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Globalizations

ISSN: 1474-7731 (Print) 1474-774X (Online) Journal homepage: https://www.tandfonline.com/loi/rglo20

The Land Question in the Food Sovereignty Project

Philip McMichael

To cite this article: Philip McMichael (2015) The Land Question in the Food Sovereignty Project, Globalizations, 12:4, 434-451, DOI: 10.1080/14747731.2014.971615

To link to this article: https://doi.org/10.1080/14747731.2014.971615

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The Land Question in the Food Sovereignty Project

PHILIP McMICHAEL

Cornell University, Ithaca, NY 14853, USA

ABSTRACT This essay explores the changing landscape of food sovereignty politics in

the shadow of the so-called ‘land grab’. While the food sovereignty movement emerged

within a global agrarian crisis conjuncture triggered by northern dumping of foodstuffs,

institutionalized in WTO trade rules, the twenty-first-century food, energy and financial crises

intensify this crisis for the world’s rural poor (inflating prices of staple foods and agri-inputs)

deepening the process of dispossession. The circulation of food is compounded by global

financial flows into enclosing land for industrial agriculture and/or speculation, challenging

small producer rights across the world. Under these conditions, the terms of struggle for the

food sovereignty movement are shifting towards a human rights politics on the ground as

well as in global forums like the FAO’s Committee on World Food Security. This includes in

particular the need to develop a discursive politics to reframe what is at stake, namely the

protection and support of a production model based on social co-operation, multi-

functionality and ecologically restorative principles.

Keywords: food sovereignty, land grab, rights politics, value chains

Introduction

This essay explores the salience of ‘food sovereignty’ as an evolving project. While ‘food sover-

eignty’ is open to multiple interpretations, I emphasize here the relationship of ‘food sover-

eignty’ politics to food regime crisis and transformation, given the counter-movement role of

food sovereignty in the food regime.1 The current ‘land grab’ is a phenomenal indicator of

the restructuring of the food regime,2 forcing the food sovereignty movement to respond.

Under these circumstances, the strategic question of sovereignty refocuses from asserting

the right of states to food policy autonomy to asserting the right of small-scale producers to

productive autonomy.

Correspondence Address: Philip McMichael, Department of Development Sociology, Faculty Fellow, Cornell Center

for Sustainable Future, Cornell University, 222 Tower Road, Academic Surge A-123, Ithaca, NY 14853, USA.

Email: [email protected]

# 2014 Taylor & Francis

Globalizations, 2015

Vol. 12, No. 4, 434–451, http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/14747731.2014.971615

Such refocusing is by no means the whole story of food sovereignty politics, which include

questions about public health, rights of consumers to local foods, food justice concerns,

worker protections, urban–rural alliance building, territorial rights among land users, food

sovereignty constitutionalism, opposition to genetically-modified organisms (GMOs), environ-

mental concerns, and so on (see, e.g., Andrée, Ayres, Bosia, & Massicotte, 2014; Mann, 2014).

Beyond food’s materiality and nutritional qualities, food also has social, cultural, and ecological

dimensions that contribute to the breadth and depth of ‘food sovereignty’ visioning. Neverthe-

less, land use and land-user rights remain foundational to the food sovereignty project—not only

because it originated in peasant/farmer mobilization, but also because human/planetary survival

depends on regenerative and resilient agro-ecosystems.

The refocusing of food sovereignty politics is over-determined by the ‘land grab’, which

materially threatens small-producer livelihoods and practices at the same time as it is justified

by, and justifies, a new form of strategic interventionism by political-economic elites. Fallout

from the ‘food crisis’ renewed corporate-driven ‘feeding the world’ rhetoric (amplified by popu-

lation projections), legitimizing a new era of large-scale investment in (industrial) agriculture

(both on- and offshore), which came to be known as the ‘land grab’ (GRAIN, 2008). The

food crisis represented a threshold in the long-simmering agrarian crisis associated with

decades of neoliberal neglect of and assault on small-scale producers across the world. Accord-

ingly, the publication of the World Bank’s 2008 World Development Report (2007) underwrote

sentiment at the 2008 World Food Summit in Rome to refocus on investing in ‘smallholders’ in

the global South, via value chains organized by agribusiness—further putting the land and land-

use practices of small-scale producers in jeopardy.

In this historical moment of direct and indirect ‘land grabbing’, the food sovereignty project

now centers on the rights of producers, and the (associated) responsibilities of states. Accord-

ingly, ‘sovereignty’ is not simply about states’ rights to determine food policy, but also it is

increasingly about the rights of small-scale producers to their models of production and repro-

duction. Certainly, both forms of sovereignty have animated the peasant-driven counter-move-

ment, which initially focused on the challenge of ‘free trade’ rules of the World Trade

Organization (WTO).

Producer rights and state responsibilities for protecting such rights in the interests of society

are food sovereignty’s most substantial strategic initiatives. Realization of these related initiat-

ives will depend on broad alliance building based in a growing recognition of the salience of

food producer rights for general socio-ecological reproduction. Such alliance building (among

producers and consumers, both urban and rural) has potential to reform states from within,

from the bottom up (see, e.g., Claeys, 2012), and is arguably underway in different forms

across the world. In the global South in particular, this means anchoring food sovereignty in

land-user rights to stabilize conditions for almost a third of the world’s population, but of

course the struggle is broader than ‘peasantism’. Thus: ‘How Vı́a Campesina will take up the

challenge to keep advancing new rights while making them relevant for the whole of society

is (of) great social relevance’ (Claeys, 2012, p. 855). The condition for a successful challenge

is to advance a different paradigm, since the current ‘development narrative’ distracts citizens

from recognizing the importance of low-input farming for body, soil, and atmospheric health.

Food Sovereignty Trajectory

The food sovereignty movement rose to prominence via a powerful critique by Vı́a Campesina

of the neoliberal discourse and practice of ‘food security’, describing a privatized food trading

The Land Question in the Food 435

system institutionalized in WTO trade rules and managed by transnational food corporations.

