This year, 2021, the global community of food sovereignty activists is celebrating what is deemed as the 25th year anniversary of food sovereignty – as it protests against a corporate-captured UN Food System Summit (UNFSS) this September 2021. The global food system remains front and center in international political debates, as working people struggle to survive during this ongoing pandemic while a few corporate food giants continue to make huge profits. The struggle to dismantle the unjust, unsustainable industrial food system while constructing alternatives around food sovereignty is at the core of contemporary anti-capitalist struggles.
This primer is about ‘the 5Rs’ and land and natural resource politics. The 5Rs is a set of five principles: Recognition, Restitution, Redistribution, Regeneration, and Representation/Resistance. The primer briefly explores the idea of a working people’s program on land and natural resources in Myanmar based on these five principles in the context of a future federal democratic system.
Jun Borras, Jennifer Franco, S. Ryan Isakson, Les Levidow, Pietje Vervest, Gustavo de L. T. Oliveira, Mindi Schneider, Ben McKay, Sérgio Sauer, Ben Richardson, Roman Herre, Alberto Alonso-Fradejas, Juan Liu, Tania Salerno, Yunan Xu, Markus Kröger
14 May 2018
Primer
What is a flex crop, and what does this mean for food, land, climate, and people?
Jun Borras, Jennifer Franco, Clara Mi Young Park, Mads Barbesgaard, Yukari Sekine, Ye Lin Myint, Thant Zin
02 March 2018
Paper
Dominant approaches to climate change mitigation are putting new pressures on small farmers and village dwellers, justifying dispossession by powerful actors who cast villagers' traditional ways of life as ecologically destructive or economically inefficient. In order to address the twin challenges of agrarian justice and climate justice, it is critical to understand the way new conflicts and initiatives intersect with old conflicts and the way they are compounded by undemocratic settings, and inequality and division along fault-lines of gender, ethnicity, class, and generation.
Global pressure on land and natural resources is mounting, with mainstream narratives about climate change often intensifying pressure to replace so-called "inefficient" users of land, including small farmers and pastoralists with market-based dynamics and actors. This dynamic makes the pursuit of socially just land policy ever more important and urgent, while at the same time creating new challenges. The fundamental connections and tensions between agrarian and climate justice must be reckoned with, and movements on both sides must deepen their understanding.
Ian Scoones, Jun Borras, Lyda Fernanda Forero, Ruth Hall, Marc Edelman, Wendy Wolford, Benjamin White
31 January 2018
Article
Religion, gender dynamics, place and cultural identity – all inform rising authoritarian populism in rural areas, alongside class interests and inequalities. Mobilising alternatives to capture by regressive political forces is not straightforward.
Land politics and the social movements mobilizing around land have changed profoundly, inspiring a new generation of scholar-activists. Professor Saturnino ('Jun') M. Borras explores land politics, agrarian movements and scholar-activism in his inaugural lecture at the International Institute for Social Studies.
Zoe Brent, Alberto Alonso-Fradejas, Jun Borras, Gonzalo Colque, Sérgio Sauer
04 February 2016
Paper
The approval of the Voluntary Guidelines on Responsible Governance of Tenure of Land, Fisheries and Forests in the Context of National Food Security in 2012 marked a historic victory. The high level of participation of civil society organizations and social movements in the negotiation of every word of this text sets this global policy document apart from the majority of other initiatives of this nature, to date.
Democratic land control is inseparable from human rights. Demands for democratic land control need to be understood in the context of broadly distinct political conditions that in turn each require distinct political intervention, namely, respect/protect, promote, and/or restore democratic land control.
Jennifer Franco, Jun Borras, Pietje Vervest, S. Ryan Isakson, Les Levidow
20 June 2014
Report
Flex crops are crops that can be used for food, feed, fuel or industrial material. Their emergence as critical global commodities is integral to understanding today's agroindustrial economy.
Who gets how much and what kinds of land, how, and for what purposes? These are the basic questions around the politics of land. The question of land politics has been resurrected in a big way recently, worldwide, and in ways significantly different from the past.
New land acquisitions or ‘global land grab' are drawing upon, restructuring and challenging the nature of both governance and government. While ‘the state’ is often invoked as a key player in contemporary land deals, states do not necessarily operate coherently or with one voice.
Land grabbing per se is not a new phenomenon, given its historical precedents in the eras of imperialism. However, the character, scale, pace, orientation and key drivers of the recent wave of land grabs is a distinct historical event closely tied to the changing dynamics of the global agri-food, feed and fuel complex.
The rise of flex crops—crops with multiple uses across food, feed, fuel and industrial complexes—has far-reaching implications for global land governance.
Three political tendencies have emerged in response to land grabbing that are shaping the global debate and the potential future trajectory of land governance.
Dramatic changes around food, climate, energy, and finance in recent years have pushed questions of land use and land control back onto the centre stage of development discourse, at the very moment when the same conditions are spurring an unprecedented rush for land and water across the globe.
Land sovereignty is the right of working peoples to have effective access to, use of, and control over land and the benefits of its use and occupation, where land is understood as resource, territory, and landscape.
