Transnational Agrarian Movements Research Articles

Post-growth agrifood systems: Towards an emancipatory politics

Abstract A world without hunger demands a post-growth rewiring of the global agrifood system predicated on emancipatory politics that enables reform of actors and institutions outside agriculture. This is necessary to shift out of the prevalent growth-hegemonic framing of agriculture and its contributions to economic growth, where the structural injustice of hunger is rendered invisible. Recent International Relations (IR) scholarship highlights the institutional arrangements underpinning global agrifood problems. This paper uses critical IR theory to understand the structural mechanisms and relations of power through which the growth-hegemonic theorisation of agriculture is produced and reproduced, sustaining hunger within an exceedingly financialised agro-industrial complex. The structural power of knowledge shaping the interlocking structures of finance, production, and security is evident in the extremely high multilevel concentration in modern agrifood systems. This structural power evident in local decentralised agroecological systems and in transnational agrarian movements reflects post-growth principles of sufficiency, shared prosperity, care, ecological and social justice.Together, they are the counter-hegemonic voices, cooperative social systems, and class interests championed by post-growth politics.

More-than-Human Witnessing? The Politics and Aesthetics of Madre Tierra (Mother Earth) in Transnational Agrarian Movements

Since the mid-1990s, appeals to “Madre Tierra” [Mother Earth] have united activists and campesino [peasant] networks globally as part of political claims of food sovereignty and agrarian rights. Positioning this paper as a contribution to feminist theory, here I explore what Madre Tierra does in political-aesthetic terms, specifically within situated struggles in Central America. Seen from (white) eco-feminist perspectives, the rise of Madre Tierra could be seen to perform new kinds of exclusions: in this resonant figure diverse indigenous cosmologies seem to collapse; agrarian struggles are rendered “feminine,” and both women and land-workers are placed in the realm of nature—which is to say, far from meaning-making. However, when the everyday practices of agrarian activism are thought through Latinx and Chicanx theories of queer kinship and black womanism, a more radical, and specifically decolonial, vision emerges. Through ethnographic vignettes I illustrate the ways that masculinity/femininity, nature/culture, and the relationships between them are being reworked.

Peasant Understanding of Food Sovereignty: Indonesian Peasants in a Transnational Agrarian Movement

Peasant Understanding of Food Sovereignty: Indonesian Peasants in a Transnational Agrarian Movement

Latent alliances: the Women’s March and agrarian feminism as opportunities of and for political ecology

On 21 January 2017, the day after a bitterly contested presidential inauguration, nearly 5 million women and men marched and protested in 673 places across the globe – under the banner of the Women’s March. The March exceeded and expanded expectations on many levels, from organizational projections to media classifications to scholarly analysis. One aspect of the March – and its ongoing repercussions – that has eluded attention is its latent links to and alliances with women-led agrarian movements underway in the United States and internationally. Rendering the March merely urban does a disservice to the subtle ways agricultural politics and even agrarian resistance permeated its political messages. I argue that a feminist political ecology analysis – particularly a postcolonial, intersectional one rooted in anti-racism and anti-classism and following the lead of Black agrarian womanism – helps elucidate the latent alignments between and among the Women’s March and transnational women-led agrarian movements, such as those of La Via Campesina. As such, the burgeoning field of feminist political ecology is well-equipped to help connect the applied intersectional visions at work in the Women’s March with those of agrarian feminist movements, even as this task provides an important intellectual opportunity for political ecology itself.

Broadening the Land Question in Food Sovereignty to Northern Settings: A Case Study of Occupy the Farm

Land access is an accepted corollary to food sovereignty, long promoted by the transnational agrarian movement La Via Campesina (LVC). LVC's land access politics have evolved with increased incorporation of diverse perspectives, but remain largely focused on achieving ‘integral agrarian reform’ in the global South. Here, I take a case where food sovereignty activists (‘Occupy the Farm’ (OTF)) occupied land owned by a public university in California, the USA, in order to broaden food sovereignty's land access considerations beyond the South, and to analyze conditions where political actions (including occupations) can help achieve changes in land access regimes. The OTF action was successful in challenging cultural norms about property and achieving access, partly due to the occupation having foregrounded multiple appealing narratives that invited participation and wider support. These narratives included agroecology versus biotechnologies; community/public access versus privatization; participatory versus bureaucratic governance structure; and green space/food production versus urban development. The article tests the use of the ‘land sovereignty’ frame in expanding food sovereignty's land politics, to encompass land contestation contexts globally and deal with the particular conditions surrounding lands. The case indicates that land occupations in the North are potentially useful—but uncertain, and very context-dependent—tactics to promote land and food sovereignty.

Contextualising food sovereignty: the politics of convergence among movements in the USA

As food sovereignty spreads to new realms that dramatically diverge from the agrarian context in which it was originally conceived, this raises new challenges, as well as opportunities, for already complex transnational agrarian movements. In the face of such challenges calls for convergence have increasingly been put forward as a strategy for building political power. Looking at the US case, we argue that historically rooted resistance efforts for agrarian justice, food justice and immigrant labour justice across the food system are not only drawing inspiration from food sovereignty, but helping to shape what food sovereignty means in the USA. By digging into the histories of these resistance efforts, we can better understand the divides that exist as well as the potential for and politics of convergence. The US case thus offers important insights, especially into the roles of race and immigration in the politics of convergence that might strengthen the global movement for food sovereignty as it expands to new contexts and seeks to engage with new constituencies.