The impact of this system was to deepen Southern food dependency on the international grain

trade by undermining country-owned food and agricultural policies (already significantly wea-

kened by structural adjustment). Sovereignty was compromised, and those who stood to lose (or

had lost) their land and their ability to produce food for themselves and local markets coined the

slogan ‘food sovereignty’ (Desmarais, 2007; Edelman, 2013; Nicholson & Delforge, 2008).

Food sovereignty emerged as a grassroots-based counter-movement to a neoliberal food

regime claiming to feed the world through a global system of trade provisioned from ‘global

granaries’ such as the USA and the EU. The counter-movement was, in the first instance, pro-

tective and restorative. It politicized ‘free trade’ discourse by exposing the corporate illusion of

‘feeding the world’ by undermining farming systems (responsible for at least 50% of the world’s

food) and instituting a new form of colonization (Ragahavan, 1990).

In the opening decade of the new century, the WTO’s architecture for ‘feeding the world’

unraveled through several systemic tremors: from paralysis of the Doha Round with noncompli-

ance by large agrarian states (India, Brazil, and China), through a food price inflation shock from

2007 to 2008, to a new ‘agro-security mercantilism’ as prominent food-dependent states over-

rode WTO trade rules by investing directly in offshore land acquisition (McMichael, 2013a).3

The institutional structure, and claims, of the corporate food regime entered into a transitional,

or restructuring, process—adding a new challenge to the world’s peasantry: from dumping of

cheap food in local markets to threats to land and farming rights via the financialization of

food and farmland.

In 2000, La Vı́a Campesina proclaimed: ‘the massive movement of food around the world is

forcing the increased movement of people’. This perceptive slogan might now be adjusted to

proclaim: ‘the massive movement of money around the world is forcing the increased movement

of people’. The shift in the food regime is from a trade-centered assault on small producers with

artificially cheapened agricultural commodities to an investment-centered assault on land users

everywhere via land and green grabs enabled by state complicity in new forms of transnational

governance that have the potential to re-order the global landscape.

Two such forms of governance are (i) the World Bank-derived Principles of Responsible

Agricultural Investment (PRAI), which essentially governs the rights of capital to invest in

‘underutilized’ land in the global South and to expand yields;4 and (ii) public–private partner-

ships (PPPs) via global value chains organized by agribusiness and sanctioned by select inter-

governmental or regional alliances (such as the G8). With respect to the latter, small producers,

formerly considered residual and insignificant, received a makeover in the context of the food

crisis, during which the financial establishment reevaluated them as a new development

vehicle via supply-chain investment. Both direct and indirect (value chain) land acquisition con-

stitute forms of ‘land grabbing’ in so far as they exert control over land use, substituting indus-

trial agriculture (McMichael, 2013b).

Contrary to the formal claim that land acquisition by or with the assistance of central states

may not constitute ‘grabbing’, because land often belongs to the state anyway (Borras,

Franco, Gómez, Kay, & Spoor, 2012, p. 858) and is acquired through legal means (Zoomers

& Kaag, 2014, p. 201), there is a substantive issue. The commandeering of lands inhabited

and used by small farmers, landless laborers, pastoralists, forest dwellers, or fisherfolk has

two key dimensions: (i) there is a direct question of cultural and livelihood rights and (ii)

there is the historic question of privileging an ultimately unsustainable ‘world-scale’ consump-

tion of ‘natural resources’ over securing and promoting low-input land-use to provision locals

(primarily) and preserve bio-diverse environments.5

436 P. McMichael

Under these circumstances, food sovereignty movement strategies require protecting rights

to, and representing the virtues of, small-scale producer systems (including pastoralism, fish-

eries, and forest-dwelling). This involves a growing convergence of grassroots agrarian move-

ments focusing on land rights (Borras, Edelman, & Kay, 2008; Mann, 2014) and addressing

territorial rights,6 and farmer-to-farmer networks building local and regional knowledge,

including sharing eco-farming practices, creating seed banks, managing landscapes, and train-

ing agro-ecological cadres (Da Vı́a, 2012; Holt-Giménez, 2010; Rosset & Martı́nez-Torres,

2012)—all of these practices make both cultural and practical claims to the land and its man-

agement for society. It involves embedding ‘food sovereignty’ platforms in national consti-

tutions of states such as Venezuela, Ecuador, Bolivia, Mali, Senegal, and Nepal (Rose,

2012: Schiavoni, this issue).7 And finally, it involves consolidation of years of work by move-

ments of rural producers and progressive non-governmental organizations (NGOs) within the

UN system to gain legitimacy for a ‘food sovereignty’ discourse and its movement protago-

nists (McKeon, 2009).8 The constituents of this struggle formed the International Civil

Society Organizations (CSOs) Planning Committee for Food Sovereignty (IPC), leading to

inclusion in 2009 of a Civil Society Mechanism (CSM) in the Food and Agriculture Organiz-

ation (FAO)’s Committee on World Food Security (CFS), representing small producers

(farmers, pastoralists, fishers, and forest dwellers).

Peasant Revival?

The rise of an international peasant coalition, symbolized by its largest organization, La Vı́a

Campesina, which unites over 200 million small producers in 160 organizations from over 80

countries (Mann, 2014, p. 3), demanding, in the 1990s, ‘the right of peoples, communities,

and countries to define their own agricultural, labor, fishing, and food and land policies which

are ecologically, socially, economically, and culturally appropriate to their unique circum-

stances’ (Ainger, 2003), was unthinkable in terms of the modern development narrative. Its

basic question politicized the food regime: by what right does the global market dispossess pro-

ducers, and their knowledge and culture, at the risk of increasing food insecurity? But its more

fundamental question concerned why small producers, in the ‘peasant way’, should not be part of

the solution, rather than a problem, of development?

