The Creation of New Rights by the Food Sovereignty Movement: The Challenge of Institutionalizing Subversion

Abstract

This article analyses the creation of new human rights by a contemporary transnational agrarian movement, Vía Campesina. It makes the case that the movement's assertion of new rights contributes to shaping a cosmopolitan, multicultural, and anti-hegemonic conception of human rights. It discusses the advantages and constraints of the human rights framework and analyses the creation of new rights by the movement as a way to overcome the limitations of the 'rights master frame'. It concludes with a discussion of some of the challenges involved in the institutionalization of new rights.

Monocultures: A Blight on Human and Planetary Health

“…One of the reviewers of this chapter properly noted that I needed to acknowledge that all was not dismal and that there were alternatives (both goals and practices) to the road we were on, involving, for instance improved distribution ; scrutiny and labelling of GM food (European Commission Directorate General for Health and Consumers, 2010) (although evidence of effective field control is scant (Bauer-Panskus et al, 2013) and expenditure on misinformation is extensive -see the Proposition 522 fight in Washington, USA (www.organicconsumers.org/essays/did-anti-gmo-movement-really-losewashington); alternative pest-control systems (Lewis et al, 1997;Chandler et al, 2011); ecologic agricultural management (Buck and Scherr, 2011;La Via Campesina, 2013); and the food sovereignty movement (Claeys, 2012;La Via Campesina, 2013). I acknowledge, applaud and support these activities (among other things, I grow organic food and keep bees), but I remain sceptical of longterm beneficial outcomes when these trends are arrayed against the power of sociopathic international capitalism.…”

Scaling Food Sovereignty: Biopolitics and the Struggle for Local Control of Farm Food in Rural Maine

“…Calls for food sovereignty raise difficult questions about the social and spatial parameters of democratic control of food system. Some observers suggest that as food sovereignty activism spreads to the Global North from the Global South, market-based localization will trump political efforts to foster food democratization as such (Claeys 2012;Fairbairn 2012); this would arguably limit the significance of such work as biopolitics. Ongoing political struggle over a local food sovereignty ordinance in Maine challenges that assessment by bringing different tiers of the state into debate over the possibility of local control of food systems.…”

“…First promulgated in 1996 at the Rome Food Summit, food sovereignty responds to peasant struggles in the face of globalized agribusiness and agro-export regimes and asserts communities' rights to produce for themselves rather than rely on international commodities markets (Alkon and Mares 2012). The food sovereignty movement calls for a radical transformation of farming and food systems by invoking a provocative if ambiguous blend of individual and collective sovereignty and rights with political and cultural overtones (Claeys 2012;Trauger 2013). Food sovereignty's "radical insistence on community and the development of a 'defensible life space' against neoliberalism's enclosure of the commons" (Kopka 2008, 46) leads activists to confront multiple levels of food and agricultural governance that impinge on life spaces through the management of food systems.…”

Vernacular rights cultures and the ‘Right to Have Rights’

“…Rather, it occurred in combination with peasant mobilisations elsewhere, with horizontal forms of communication and exchange revealing and developing transnational resonances amongst peasant struggles and giving rise to la Via Campesina, a transnational peasant organisation. Moreover, peasant demands for this new right to food sovereignty have generated changes in local and transnational discourses and practices of rights, with food sovereignty being incorporated into numerous national constitutions, into international soft law (Claeys, 2012), and into political imaginaries across the world. Transnational imaginaries and inscriptions of rights thus reflect a history of struggle that is both local and transnational, and are sutured with the thick cultures, histories, and contexts of the multiple mobilisations through which rights are demanded and enacted.…”

“…Both of these bodies of literature have also highlighted how MST members call upon peasant histories and identities, religious understandings, existing inequalities in land distribution, and constitutional requirements in making their demand for rights to land and food (see also MST, 2013 8 andRosset, 2011). Literature on la Via Campesina, meanwhile, has focused on the nature and effects of Via Campesina as a transnational actor, calling attention to the transnational factors driving peasant oppression (Weis, 2013;White et al, 2012), the history, practices and effects of Via Campesina (Borras Jr. 2010;Claeys, 2012;Holt-Gimanez, 2010;Martinez-Torres and Rosset, 2010;Rosset, 2013;Via Campesina, 2014;), and the novel nature of their demand for food sovereignty (Claeys, 2012;Dunford, 2014;Holt-Gimenez, 2009;Patel, 2007;Rosset, 2011). But existing literature has not rooted the novelty of this demand in the particular histories, cultures and political contexts of the grass roots peasant mobilisations, like the MST, that constitute the wider movement.…”