Food as a commodity, human right or common good

Jackson, Peter; Rivera-Ferré, Marta G.; Candel, Jeroen; Davies, Anna; Derani, Cristiane; Vries, Hugo de; Dragović–Uzelac, Verica; Hoel, Alf Håkon; Holm, Lotte; Mathijs, Erik; Morone, Piergiuseppe; Penker, Marianne; Śpiewak, Ruta; Termeer, Katrien; Thøgersen, John

doi:10.1038/s43016-021-00245-5

Cited by 41 publications

(29 citation statements)

References 10 publications

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“…It is practically no longer possible to talk about food in an isolated way rather than in terms of food systems, especially if applying the commons theory (Ferrando, 2016;Jackson et al, 2021). For this reason and in order to overview the entire food system and all the potential initiatives and discourses on food-as-a-commons in it, we follow the social ecological systems (SES) framework as elaborated by Marshall (2015).…”

Section: Study Design and Methodologymentioning

confidence: 99%

“…There must, however, always be an institutional arrangement in place to enable sharing of the good among users (Cheria & Edwin, 2011). In order to treat food and all inputs and outputs in the food value chain increasingly as commons, a transformation of the food system is required (Jackson et al, 2021). This would mean production, trade, marketing, distribution, processing, consumption and related social values, such as knowledge of nutrition, food culture and traditions, acquire joint discursive decision-making processes that go beyond supply and demand.…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

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The Food-as-a-Commons Discourse: Analyzing the Journey to Policy Impact

Carceller-Sauras

Theesfeld

2021

Int J Commons

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Section: Study Design and Methodologymentioning

confidence: 99%

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

The Food-as-a-Commons Discourse: Analyzing the Journey to Policy Impact

Carceller-Sauras

Theesfeld

2021

Int J Commons

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“…The idea of food as a ‘commons’ has also seen a revived focus by scholars and activists (e.g. Healy et al 2020 ; Jackson et al 2021 ). Renewed interest in urban agriculture and land access for communities of colour has renewed the promise of radical food justice, though requires overcoming significant structural barriers (O’Hara and Toussaint 2020 ).…”

Section: Covid-19 Responses: Containing or Contesting Business-as-usual?mentioning

confidence: 99%

Containing Hunger, Contesting Injustice? Exploring the Transnational Growth of Foodbanking- and Counter-responses- Before and During the COVID-19 Pandemic

2022

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COVID-19 caused levels of household food insecurity to spike, but the precarity of so many people in wealthy countries is an outgrowth of decades of eroding public provisions and labour protections that once protected people from hunger, setting the stage for the virus’ unevenly-distributed harms. The prominence of corporate-sponsored foodbanking as a containment response to pandemic-aggravated food insecurity follows decades of replacing rights with charity. We review structural drivers of charity’s growth to prominence as a hunger solution in North America, and of its spread to countries including the UK. By highlighting pre-pandemic pressures shaping foodbanking, including charities’ efforts to retool themselves as health providers, we ask whether anti-hunger efforts during the pandemic serve to contain ongoing socioeconomic crises and the unjust living conditions they cause, or contest them through transformative pathways to a just food system. We suggest that pandemic-driven philanthropic and state funding flows have bolstered foodbanking and the food system logics that support it. By contextualising the complex and variegated politics of foodbanking in broader movements, from community food security to food sovereignty, we reframe simplistic narratives of charity and highlight the need for justice-oriented structural changes in wealth redistribution and food system organisation if we are to prevent the kinds of emergency-within-emergency that we witnessed as COVID-19 revealed the proximity of many to hunger.

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“…Schweitzer (2021) articulates how this vision might be realised at the city-scale, using the case of Austin, Texas. Food aid also offers examples of decommodified food networks (Lohnes, 2020;Spring & Biddulph, 2020), while resurgent interest in viewing food as a 'commons' (Jackson et al, 2021) offers ways to reimagine food charities as parts of a nascent 'planetary food commons' (Healy et al, 2020). Within such networks (linking the state, food producers and communities), decommodified food provisioning could support localised food economies while avoiding the stigma of charity as it currently exists within the manufactured scarcity of capitalist food systems.…”

Section: Universal Basic Servicesmentioning

confidence: 99%

“Pay the rent or feed the kids”: A scoping review of the ‘housing-food insecurity nexus’ in Canada

Spring¹,

Rosol²

2022

Preprint

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Housing and food are both fundamental human rights and key social determinants of health. Yet despite their interrelations, housing and food are often treated separately by government bodies, policymakers and social movements. While both ‘food insecurity’ and ‘housing insecurity’ have been the targets of much research and activism in recent decades, we find less attention to their intersections, and to the potential for research and activism that centres these intersections in struggles to address their linked underlying causes. This scoping review aims to bring these two domains into closer conversation by further developing the notion of the ‘housing-food insecurity nexus’. We conceptualise this nexus as the co-occurrence of housing and food insecurity, often resulting from unaffordable housing costs (and the relative flexibility of food expenditure) in the context of neoliberal housing policy and market conditions where living costs outstrip incomes for many. The review highlights empirical and explanatory intersections and explores potentials for more coordinated action that can help to ensure people are able to realise both their right to housing, and to good food. The review is based on literature from Canada and pays particular attention to urban areas but bears relevance elsewhere. We first give empirical evidence for the housing-food insecurity nexus, and how this might differentially affect particular marginalised groups. Second, we suggest explanatory frameworks that broaden perspectives onto the nexus and particularly draw attention to underlying drivers of increasing food and housing unaffordability. Finally, we review proposed solutions, from short- to long-term. We conclude that necessary to the implementation of these solutions is a re-politicisation of the right to food and housing, uniting around the shared harms of many: renters, food producers, and movements for economic justice. We thus also examine the potential for cross-sector and multi-level partnerships that can leverage power in the pursuit of these twinned, essential goals.

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Food as a commodity, human right or common good

Abstract: Different framings of food may shape food policies and their impact. Despite acknowledging food systems' complexities, the European Commission's Farm to Fork Strategy still addresses food as a commodity instead of a human right or common good.

Cited by 41 publications

References 10 publications

The Food-as-a-Commons Discourse: Analyzing the Journey to Policy Impact

The Food-as-a-Commons Discourse: Analyzing the Journey to Policy Impact

Containing Hunger, Contesting Injustice? Exploring the Transnational Growth of Foodbanking- and Counter-responses- Before and During the COVID-19 Pandemic

“Pay the rent or feed the kids”: A scoping review of the ‘housing-food insecurity nexus’ in Canada

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