Developmentalism was founded on the assumption of a disappearing peasantry, as it serviced

urban industrialism via proletarianization (cf. Lewis, 1954). The rise of a transnational agrarian

movement not only inverts this episteme, but also denaturalizes the ‘global food system’ by

establishing (rights-based) claims of small producers to their own local food systems—which

account for up to two-thirds of the world’s food (Erosion, Technology and Concentration,

2009). Here, the food sovereignty frame redefines ‘agrarian reform’ in social justice and

human ecological terms (Borras, 2008; Mann, 2014, p. 57), underscoring the global public

good inherent in support for and durability of small-producer cultures:

In the context of food sovereignty, agrarian reform benefits all of society, providing healthy, acces- sible and culturally appropriate food, and social justice. Agrarian reform can put an end to the massive and forced rural exodus from the countryside to the city, which has made cities grow at unsustainable rates and under inhuman conditions. (Nyeleni, 2006, http://www.nyeleni.org/spip. php?article54)

This formulation expresses a distinct ontology, re-centering farming as an environmental and

social necessity for human survival, and requiring an alternative socio-political order, and model

The Land Question in the Food 437

of ‘development’. Here, ‘sovereignty’ presents as a process of social transformation and a refor-

mulation of states from within (McMichael, 2006).9 Such a vision is epochal in inverting the

assumptions of modernity: of mastering nature with industrial technique, subordinating agricul-

ture to urban industrialism, and devaluing human labor. While elimination of peasant–landlord

relations has been the measure of nation-building and modernity (Moore, 1966), in the context of

a ‘post-national’ mismatch between rural evictions and urban unemployment via a global food

regime (Bernstein, 2006; Davis, 2006), the food sovereignty movement potentially performs a

‘midwife’ role to de-centralizing political–ecological relations.

In the meantime, the power of this movement is registered in its increased presence and legiti-

macy in UN forums, and particularly the FAO’s CFS (Mann, 2014; McKeon, 2009). In the

context of an increasing presence of producer movements and a severe food price shock, devel-

opment agencies recognized a potential in ‘smallholder agriculture’, with the FAO ‘taking the

lead in urging massive investment in smallholder agriculture, acknowledging the importance

of the staple food-producing capacity of peasant agriculture’ (Bryceson, 2010, p. 82).

However, this switch from historical relic to historical subject is double-edged, as peasant

claims for relevance and support coincide with a process of redesigning the rural world by

donor and development communities, to augment flows of agricultural commodities from the

peasant sector. Thus: ‘In a better-late-than-never attempt to resuscitate the African agricultural

advances that SAP’s short-circuited in the 1980s, donors are now scrambling to think of ways of

boosting smallholder agriculture’ (Bryceson, 2010, p. 82). The World Bank claims that ‘effec-

tive instruments in using agriculture for development’ (2007, p. 4) include increasing assets of

poor households, making smallholders more productive, and expanding the rural nonfarm

economy. This ‘new agriculture’ is to be ‘led by private entrepreneurs in extensive value

chains linking producers to consumers and including many entrepreneurial smallholders’. For

sub-Saharan Africa in particular,10 the World Bank sidesteps the global orientation of value

chains, claiming that they promise local rural development to stimulate national economic

growth, even when they compromise local food security and sovereignty.

The Value-Chain Challenge

The new status of small-scale producers poses new problems for the food sovereignty move-

ment, given the legitimizing function of ‘improvement’ of peasant agriculture. While develop-

ment institutions, governments, and investors pay lip service to the importance of

‘smallholders’, this generally refers to their significance as a new extractive ‘resource’ as

farming skills and practices are replaced with agro-inputs via forms of contract farming.11 At

the same time, it has become clear that land controversies (resource grabbing and resettlement)

have propelled the investor community toward the value-chain fix (McMichael, 2013a). Thus,

the most recent assessment of responsible investment practices in agriculture by the World

Bank acknowledges that: ‘Contract farming operations allow farmers to remain in control of

their most important asset, their land, thus avoiding disputes over access to resources and com-

munity displacement. Outgrower schemes also support far more jobs than estate farms’ (2014,

p. 26).

As noted above, contemporary contracts represent a form of land grabbing, with value chains

specializing in the business of ‘control grabbing’. Thus, under the guise of smallholder support:

for many agribusiness companies the contract farming solution is a public relations exercise designed to build alliances in the areas where they produce and source their throughput, and to

438 P. McMichael

access subsidized credit from agencies buying into the ‘smallholder path’ to development. In fact, access to subsidized credit seems a significant factor driving agribusiness to engage smallholders.’ (Oya, 2012, p. 10)12

As the current object of development, peasantries13 are redefined in entrepreneurial terms.

Here, the ‘new agriculture for development’ is governed by market intensification, via agribusi-

ness, with public support: ‘The private sector drives the organization of value chains that bring

the market to smallholders and commercial farms’ (World Bank, 2007, p. 8). Thus, the Declara-

tion following the FAO’s November 2009 World Summit on Food Security stated:

We will pursue policies and strategies that improve the functioning of domestic, regional and inter- national markets and ensure equitable access for all, especially smallholders and women farmers from developing countries. We support WTO-consistent, non-trade distorting special measures aimed at creating incentives for smallholder farmers in developing countries, enabling them to increase their productivity and compete on a more equal footing on world markets. (FAO, 2009, p. 4)

Ignoring the existence, and value, of local markets, the value-chain project is largely geared to

incorporating small producers into international markets, and to growth in agribusiness profit,

turning farmers into farm labor on their own land (McKeon, 2014b; McMichael, 2013a). And

the public sector is an important complement to this vision.

During the height of the food crisis, FAO director-general Jacques Diouf observed that gov-

ernments, with international partners, should pursue the necessary public investment, providing

favorable environments for private investments (Urquhart, 2008). PPPs tend to be organized

around a business model for small producers—including bankrolling states with private

funds, particularly in Africa. Thus, the Gates Foundation’s financial resources ‘are attracting

the interest of poor African governments, making them more amenable to the suggestions of

institutions from outside Africa’ (Daño, 2007, p. 55). Meanwhile, Alliance for a Green Revolu-

tion in Africa (AGRA) Vice-President, Adesina, encourages public support from the G8, the

International Fund for Agricultural Development (IFAD), the World Bank, and the African

Development Bank for the African agricultural sector, particularly in infrastructures to facilitate

private investment: ‘Concentrating ODA funds on public goods will free up domestic resources

to focus on providing support to smallholder farmers to take advantage of new agricultural tech-

nologies to raise agricultural productivity’ (2009, p. 10).

