{"title":"State science, risk and agricultural biotechnology: Bt cotton to Bt Brinjal in India","authors":"R. Herring","doi":"10.1080/03066150.2014.951835","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1080/03066150.2014.951835","url":null,"abstract":"Agricultural biotechnology has been a project of India's developmental state since 1986, but implementation generated significant conflict. Sequential cases of two crops carrying the same transgene – Bt cotton and Bt brinjal (eggplant/aubergine) – facing the same authorization procedures produced different outcomes. The state science that approved Bt cotton was attacked as biased and dangerously inadequate by opponents, but the technology spread to virtually universal adoption by farmers. Bt aubergine was approved by the same Genetic Engineering Approval Committee (GEAC), but the decision was overruled, the GEAC downgraded and a moratorium imposed on the crop. Resultant conflicts engaged international networks, expanded the domestic arena in which science is contested and instigated restructuring of institutions for governance of genetic engineering. Divergent trajectories of the two crops corresponded to global patterns, but also reflected differences in agro-ecologies and state interests. In Bt cotton, state and cultivator interests dominated precautionary logics; in Bt eggplant, politics of risk dominated questions of agro-economics. The cases illustrate both the inherent vulnerability of science in politics and specific vulnerabilities of science embedded in particular institutions. Differences in institutional specificity of state science matter politically in explaining variation across countries in adoption and rejection of genetically engineered crops.","PeriodicalId":48271,"journal":{"name":"Journal of Peasant Studies","volume":"42 1","pages":"159 - 186"},"PeriodicalIF":5.1,"publicationDate":"2015-01-02","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"https://sci-hub-pdf.com/10.1080/03066150.2014.951835","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"59429537","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":1,"RegionCategory":"社会学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Raj Patel, R. Bezner Kerr, L. Shumba, L. Dakishoni
{"title":"Cook, eat, man, woman: understanding the New Alliance for Food Security and Nutrition, nutritionism and its alternatives from Malawi","authors":"Raj Patel, R. Bezner Kerr, L. Shumba, L. Dakishoni","doi":"10.1080/03066150.2014.971767","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1080/03066150.2014.971767","url":null,"abstract":"The Group of Eight Countries (G8) launched the New Alliance for Food Security and Nutrition to improve nutritional outcomes through private sector involvement in agricultural development. The accession of Malawi to the Alliance reveals the assumptions behind the intervention. We show that while the New Alliance may seem to have little to do with nutrition, its emergence as a frame for the privatization of food and agriculture has been decades in the making, and is best understood as an outcome of a project of nutritionism. To highlight the failings of the approach, we present findings from the Soils, Food and Healthy Communities Initiative in northern Malawi, which has demonstrated success in combatting malnutrition through a combination of agroecological farming practices, community mobilization, women's empowerment and changes in intrahousehold gender dynamics. Contrasting a political economic analysis of the New Alliance alongside that of the Soils, Food and Healthy Communities Initiative shows the difference between a concern with the gendered social context of malnutrition, and nutritionism. We conclude with an analysis of the ways that nutrition can play a part in interventions that are inimical, or conducive, to freedom.","PeriodicalId":48271,"journal":{"name":"Journal of Peasant Studies","volume":"42 1","pages":"21 - 44"},"PeriodicalIF":5.1,"publicationDate":"2015-01-02","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"https://sci-hub-pdf.com/10.1080/03066150.2014.971767","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"59429617","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":1,"RegionCategory":"社会学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"Social movements, law and the politics of land reform: lessons from Brazil","authors":"Gabriel Ondetti","doi":"10.1080/03066150.2014.978142","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1080/03066150.2014.978142","url":null,"abstract":"University Press. Taussig, M.T. 1986. Shamanism, colonialism, and the wild man: a study in terror and healing. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Thomas, E., M. van Zonneveld, J. Loo, T. Hodgkin, G. Galluzzi, and J. van Etten. 2012. Present Spatial Diversity Patterns of Theobroma cacao L. in the Neotropics Reflect Genetic Differentiation in Pleistocene Refugia Followed by Human-Influenced Dispersal. PLoS ONE 7, no. 10.","PeriodicalId":48271,"journal":{"name":"Journal of Peasant Studies","volume":"42 1","pages":"236 - 239"},"PeriodicalIF":5.1,"publicationDate":"2015-01-02","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"https://sci-hub-pdf.com/10.1080/03066150.2014.978142","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"59429740","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":1,"RegionCategory":"社会学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"Peasant-driven agricultural growth and food sovereignty","authors":"J. van der Ploeg","doi":"10.1080/03066150.2013.876997","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1080/03066150.2013.876997","url":null,"abstract":"The concept of food sovereignty presents us with an important theoretical and practical challenge. The political economy of agriculture can only take up this gauntlet through improving its understanding of the processes of agricultural growth. It is very difficult to address the issue of food sovereignty without such an understanding. Developing such an understanding involves (re)combining the political economy of agriculture with the Chayanovian approach. This paper gives several explanations (all individually valid but stronger in combination) as to why peasant agriculture results in sturdy and sustainable growth and also identifies the factors that