Food Sovereignty and the Recognition of New Rights for Peasants at the UN: A Critical Overview of La Via Campesina's Rights Claims over the Last 20 Years

This article explores how human rights framing by the transnational agrarian movement La Via Campesina (LVC) has evolved over the last 20 years. It discusses how the movement has worked towards institutionalizing new categories of rights, such as the ‘right to food sovereignty’ and the ‘rights of peasants’, thereby contributing to the creation of new human rights standards at the United Nations (UN). It also critically addresses some of the challenges the movement has been confronted with when framing its demands in terms of rights. Its overall argument is that LVC has managed to tap the potential of the rhetoric of rights to find common ground, thanks to its innovative use of non-codified rights. This has enabled activists to ‘localize’ human rights and make them meaningful to their various contexts. However, it contends that further advancing the movement's goals will require serious consideration of some of the key limits of the human rights framework.

From ‘Here’ to ‘There’: Social Movements, the Academy and Solidarity Research

Increasing numbers of social movement scholars now advocate participatory and collaborative research approaches. These are often premised upon the assertion of a convergence between movement and researcher that implicates the latter in the struggles of the former. Naming this approach “solidarity research”, in this article I identify the components that provide the rationale for its pursuit. As well as affirming movement-researcher solidarity, this rationale also comprises a situated epistemology that asks academics to think reflexively about their research practice, the roles they play, and the interests they serve. This reveals the diverging positionality, of knowledge and interests, that often exists between movements and academics. Such concerns give rise to specific methodological and ethical principles that indicate the importance of negotiating this positionality to successful collaboration. Reflecting on my own experiences trying and sometimes failing to conduct participatory research with transnational agrarian movements, I identify dynamics that enable and constrain the pursuit of such collaborative research within commitments to broader methodological and ethical principles of solidarity.

Food sovereignty: forgotten genealogies and future regulatory challenges

‘Food sovereignty’ has become a mobilizing frame for social movements, a set of legal norms and practices aimed at transforming food and agriculture systems, and a free-floating signifier filled with varying kinds of content. Canonical accounts credit the Vía Campesina transnational agrarian movement with coining and elaborating the term, but its proximate origins are actually in an early 1980s Mexican government program. Central American activists nonetheless appropriated and redefined it in the late 1980s. Advocates typically suggest that ‘food sovereignty’ is diametrically opposed to ‘food security’, but historically there actually has been considerable slippage and overlap between these concepts. Food sovereignty theory has usually failed to indicate whether the ‘sovereign’ is the nation, region or locality, or ‘the people’. This lack of specificity about the sovereign feeds a reluctance to think concretely about the regulatory mechanisms necessary to consolidate and enforce food sovereignty, particularly limitations on long-distance and international trade and on firm and farm size. Several regulatory possibilities are mentioned and found wanting. Finally, entrenched consumer needs and desires related to internationally-traded products – from coffee to pineapples – imply additional obstacles to the localisation of production, distribution and consumption that many food sovereignty proponents support.

The Creation of New Rights by the Food Sovereignty Movement: The Challenge of Institutionalizing Subversion

This article analyses the creation of new human rights by a contemporary transnational agrarian movement, Vía Campesina. It makes the case that the movement’s assertion of new rights contributes to shaping a cosmopolitan, multicultural, and anti-hegemonic conception of human rights. It discusses the advantages and constraints of the human rights framework and analyses the creation of new rights by the movement as a way to overcome the limitations of the ‘rights master frame’. It concludes with a discussion of some of the challenges involved in the institutionalization of new rights.

REFRAMING DEVELOPMENT: GLOBAL PEASANT MOVEMENTS AND THE NEW AGRARIAN QUESTION

This paper criticizes the conventional conception of the agrarian question and argues that the way the “agrarian question” is traditionally understood should be revised. The role played by the agrarian movement, especially transnational agrarian movements such as the Vía Campesina, is underscored.

Transnationality and the Indian Fishworkers' Movement, 1960s–2000

This paper contributes to the literature on ‘transnational agrarian movements’ by drawing upon the ‘fishworkers' movement’ in the 1960s in India's Kerala state, and the subsequent role it played in the formation of national and transnational networks. Against the prevailing teleology of movement network organization from local to national to transnational, I suggest that transnational and transregional flows produce the local and national as spaces of action. Instead of an unproblematic inclusion of fishers' movements into the general rubric of ‘transnational agrarian movements’, I argue that considering differences between agriculture and fishing, and within fishing, allows a better explanation of the potential and limits of solidarity within the transnational network of fishers’ movements. I show that transnationality is not only about solidarity between movements but also about engaging with ‘transnational regimes', which provide resources for network formation as well as produce stresses within networks.