These comments reflect AGRA’s experience in leveraging from commercial banks $170

million in ‘market-based and affordable loans for smallholder farmers and agricultural value

chains that support them in Tanzania, Uganda, Kenya, Mozambique, and Ghana’ (Adesina

2009, pp. 14–15). They also anticipated the establishment of the New Alliance for Food Security

and Nutrition (NAFSN) at the G8 summit in 2012, dedicated to ‘accelerating the flow of private

capital’ for poverty reduction via agricultural-led growth in various African countries.14 Align-

ing private investment with the Comprehensive Africa Agriculture Development Program

(CAADP)-driven national agricultural investment strategies defers to recipient governments,

who nevertheless are obliged to sign Cooperative Framework Agreements (CFAs) with

donors and companies, requiring top-down15 policy reforms to create enabling business environ-

ments for national and global firms. Thus, Ghana’s CFA includes:

The Government of Ghana intends to improve incentives for private sector investment in agriculture, in particular, taking actions to facilitate inclusive access to and productive use of land; developing and implementing domestic seed regulations that encourage increased private sector involvement in this area; and supporting transparent inclusive, evidence-based policy formulation. (G8, 2012, p. 2)

The Land Question in the Food 439

Among the many private companies participating in the NAFSN for Ghana:

Unilever is a global consumer products company with plans to expand its sourcing throughout Africa. It operates in more than 20 Sub-Saharan African countries . . .

Africa is at the heart of its global business strategy and Unilever wants to double the size of its business there. Unilever wants to see African agricultural potential fulfilled in a way that creates sus- tainable business opportunities—particularly for the smallholder farmers integrated into its local and global supply chains. (G8, 2012, pp. 12–13)

Associated Growth Corridors16 incorporate peasants into value chains as outgrowers, and

target common lands alienated from small producers—millions, in the case of the Nacala

Corridor in Mozambique, where common lands have been declared abandoned and leased to

Brazilian and Japanese investors (Paul & Steinbrecher, 2013, p. 9). A locally incorporated

firm with international financing, Rei do Agro, contracts with 50 small producers, providing

agri-inputs (seeds and chemicals), extension services and mechanized field preparation for soy-

beans, maize, and sunflowers.

The NAFSN model, then, is to capitalize the land and labor (as contract farming) under the

control of international investors, traders, and retailers (McKeon, 2014a). The reproduction of

small-scale producers is organized via chains of dependence, since many of the firms involved

account for ‘the whole supply chain, from seeds, chemical inputs, production, processing, trans-

port, and trade to supermarkets’ (Paul & Steinbrecher, 2013, p. 2). Grow Africa,17 a partnership

platform linked to CAADP, a program of the New Partnership for Africa’s Development, estab-

lished by the African Union in 2003, and modeled on the World Economic Forum’s New Vision

for Agriculture Initiative, captures the essence of these initiatives in the slogan: ‘we want to see

smallholder farmers grow into businesses’.

The challenge for the food sovereignty movement is, ultimately, to disabuse state and develop-

ment authorities, and private sector interests, of the assumption that all ‘smallholder farmers’ rep-

resent ‘businesses in waiting’. In UN debates and corridors movement, activists seek to

problematize the discourse in such a way as to distinguish small-scale producer practices from

the industrial model and to establish distinctive terms of reference for what it takes to farm the

land with saved seed as opposed to applying agro-input packages. In the process of drafting an

alternative to the World Bank’s Principles for Responsible Agricultural Investment (PRAI) in

the CFS, CSOs strive to distinguish in particular the different meaning of ‘investment’ across the

aisle: financial investment for large-scale enterprise, and labor investment for small-scale producers

dedicated to improving soil fertility, hydrological cycles, and biodiversity (McMichael, 2014a).

This is, ostensibly, an epistemic issue, requiring recognition of the rights, practices, and

benefits of small-producer communities. And it requires recognition that small-scale producers

are the majority producers in the global South, and more effective at feeding themselves and

their fellow citizens than the corporate regime,18 geared as it is to commandeering land and

water to produce fungible/flex commodities for only those with global purchasing power.

Human Rights Politics

As an epistemic issue, the food sovereignty principle depends significantly on rights claims.

Contrary to liberal conceptions of individual (or market) rights, food sovereignty implies collec-

tive or group rights. This is expressed in grassroots resistance to ‘food security’ land grabbing

(see, e.g., Kerssen, 2013; Klopp & Lumumba, 2014; McKeon, 2014b). The rights-based strategy

builds on extant international rights instruments (the 1948 UN Declaration is a watershed

440 P. McMichael

convention), with the aim of expanding the realm of rights and concretizing them with social

purpose. Thus, the current Peasants’ Rights Convention campaign objective ‘is not just to

secure compliance with international norms, but to shift the norms themselves’ (Edelman &

James, 2011, p. 91). A key example is the claim by Henry Saragih (recent coordinator of Vı́a

Campesina) that the International Convention on Economic and Social and Cultural Rights

‘only mentions access to food as the fulfillment of rights to food, whereas the right to

produce food is much more fundamental to fulfilling the rights to food’ (quoted in Edelman

& James, 2011, p. 85). That is, rather than having a market access right to food, the more funda-

mental right to produce food requires stabilizing the world’s small-producer population, respon-

sible for 50% of the world’s food at the same time as it constitutes about 50% of the world’s

hungry. To reframe the question of rights in this way relates hunger to ‘land grab’ denial of

small-producer rights to their land and livelihoods, and links ‘sovereignty’ to producer rights

and productive capacities (including infrastructural needs).

This normative shift, which some activists term ‘new generation’ rights (Edelman & James,

2011, p. 93), is not simply about collective peasant rights, but also about substantiating the dis-

tinctive, multi-functional character of small-scale production. The food sovereignty movement

now confronts codes of conduct that define peasants as potential ‘smallholder businesses’, and

project a singular (commercial) mode of agricultural investment. Such misrepresentation of

small-scale producers expresses the convenience of a development narrative of peasants as

relics. Epistemically, it misunderstands that the ‘primary raison d’être of peasant farming is live-

lihood and labor, not only food, and yields are closely dependent on social relationships’ (Hilmi,

2012, pp. 59–60). For twenty-first century land users, land is not only an object to secure, but

also is being reclaimed (through bio-reclamation and agro-ecology for restorative practices)

for the purpose of resource building as ‘ecological capital’, and to secure territorial/cultural iden-

tity (cf. Escobar, 2008), and to re-build food self-reliance.19 It is therefore not surprising that the

concept of ‘land sovereignty’ has emerged to consolidate food sovereignty claims (Borras &

Franco, 2012).

