Food Sovereignty's New Frontiers

Abstract

Globalization and Food Sovereignty: Global and Local Change in the New Politics of Food. Edited by Peter Andree, Jeffrey Ayres, Michael J. Bosia, Marie-Josee Massicotte. Toronto, University of Toronto Press, 2014. 392 pp., $34.95 paperback (ISBN-13: 978-1-442-61228-0). The purpose of Globalization and Food Sovereignty is to bring the politics of food into the realm of political science, a discipline that reportedly has “largely failed to theorize the political aspects of food” (p. 28). The new insights, both empirical and theoretical, offered by some contributors to Globalization and Food Sovereignty make a solid contribution to the growing critical body of work on the politics of food. While mostly helpful, some chapters seem to rehash old arguments or not engage critically with the now-rich body of debates in alternative production and consumption. In this review, I address three themes that emerge in Globalization and Food Sovereignty that advance our understanding of food sovereignty. 1. Definitions of food sovereignty: Can food sovereignty be both radical and neoliberal? If the chapters in this book highlight anything, it is the contrariness of food sovereignty. Food sovereignty represents both an ideal and a set of actions that defy easy definition. Several chapters in this book examine how food sovereignty is increasingly being articulated and appropriated (coopted?) by actors not previously understood as advancing food sovereignty, such as consumers and producers in the Global North. Whatever the means and strategies employed, the ultimate goal is to resist the globalization of agriculture and corporate dominance. I found Menser's arguments beneficial in attempting to bring food sovereignty into political philosophy parlance. Menser argues that the notion of territory, governed and defended by sovereign states, should be understood as the space of agro-ecological production in food sovereignty articulations. However, his argument that food sovereignty is class war reterritorialized, cannot be taken as given, in light of findings in this book, and by other scholars, that consumerist approaches …