Still searching for (food) sovereignty: Why are radical discourses only partially mobilised in the independent Anglo-Caribbean?

Abstract

The notion of 'food sovereignty' is often surprisingly absent in food and agricultural discourses in the Anglo-Caribbean, where over the past half century policy-making has aligned with conventional 'food security' approaches. This paper argues that, in addition to its contemporary entrenchment within a neoliberal environment, this is also due to the nature of 'sovereignty' itself in a region which has been shaped by a distinctive colonial, social and economic history. In order to demonstrate this, firstly, it makes the case for why, in the context of rising food imports and enduring structural legacies, food sovereignty matters in the Anglo-Caribbean. Secondly, it charts changes in the regional policy of the Caribbean Community (CARICOM) to show how, despite repeated calls to increase selfsufficiency, conventional neoliberal approaches to agricultural development and food security have predominated since the 1970s. Finally, it identifies and analyses limited instances where food sovereignty discourses have been mobilized, by farmers' groups and political actors, and interrogates the meaning of both 'internal' and 'external' sovereignty itself in this post-colonial context. It finds mobilisations of food sovereignty to be characterised by a repeated conflation of domestic food production with the concept's ideological principles as a political project, and a particular understanding of sovereignty that places an emphasis on 'the state' and 'the region' over 'the people'. This shows that the very nature of 'sovereignty' itself plays a critical role in both the translation of, and possibilities mobilising for 'food sovereignty' as a radical project as envisaged in the wider literature.

Food Security Challenges and Options in the Caribbean: Insights from a Scoping Review

“…Food sovereignty has also been proposed as a critical response. In 2007, a group of delegates from several local farmer organizations submitted an Agricultural Manifesto to CARICOM (Thompson 2019 ). The Manifesto was based on food sovereignty principles, urging “bottom–up solutions” and “participation” over “consultation” (ibid).…”

Food as a weapon? The geopolitics of food and the Qatar–Gulf rift

“…Since the start of the embargo of Qatar in 2017, securitized discourses about food have made a resurgence across the Arabian Peninsula. Intertwined with globally hegemonic tropes and imaginaries of state-based nationalism, food security narratives are pervaded by the themes of in/dependence, territorial sovereignty, national vulnerability, and the precarious integrity of food supply chains, which might become a site of attack in political confrontations (Barnes, 2009; Boland, 2000; Conversi, 2016; Duminy, 2018; Gross and Feldman, 2015; Hopma and Woods, 2014; Nally, 2015; Thompson, 2019; Wegren et al, 2018; Wengle, 2016; Woertz, 2019). Yet as international as these securitized imaginaries of food as a ‘weapon’ are, they also have a specifically regional history in the Gulf.…”

Labor movements and party system development: Why does the Caribbean have stable two-party systems, but the Pacific does not?

“…Sometimes, the party that led the country to independence was tied most closely to the primary sector: in many of the small Eastern Caribbean islands, the fortunes of those most associated with the maintenance of the banana sector-such as the United Workers Party (UWP) in St Lucia (see Joseph, 2011)-waxed and waned as it rose and declined. So, where some parties represented rural communities linked to those major export-agricultural sectors, and even today link enduring claims for substantive political freedom to wider questions of sovereignty (see Thompson, 2019a), others emerged in the urban settings-often self-described "labor" parties that primarily represented public sector workers-as states developed and modernized. But to describe these as cleavagebased would be a misrepresentation: party formation did not exemplify the same kind of elite vs labor, right vs left divide that exists in Europe; both groups of parties represented all kinds of workers via union linkages; they accepted, supported and defended the tripartite consensus; and, although at times nominally linked to rural or urban constituencies, drew wide support from across a generally homogenous society.…”