Here, sovereignty means not only the right to produce, but also control of production land-

scapes, and food sovereignty ‘is a principle and an ethical lifestyle that does not correlate

with an academic definition but arises from a collective, participatory process’ (Stedile & de

Carvalho, 2011, p. 25; see also Patel, 2009). ‘New generation’ rights, then, are significant in

material, political, and moral terms, but they lack formal status:

it is well known that WTO and the international investment protection regime have at their disposal strong sanction mechanisms, whereas the U.N. Human Rights System unfortunately still lacks them. Additionally, commercial and investment law regimes still do not accept the primacy of international human rights law. (Monsalve-Suárez, 2013, p. 13)

Parallel to the soft law status of human rights is the disregard for a substantive definition of the

right to (produce) food in debates regarding peasants’ rights underway in the UN. Such a defi-

nition is anticipated in elements of the draft Peasants’ Rights Declaration:

that demand rights to conserve and exchange or sell traditional seed varieties, to intervene in markets and set prices, to participate in economic decision-making at the international and national levels, and to ‘reject interventions that can destroy local agricultural values’. (Edelman & James, 2011, pp. 96–97; final quote from La Vı́a Campesina)

Similarly, CFS Tenure Guidelines do not address how land should be used and managed sustain-

ably, and circumvent the question of the salience of small farming—the effect being to leave the

The Land Question in the Food 441

G8, World the Bank, and the International Land Coalition (ILC) to advance their own interpret-

ations (McKeon, 2014b).

Under these circumstances, the food sovereignty movement is confronted with targeting states

and inter-governmental organizations that recognize, protect, and enhance agrarian-producing

communities. Control grabbing strategies require state action, even as states have increasingly

privatized in cycles of debt regime austerity—as Borras, Franco, and Wang claim: ‘mainstream

economists who do not usually like the state coming into the picture are calling the state back in

to facilitate the identification, quantification, acquisition, and disposition of so-called available

marginal lands’ (2013, p. 169). State complicity involves both practical territorial recomposition

(selling/leasing land, eviction, resettlement, and outgrower schemes)20 and participation in or

subjection to new transnational protocols (agricultural investment, certification schemes, and

carbon markets). Either way, states are no longer simply subordinate to a common set of enforce-

able (market) rules (as under WTO protocols), but are rather more proactively involved in PPPs

and in imposing and interpreting governance functions emanating from inter-governmental

agreements, development agencies, and financial institutions as conditions of receipt and/or

hosting investment tranches.

These are essentially individual state decisions, such that the ‘crucial role of national states in

land grabbing has rendered attempts at the international governance of land grabbing a compli-

cated undertaking. It will be a challenge for inter-governmental institutions to make these

national governments responsive to international rules’ (Borras et al., 2013, p. 167). Within

the CFS ‘rai process’, focused on substituting a rights-based protocol on investment in agricul-

ture for the World Bank’s PRAI, CSM activists target member states and the CFS to uphold

international human rights obligations, particularly in relation to agricultural investment.

Food sovereignty politics here involve embedding a normative framework in land use protocols

to be observed by states and their corporate investors, insisting on a strategic role for public

investment in ensuring ‘country-owned’ food security, and distinguishing small-scale producer

investment models from financial investments in ‘flex crops’.21 Meanwhile, local movements

pressure states with direct action and legal means to slow or regulate land acquisition,22 but pol-

itical elites have reason (kickbacks, debt, and brokerage) to resist such pressure, and now, under

cover of ‘foreign aid’, and ‘food security’ concerns, cooperate with donors to license large-scale

land grabs or value-chain enclosures (Liberti, 2013).

Meanwhile, firms and investors (and G8 states) enlist nation-states in interpreting ‘country-

owned’ as governments implementing security policy frameworks with mandated agricultural

technologies (including GMOs) to ensure commodity-oriented productivity on the land. The

model is the Poverty Reduction Strategy Papers, whereby southern governments were enlisted

in the 1990s by the international financial institutions to author their own austerity policies—ren-

dering states accountable for poverty reduction by embedding public priorities in private

relationships: in effect fashioning ‘governance states’ (Harrison, 2004). In this juncture, the

task before the food sovereignty movement is to use pressure from above (in the UN) and

below (grassroots mobilization) on states to recognize and secure the rights and capacities of

their rural populations to produce food, and to regulate trade in the interests of human rights.23

The Strategic Importance of Sovereignty

While food sovereignty initially targeted the unfair principle of world ‘free’ trade and its impact

on small producers in the name of national food policy sovereignty, the strategic meaning of

sovereignty has deepened in the present conjuncture. It centers now on an ontological issue,

442 P. McMichael

namely, the incommensurability of small- and medium-scale family-based farming with indus-

trial/corporate agriculture. Productivism is the operative principle for corporate and develop-

ment institutions, as they concentrate on ‘yield gaps’ in ‘smallholder’ farming to justify

‘improvement’. Productivism imposes a yield metric on farming comparisons that elides

history, culture, and ecology. A snapshot productivity comparison between farms and agribusi-

nesses ignores the neglect of small-scale farming, particularly in the global South, over the last

three decades.24 It also measures only plant yields (but neither efficiency of water/energy use,

nor environmental externalities), rather than the ecology of farming land as wealth itself

(with additional socio-cultural value). The CFS High-Level Panel of Experts Report on Investing

in smallholder agriculture for food security defines small-scale farming in the following way:

Smallholder agriculture is practised by families (including one or more households) using only or mostly family labour and deriving from that work a large but variable share of their income, in kind or in cash . . . it includes crop raising, animal husbandry, forestry and artisanal fisheries . . . . Off-farm activities play an important role in providing smallholders with additional income and as a way of diversifying risk . . . smallholders producing only or mainly for subsistence are not uncommon . . . smallholder’s families are part of social networks within which mutual assistance and reciprocity translate into collective investments (mainly through work exchanges) and into soli- darity systems. (High Level Panel of Experts [HLPE], 2013, pp. 10–11)

Furthermore, ‘smallholder agriculture is the foundation of food security in many countries and

an important part of the social/economic/ecological landscape in all countries’ (CFS 2013,

p. 11), and the ‘potential efficiency of smallholder farming relative to larger farms has been

widely documented, focusing on the capacity of smallholders to achieve high production

levels per unit of land through the use of family labor in diversified production systems’

(CFS 2013, p. 12). Labor investment is the differentia specifica of peasant agriculture (cf.

