strengthen the sustainability and productivity of most tillage systems (including ‘organic’ systems) in arable farming, horticulture, plantation agriculture, agro-forestry and integrated crop–livestock systems.”

Here, the claims about both CA and SRI are made at the level of “developing countries where human populations are increasing most rapidly”. For CA, they’re made at the level of “most tillage systems [...] in arable farming, horticulture, plantation agriculture, agro-forestry and integrated crop–livestock systems”.

These are high level claims by any stretch of the imagination; and Kassam and Brammer are not the only ones making them. The question that deserves our attention is: How are such claims constructed; and can (how can) they ever be refuted?

We might think of such a high level claim as being like a large brick edifice. One way of constructing it would be brick-by-brick, where each new brick represents an additional piece of evidence. In the case of agricultural technologies such as SRI and CA, this additional evidence might expand the array of soil types, rainfall regimes, production systems, and so on, in which these technologies have been shown to both yield significant benefits and be practicable.

A high level claim constructed in this way would arise from, and would link directly to, a base of experimental or observational data that could be made available to be re-interrogated as required.
However, high level claims of the potential impact or success of agricultural technologies are seldom constructed in this way - primarily because the additional experimentation would simply be too time consuming and expensive. Funders don’t want to pay for that intensity of research, and everyone is under pressure to demonstrate results quickly.

So, rather than building a claim to ‘impact at scale’ by adding one brick of evidence to another, what appears to happen is that a very limited quantity of site-specific data is ‘stretched’: this allows the creation of a large but paper thin edifice that, to the eye of someone who is ready to believe, appears solid and robust.

The problem is that once such a large-scale claim has been established, despite having little real substance, it can be extraordinarily resistant to attack on the basis of argument and evidence.
This is partly because of the level at which the claims are made. As such claims is are not rooted in the world of evidence and are made in such general and universal terms, any critique based on the low-level counter-evidence of the agronomist (i.e. from trial plots, fields and farms) is repelled like water off a duck’s back. Emery Roe has made a similar observation in relation to the staying power of some development narratives, despite the existence of a significant body of undermining evidence.
This situation, where impact claims are largely divorced from the experimental evidence that is the life-blood of applied agronomy, and where mainstream academic journals increasingly allow themselves to be part of the process of ‘stretching’, represents a fundamental challenge to the discipline.

How agronomists respond to this challenge will, to a large extent, determine their relevance to sustainable agricultural development over the coming decades. We very soon need to see the green shoots of an agronomy fight-back!

References

• Kassam, A., & Brammer, H. (2012). Combining sustainable agricultural production with economic and environmental benefits. The Geographical Journal, no-no. doi: 10.1111/j.1475-4959.2012.00465.x
• Roe, E. M. (1991). Development narratives, or making the best of blueprint development. World Development, 19(4), 287-300.
• Sumberg, J., Irving, R., Adams, E., & Thompson, J. (2012). Success making and success stories: agronomic research in the spotlight. In J. Sumberg & J. Thompson (Eds.), Contested Agronomy: Agricultural Research in a Changing World. London: Routledge.
• Sumberg, J., & Thompson, J. (Eds.). (2012). Contested Agronomy: Agricultural Research in a Changing World. London: Routledge.
• Sumberg, J., Thompson, J., & Woodhouse, P. (2012). Why agronomy in the developing world has become contentious. Agriculture and Human Values, 1-13. doi: 10.1007/s10460-012-9376-8