Quiet no more: The emergence of food justice and sovereignty in Romania

Abstract

How do peasants assert food justice and sovereignty in Eastern Europe? How do their food practices connect with broader political conflicts and movements? Most scholarship on food and agriculture in this region describes small-scale farming as a ‘quiet’ - apolitical and unpurposeful - contribution to sustainability. This paper aims to expand the ‘quiet sustainability’ thesis by theoretically building on food justice and sovereignty theories. Since sustainability cannot be achieved without confronting the structures that reproduce oppression, food sovereignty – as the right of people to define their own agro-food systems – should be seen as a precondition for both greater justice and sustainability. Drawing on the case of a peasant association from Romania, Eco Ruralis, member of the European Coordination Via Campesina, we argue that peasants are not just ‘quietly’ contributing to sustainability but rather have been historically and systemically silenced and marginalized by various regimes of power. As testimonies show, such alternative practices are continuously devalued, threatened and marginalized but peasants also seek to re-politicize food. We posit that a movement for food justice and sovereignty is emerging in former socialist Eastern Europe, characterized by embeddedness within transnational movements against extractivism and efforts to reclaim the dignity of being a peasant.