Ploeg, 2009). In short, sovereignty is about securing this mode of farming, as human-nature

co-production, that is, ‘agrarian citizenship’ (Wittman, 2009).

Nevertheless, the vision for small-scale producers from the development establishment fixates

on value chains, which, under present conditions, have exploitative contracts (McMichael,

2013a).25 In this regard, the director of Self Help Africa, which, with PepsiCo support, works

with cashew-nut farmers and processors in Benin to supply Europe, declared: ‘Strengthening

smallholder value chains is really about helping farmers to move from being subsistence

based to enabling them to make a better profit’ (Does the future of farming in Africa lie in

the private sector, 2012). This is the singular solution to the under-privileged condition of

small-scale producers, induced by decades of public neglect of local farming, amplified by struc-

tural adjustment policies, and of course beckoning to investors, agribusinesses, retailers, foreign-

currency strapped governments, and NGOs. As an African NGO director added, the NGO role is

shifting from facilitating trade between farmers and the private sector to ‘watchdogging’ the

resulting supply chains—substituting a focus on value-chain management for looking out for

farmers.

The reality of value chains of course requires the attention of the food sovereignty movement.

There are two responses. The first is protective, in regulating value chains to reduce monopoly

‘buyer power’ and to promote more equitable outcomes for farmers and food system workers

alike.26 Such regulation is appropriately performed by states, not NGOs. Accordingly, the

CSM insists that member states take responsibility for monitoring and regulating extant

supply chains in the service of human rights.

The second response is to encourage a reorientation to domestic food production, consistent

with the original food sovereignty vision, and now with CFS endorsement of the goal of the

The Land Question in the Food 443

‘progressive realization of the right to adequate food in the context of national food security’ in

its various reports (HLPE, 2013; CFS 40 Policy Roundtable, the Voluntary Guidelines on

Responsible Governance of Tenure of Land and Other Natural Resources, and the Global Stra-

tegic Framework). The recent UN Right to Food Rapporteur has recommended targeting dom-

estic production to reduce food dependency, observing that there are ‘approximately 500 million

small-scale farmers in developing countries making them not only the vast majority of the

world’s farmers but, taking into account their families, responsible for the well-being of over

two billion persons’ (De Schutter, 2011, p. 13). Reclaiming this right concerns rebalancing

power equations: restoring integrity to domestic farm sectors27 and rights to producing commu-

nities, and wresting power from agribusiness, grain traders, retailers, and affluent consumers to

prioritize food security as a socio-political right, rather than a market gamble.

Either way, sovereignty is critical to protection or reorientation of small-scale producers. But

sovereignty also means ‘epistemic autonomy’: separating economic/financial and non-economic

values such as sufficiency economy, reciprocity via seed networks, an ecological calculus, and

so on. Even in the UN debates, in CFS 40, the persistence of the trade reflex (by which states

improve their balance of payments) reproduces the notion that agriculture is a revenue operation

and is best left to entrepreneurial farming.28 One representative of the Private Sector Mechanism

(PSM), from an agro-food network, made the following observations in a debate about small

farmers, land, and investments:

while there is a consensus that farmers are at the center, farming needs to be understood as a pro- fession, and food security is about economic growth, not just growing food—thus farmers need to break the subsistence cycle and become entrepreneurs, produce more with less land, and stabilize via land ownership, inputs (agro-chemicals), knowledge, and market access.

This kind of packaged statement, with echoes in other such statements regarding smallholders

being at the heart of a ‘transition’, including a ‘new deal’ for smallholders, draws on a form

of economic reductionism, reproduced by PSM representatives: ‘we invest in large and

small’—implying scale neutrality that elides the incommensurability of small farming and

industrial agriculture, and: ‘agriculture investments are wonderful job creators’—suggesting

either plantations or agro-industrial estates as job safety nets for displaced farmers where jobs

are the currency of modernity.29 Job provision assumes that small-scale producers are better

off earning a wage (assuming that the agri-estate endures), and that small farming is no different

from farm-working, which reflects considerable ontological ignorance. The emphasis on a finan-

cial calculus similarly discounts local common pool resources, managed by self-organizing land

users with shared rules which ‘differ from the logic of capital—they reflect, instead the interests

and perspectives of the involved producers, ecological cycles and/or principles such as social

justice, solidarity, or the containment of (potential) conflicts’ (Ploeg, Jingzhong, & Schneider,

2012, p. 164). These principles lie at the core of food sovereignty—the term is not simply

about autonomy, rather it embodies a historic, ontological alternative to the juggernaut of

agro-industrialization.

Conclusion

The coordinates of the conjuncture within which ‘food sovereignty’ emerged as an original

rural-based counter-movement have shifted as the food regime has entered a crisis phase. The

terms of opposition include now a defense of ‘ways of life’ on the land against not only

market forces (food surplus dumping) but also organized physical and economic enclosures.

444 P. McMichael

At the same time, the crisis has precipitated recognition of the false claims of neoliberal ‘food

security’, expressing a legitimacy crisis for the international institutional architecture of the food

regime (McMichael, 2014b). As usual, the legitimacy crisis has, in the manner of the ‘shock doc-

trine’ (Klein, 2007), spawned a power grab to reformulate the conditions of access to farmland,

labor, and product to feed and fuel the world minority with purchasing power. The conditions

involve new forms of legitimation of colonization of land (including common property

resources) across the world by foreign and domestic investors and governments. Land titling

and capitalization, and incorporation of small-scale producers into value chains, are proclaimed

as methods of improving productivity of the land and ‘transitioning’ farmers into agricultural

entrepreneurs. The conditions also involve elaborating governance mechanisms that are

geared to, among other things, ‘responsibly destroying the world’s peasantry’ (De Schutter,

2010).

