Agrarian Justice publications

Food Sovereignty: A skeptical view

Henry Bernstein
January 2013
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

Annette Aurélie Desmarais & Hannah Wittman
January 2013
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

Peter Rosset & Maria Elena Martinez-Torres
January 2013
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

Jennifer Clapp
January 2013
This paper provides a new perspective on the political implications of intensified financialization in the global food system.

“Like gold with yield”

Madeleine Fairbairn
January 2013
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

Jesse Ribo
January 2013
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

Jan Douwe van der Ploeg
January 2013
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

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

Robin Broad
January 2013
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

Philip McMichael
January 2013
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.