Food Sovereignty - A Critical Dialogue Conference Papers

Leading scholars and political activists will engage in critical and productive dialogue with those who are skeptical to the concept of food sovereignty to examine what food sovereignty might mean and what policies it implies. These are their papers.

Food Sovereignty: A skeptical view

January 2013
Henry Bernstein

This paper attempts to identify and assess some of the key elements that ‘frame’ Food Sovereignty.

Farmers, Foodies & First Nations: Getting to Food Sovereignty in Canada

January 2013
Annette Aurélie Desmarais & Hannah Wittman

This article explores the various meanings of food sovereignty developed by distinct actors in Canada to better understand existing challenges, tensions, convergences and divergences in developing a national movement for food sovereignty.

Rural Social Movements and Diálogo de Saberes

January 2013
Peter Rosset & Maria Elena Martinez-Torres

While many contemporary rural social movements once argued for increased industrial farming inputs and machinery for their members, the past few years have seen an accelerating shift toward the promotion of agroecology as an alternative to the so-called Green Revolution.

Financialization, Distance and Global Food Politics

January 2013
Jennifer Clapp

This paper provides a new perspective on the political implications of intensified financialization in the global food system.

“Like gold with yield”

January 2013
Madeleine Fairbairn

Since 2007, capital markets have acquired a newfound interest in agricultural land as a portfolio investment. This phenomenon is examined through the theoretical lens of financialization.

Risk and Blame in the Anthropocene

January 2013
Jesse Ribo

Climate change and climate-change policies affect food security. Vulnerabilities, however, do not just fall from the sky. Vulnerability is not an attribute of changing hazards. It is produced and reproduced through social and political-economic relations on the ground.

Peasant-driven agricultural growth and food sovereignty

January 2013
Jan Douwe van der Ploeg

The concept of food sovereignty represents an important theoretical and practical challenge. The political economy of agriculture can only take this gauntlet by developing a better understanding of the processes of agricultural growth. Without such an understanding it is difficult to address the issue of food sovereignty.

Achieving Mexico’s Maize Potential

January 2013
Antonio Turrent Fernández, Timothy A. Wise & Elise Garvey

Once the poster child for free trade, Mexico is now better known for its failures, among them the loss of the country’s food sovereignty. Rising agricultural prices, combined with growing import dependence, have driven Mexico’s food import bill over $20 billion per year and increased its agricultural trade deficit.

Gold for Export? … or Water & Food for Life?

January 2013
John Cavanagh
Robin Broad

With the rapid expansion of gold mining, social movements in many countries have gathered force to oppose the mining. Environmental concerns have been central to this opposition. But the opposition has grown into a larger critique of “what is development?” posing corporate-led export growth against peasant-led local agriculture.

Historicizing Food Sovereignty

January 2013
Philip McMichael

To historicize food sovereignty is to situate it: first, as a strategic countermovement in/of the food regime; and second, by historicizing the food regime itself to identify the shifting terrain of food sovereignty politics.