At both ground-zero level and in global (member state) forums alike, the food sovereignty

movement is confronted with protecting land-users’ claims (and rights) to their landscapes

and territories, as well as with advancing discursive means to reframe what is really at stake.

Here, the dynamics of knowledge production are critical, as it is increasingly clear that

modern problems do not generate modern solutions (De Sousa Santos, 2002). As noted, corpor-

ate supporters have an interest in misrepresenting small-scale farming models as inadequate to

the task of ‘feeding the world’, and counter-posing industrial agriculture (with ‘sustainable

intensification’) as the solution. Value chains in particular represent a new market frontier for

agro-inputs when large-scale land grabs are contentious—but they are neither necessarily

permanent nor a solution, and, as such, are subject to contestation via a politics of rights and

of representation (Patel, 2009).

Combining a politics of rights and representation enables construction of a counter-narrative

to a mono-cultural development narrative, in a long-term crisis of unsustainability and inability

to feed populations other than global consumers.30 The food sovereignty counter-narrative con-

cerns detailing the global array of myriad social experiments centering on low-input, ecological

farming, and local food provisioning (both rural and urban). Given its origins in agrarian world-

regions, for the food sovereignty project the restoration of land and territorial rights is an

immediate priority, presenting an ontological alternative to communities across the world.

Acknowledgements

The author is indebted to three sturdy reviewers for critical feedback.

Funding

The author acknowledges, with thanks, the support of a Research Council of Norway grant: ‘Cultures, Values, Ethics,

Arguments and Justifications in the Management of Agricultural Land (FORFOOD)’, Center for Rural Research, Trond-

heim, 2013–2016.

Notes

1 For an argument about the originary significance of the food sovereignty movement for southern agrarian societies,

with which this essay is concerned, see McMichael (2013c).

2 For a fuller account of this process, see McMichael (2012).

3 At the time, the WTO was the clearly identified enemy. According to the statement prepared by the women who

participated in the Vı́a Campesina delegation in Seattle in 1999: ‘Despite all the protests in Seattle, we thank the

The Land Question in the Food 445

WTO for unifying small farmers worldwide. During the week-long work in Seattle, we have now succeeded in

globalizing the struggle and globalizing our hopes’ (Desmarais & Nicholson, 2013, p. 7).

4 A related form of ‘governance’, facilitating financial investment in large-scale operations (whether plantations or

value-chain complexes) is now undergoing intensification, with the Bank’s recent development of a program of

Benchmarking the Business of Agriculture, requested by the G8 for agricultural sector benchmarking. As the

Bank states, this is ‘a new project that gives users information and objective measures to understand where their

economies are in the process of agricultural transformation, and identify areas of improvement’ (2014).

5 To the claim that small producers may choose to participate in supply/value chain production, the question must

first be asked: what range of choice do they have when farming for food has been progressively devalued and

starved of public support, where land has been degraded, states are hungry for foreign exchange, investors scour

the world and their backyard for agricultural, mining, and water in a resource-depleting world, and offset

carbon credits have become the new currency? Susanti and Budidarsono note that smallholders in Indonesia

may individually ‘benefit’ from commercial oil palm production, but forests and rice fields suffer (2014,

p. 134), not to mention environmental chemicalization at the expense of surrounding land and waterscapes

(Colchester et al., 2006).

6 As Rosset (2013) underlines, the food sovereignty project has had to recognize and manage the multiple claims on

territory by different minority cultures (e.g. indigenous vs. farmer vs. pastoralist communities)—the provisional

concept of ‘land sovereignty’ (Borras & Franco, 2012) addresses this question, marking the movement’s re-

envisioning of ‘agrarian reform’ from a territorial perspective.

7 Whether and to what extent food sovereignty comes to organize state policy is quite variable, and hardly substantial

yet (Clark, 2013; Giunta, 2013). Arguably this will only transpire via powerful grassroots movements.

8 In March 2006, the FAO Conference on Agrarian Reform and Rural Development acknowledged the principle of

‘food sovereignty’ (Mann, 2014, p. 65). In October 2013, FAO Director General Jose Graziano da Silva and Ángel

Strapazzón of La Vı́a Campesina met to formalize an agreement of cooperation acknowledging the essential role

played by smallholder food producers, focusing on key areas such as strengthening peasant based agro-ecological

food production, protecting small holders’ rights to access to land and water, improving farmer rights over seeds in

accordance with international and national seed laws, and improving access of women and youth to land and other

productive resources. Rosset (2013, p. 734) emphasizes the ‘differentiated engagement’ of La Via Campesina with

multilateral institutions, where the WTO, International Monetary Fund and World Bank are regarded as implacable

opponents.

9 This double movement of overriding the WTO food dependency regime via national sovereignty as the historic

precondition of a simultaneous grass-roots process of democratizing domestic food systems (with urban allies)

helps to resolve questions regarding a possible contradiction between state and civil society sovereignties (cf.

Hospes, 2014; Schiavoni, this issue). McKay and Nehring (2013) note a discursive shift in La Vı́a Campesina

from ‘rights of nations’ to ‘rights of peoples’ between 1996 and 2001—I would argue that this meaning was

implicit in the original declaration, by food producers themselves (see also Claeys, 2012, p. 849). Initially, the

emphasis on national sovereignty was a form of strategic essentialism (McMichael, 2013b, p. 147).

10 The African focus is telling, as, for the World Bank:

Africa represents the ‘last frontier’ in global food and agricultural markets. It has more than half of the world’s

uncultivated but agriculturally suitable land and has scarcely utilized its extensive water resources. As

Africa’s population, incomes, and cities grow and spur the development of domestic markets, the prospects

for agriculture and agribusiness will be better than ever (2013, p. 2).

Africa and Latin America are the world regions where about 80% of projected expansion in arable land is

expected in the future (FAO, 2009, p. 40). For Sub-Saharan Africa, the Bank views growth in agricultural pro-

ductivity in developmental terms: as ‘vital for stimulating growth in other parts of the economy’, compared with

Asia, where the focus is on generating ‘rural jobs by diversifying into labor-intensive, high-value agriculture

linked to a dynamic rural, nonfarm sector’ (2007, p. v).