Food sovereignty movement activism in South Korea: national policy impacts?

The transnational agrarian movement La Via Campesina (LVC) seeks to reestablish food sovereignty authority within national borders by removing agriculture from the WTO system. The WTO is a membership organization of participating nation-states that have agreed to abide by the rules of the WTO governance regime. Nominally, at least, changes in these governance rules must be approved by the nation-state members. This paper examines the extent to which South Korean affiliate organizations of LVC, the Korean Peasant League and the Korean Women Peasants Association, have been successful in placing food sovereignty issues on the national agri-food policy agenda in South Korea that challenge the WTO’s neoliberal global governance regime for agriculture. In effect, the success of transnational movements like LVC in challenging global institutions may rest on how well their member affiliates are able to play domestic agri-food politics.

Peasants' rights and the UN system: quixotic struggle? Or emancipatory idea whose time has come?

The transnational agrarian social movement Vía Campesina is campaigning to have the United Nations negotiate and implement a Declaration, and eventually an International Convention, on Peasants' Rights. This article analyzes the origins and demands of the campaign and the place of the claimed rights in international law. Peasant organizations hope to follow in the footsteps of indigenous peoples' movements that participated in the negotiations preceding the 2007 UN Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples. The peasants' rights campaign has succeeded in linking its demands to discussions of the right to food in the United Nations, where concern is growing over the approach of the 2015 target for realizing the Millennium Development Goals, in particular the halving of the numbers of people suffering from hunger. The campaign is likely to face stiff resistance from powerful UN member states, but could achieve substantial advances even if the path to a convention is difficult or never completed.

The Politics of Transnational Agrarian Movements

ABSTRACTThe transnational agrarian movements (TAMs) which have emerged in recent decades have been actively engaged in the politics and policies of international (rural) development. Intergovernmental and non‐governmental development agencies have welcomed and supported TAMs in the context of promoting international ‘partnerships for development’. The analysis in this article revolves around the politics of TAM representation, intermediation and mobilization around the issue of land. It focuses on La Vía Campesina in relation to three other coalitions: the International Federation of Agricultural Producers, IPC for Food Sovereignty and International Land Coalition. It is argued here that ‘people linked to the land’ are socially differentiated and thus have varied experiences of neoliberal globalization. Their social movements and organizations are just as differentiated, ideologically, politically and institutionally. This differentiation is internalized within and between TAMs, and partly shapes TAMs’ political agendas and strategies in their interaction with international development institutions.

Transnational Agrarian Movements: Confronting Globalization - edited by Borras Jr., Saturnino M., Edelman, M. and Kay, C.

Transnational Agrarian Movements: Confronting Globalization - edited by Borras Jr., Saturnino M., Edelman, M. and Kay, C.

Food security, food sovereignty, and local challenges for transnational agrarian movements: the Honduras case

This article examines the complicated histories of two competing development tropes in postwar Honduras: food security and food sovereignty. Food security emerged as a construct intertwined with land security and national food self-sufficiency soon after the militant, peasant-led movement for national agrarian reform in the 1970s. The transnational coalition, La Vía Campesina, launched their global food sovereignty campaign in the 1990s, in part to counter the global corporate industrial agro-food system. Cultural and political analysis reveals challenges for each trope. Food security resonates with deeply held peasant understandings of seguridad for their continued social reproduction in insecure social and natural conditions. In contrast, the word sovereignty, generally understood as powers of nation states, faces semantic confusion and distance from rural actors' lives. Moreover, Honduras's national peasant unions, weakened by funding cuts and neoliberal assaults on agrarian reform, diverted by their own efforts to help establish the transnational La Vía Campesina, have been unable and, in some cases, unwilling to campaign effectively for food sovereignty. In addition, a parallel network of NGO-supported sustainable agriculture centres has largely embraced the peasant understandings of food security, while remaining skeptical of ‘mismanaged, modernist’ agrarian reform and the food sovereignty campaign. Attention turns to structural analysis of the steady decline of agriculture, economy and social life in the Honduran countryside, while also identifying potentially hopeful local-national solidarities between peasant union and sustainable agriculture leaders within the popular resistance movement to the recent military coup. This article finds that transnational agrarian movements and food campaigns tend to ignore local peasant understandings, needs, and organisations at their own peril.

Transnational Agrarian Movements Confronting Globalization – Edited by Saturnino M. Borras Jr, Marc Edelman and Cristóbal Kay

Transnational Agrarian Movements Confronting Globalization – Edited by Saturnino M. Borras Jr, Marc Edelman and Cristóbal Kay

Transnational Agrarian Movements: Confronting Globalizationedited by Saturnino M. Borras Jr, Marc Edelman and Cristóbal Kay

<i>Transnational Agrarian Movements: Confronting Globalization</i>edited by Saturnino M. Borras Jr, Marc Edelman and Cristóbal Kay

IDS Research Summary 323: Transnational Agrarian Movements Struggling for Land and Citizenship Rights

IDS Research Summary 323: Transnational Agrarian Movements Struggling for Land and Citizenship Rights