11 For an extended discussion of the modalities and effects of contract farming,

entailing relations between growers and private or state enterprises that substitute for open-market exchanges

by linking nominally independent family farmers of widely variant assets with a central processing, export, or

purchasing unit that regulates in advance prices, production practices, product quality, and credit (see Watts

(1994, pp. 26–7), and for updates, see Gibbon and Ponte (2005) and McMichael (2013a)).

446 P. McMichael

12 Nielsen and Pritchard also view ‘the outsourcing of tea production in South India . . . as a strategic response to

enhanced demands for ethical accountability along the global value chain’ (2009, p. 206).

13 I use the term ‘peasantries’ to refer to a varied grouping of small-scale producers, including family farmers,

pastoralists, forest-dwellers, and fishers (cf. Ploeg, 2009).

14 For example, Benin, Burkina Faso, Côte d’Ivoire, Ethiopia, Ghana, Malawi, Mozambique, Nigeria, Tanzania, and

Senegal.

15 Oxfam reports: ‘the negotiation between governments and companies has not been open to public scrutiny or the

participation of small-scale producers’ (2013, p. 5).

16 Tanzania’s Southern Agricultural Growth Corridor (SAGCOT) of 7.5 million ha includes 2 million hectares farmed

by smallholders (Paul & Steinbrecher, 2013, p. 9).

17 http://growafrica.com/

18 Not only do small producers account for 80% of the food consumed in the global South, but also there is an

established scientific consensus that the relative yields of organic/agro-ecological versus non-organic farming

are sufficient to provision the current daily average consumption of calories across the world (Badgley et al.,

2007; Pretty & Hine, 2001; Pretty, Morison, & Hine, 2003). Pretty et al. (2006) compared 286 projects across

37 million hectares in 57 southern countries, finding agro-ecological techniques increased crop productivity by

an average of 79% on over 12 million farms, with improvements in environmental services.

19 Bryceson claims pertinence here:

Historically, peasantries have formed the demographic, cultural, and political bulwark of African nation-

states, providing the ethical and social foundations upon which national stability has rested. Thus, for the

sake of human welfare, agricultural productivity, and national stability, smallholder agriculture is preferable

to large-scale, highly capitalized agriculture (2010, p. 81).

20 See Wolford, Borras, Hall, Scoones, and White (2013) for a summary statement of the complex relations involved

in land grabbing by a variety of domestic, and foreign, actors. This essay focuses on central state responsibilities.

21 Borras, Franco, Isakson, Levidow, and Vervest (2014).

22 Resistance takes a variety of forms: including government restrictions on foreign acquisitions of land in Argentina

and Brazil (Borras et al., 2012; Perrone, 2013), land governance reforms in Burkina Faso, Kenya, Tanzania, and

Liberia (FOLA, 2013), and use of the Voluntary Tenure Guidelines to inform land struggles in India, Mali,

Uganda, Argentina, and Italy (McKeon, 2014b), documentation of land grabbing forms and extent in Europe to

encourage application of the Guidelines in the EU (Transnational Institute, 2013), land occupation by social

movements in Argentina (Brent, 2013), indigenous struggles to defend territory in Guatemala (Alonso-Fradejas,

2013) and Honduras (Kerssen, 2013), and socio-political struggles in Europe (Franco & Borras, 2013).

23 Thus, De Schutter challenges the WTO’s prioritizing of international trade for meeting food security needs—a

challenge with enhanced credibility in the wake of the food crisis and its constitutive export bans and

subsequent land grabbing. Further, he points out: ‘It is precisely because the links between trade and the

realization of the right to food are complex that human rights impact assessments should be conducted before

free trade agreements are agreed upon’ (De Schutter, 2012, p. 5).

24 For example: ‘conventional agricultural research enjoyed 60 years of massive private and public sector support for

crop genetic improvement, dwarfing funding for organic agriculture by 99 to 1’ (Holt-Giménez, 2012, p. 1).

25 As the Global Strategic Framework has noted:

It is recognized that the bulk of investment in agriculture is undertaken by farmers and smallholders them-

selves, their cooperatives and other rural enterprises, with the rest being provided by a multiplicity of

private actors, large and small, along the value chain, as well as governments. Smallholder farmers, many

of whom are women, play a central role in producing most of the food consumed locally in many developing

regions and are the primary investors in agriculture in many developing countries (CFS, 2012, p. 13, 2nd

draft).

26 ‘According to an IIED and Oxfam report, the value chain approach only works effectively for 2–10% of small

producers, due to a number of factors which keeps them at the “mercy of larger producers”’ (Henriques, 2013, p. 9).

27 In this regard, ‘renationalizing and rebuilding national grain reserves and parastatal marketing boards . . .

[including] farmer organizations’ (Rosset, 2009, p. 20) is an important step. In recent WTO deliberations in

Bali, India held firm to having its domestic grain reserve undefined as a restraint on trade. Kay (2014) outlines a

series of public investment initiatives to strengthen ‘investment from below’.

The Land Question in the Food 447

28 It also accounts for the strong, and controversial, resistance by agro-exporting states to regulation of biofuels

production and circulation.

29 For an empirical critique of this assumption in World Bank claims, see Li (2011).

30 There is an emerging set of counter-narrative stories from the grassroots front, providing credibility and sharing

experiences of local practices and organization (see, e.g., Franco & Borras, 2013; Holt-Giménez & Patel, 2009;

Hilmi, 2012; Kerssen, 2013; Mann, 2014; McKeon, 2014b).

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Philip McMichael is a Professor and Chair of Development Sociology, Cornell University, and

is a member of the Civil Society Mechanism in the CFS/FAO. Current research is on agrarian

movements, land questions, and food regimes. He is author of the award-winning Settlers and

the Agrarian Question (1984), Development and Social Change: A Global Perspective

(2012), and Food Regimes and Agrarian Questions (2013), and editor of Contesting Develop-

ment: Critical Struggles for Social Change (2010).

The Land Question in the Food 451