undermine this capacity. The paper also argues that peasant agriculture is far from being a remnant of the past. While different peasantries around the world are shaped and reproduced by today's capital (and more specifically by current food empires), they equally help to shape and contribute to the further unfolding of the forms of capital related to food and agriculture. It is important to understand this two-way interaction between capital and peasant agriculture as this helps to ground the concept of food sovereignty. The article argues that the capacity to produce enough food (at different levels, distinguishing different needs, and so on) needs to be an integral part of the food sovereignty discourse. It concludes by suggesting that peasant agriculture has the best potential for meeting food sovereignty largely because it has the capacity to produce (more than) sufficient good food for the growing world population and that it can do so in a way that is sustainable.","PeriodicalId":48271,"journal":{"name":"Journal of Peasant Studies","volume":"41 1","pages":"1030 - 999"},"PeriodicalIF":5.1,"publicationDate":"2014-11-02","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"https://sci-hub-pdf.com/10.1080/03066150.2013.876997","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"59428539","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":1,"RegionCategory":"社会学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"Re-purposing the master's tools: the open source seed initiative and the struggle for seed sovereignty","authors":"J. Kloppenburg","doi":"10.1080/03066150.2013.875897","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1080/03066150.2013.875897","url":null,"abstract":"‘Food sovereignty’ must necessarily encompass ‘seed sovereignty’. Corporate appropriation of plant genetic resources, development of transgenic crops and the global imposition of intellectual property rights are now widely recognized as serious constraints on the free exchange of seeds and the development of new cultivars by farmers, public breeders and small seed companies. In response, an Open Source Seed Initiative (OSSI) has been launched in the United States to apply legal mechanisms drawn from the open source software movement to plant breeding. An open source license is a tool constituted by the provisions of contract law. It is a tool of the master inasmuch as the structure of the legal system has been designed to facilitate the activities of the dominant stakeholders in the overarching social formation. This paper assesses the problematics of re-purposing such a tool by examining the issues that have been raised in OSSI's efforts to develop its licenses and to transmit its sense of their potential to prospective allies. Through an examination of the expressed positions of La Vía Campesina and Navdanya on the nature of ‘seed sovereignty’, the compatibilities and disjunctures of OSSI's stance with those of potential allies in the food sovereignty movement are assessed.","PeriodicalId":48271,"journal":{"name":"Journal of Peasant Studies","volume":"41 1","pages":"1225 - 1246"},"PeriodicalIF":5.1,"publicationDate":"2014-10-15","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"https://sci-hub-pdf.com/10.1080/03066150.2013.875897","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"59428435","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":1,"RegionCategory":"社会学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"Diálogo de saberes in La Vía Campesina: food sovereignty and agroecology","authors":"M. Martínez-Torres, P. Rosset","doi":"10.1080/03066150.2013.872632","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1080/03066150.2013.872632","url":null,"abstract":"The transnational rural social movement La Vía Campesina has been critically sustained and shaped by the encounter and diálogo de saberes (dialog among different knowledges and ways of knowing) between different rural cultures (East, West, North and South; peasant, indigenous, farmer, pastoralist and rural proletarian, etc.) that takes place within it, in the context of the increasingly politicized confrontation with neoliberal reality and agribusiness in the most recent phase of capital expansion. This dialog among the ‘absences’ left out by the dominant monoculture of ideas has produced important ‘emergences’ that range from mobilizing frames for collective action – like the food sovereignty framework – to social methodologies for the spread of agroecology among peasant families.","PeriodicalId":48271,"journal":{"name":"Journal of Peasant Studies","volume":"41 1","pages":"979 - 997"},"PeriodicalIF":5.1,"publicationDate":"2014-10-15","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"https://sci-hub-pdf.com/10.1080/03066150.2013.872632","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"59428746","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":1,"RegionCategory":"社会学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"The ‘state’ of food sovereignty in Latin America: political projects and alternative pathways in Venezuela, Ecuador and Bolivia","authors":"Ben M. McKay, R. Nehring, M. Walsh-Dilley","doi":"10.1080/03066150.2014.964217","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1080/03066150.2014.964217","url":null,"abstract":"The concept of food sovereignty has been enshrined in the constitutions of a number of countries around the world without any clear consensus around what state-sponsored ‘food sovereignty’ might entail. At the forefront of this movement are the countries of the so-called ‘pink tide’ of Latin America – chiefly Venezuela, Ecuador and Bolivia. This paper examines how state commitments to food sovereignty have been put into practice in these three countries, asking if and how efforts by the state contribute to significant transformation or if they simply serve the political purposes of elites. Understanding the state as a complex arena of class struggle, we suggest that state efforts around food sovereignty open up new political spaces in an ongoing struggle around control over food systems at different scales. Embedded in food sovereignty is a contradictory notion of sovereignty, requiring simultaneously a strong developmentalist state and the redistribution of power to facilitate direct control over food systems in ways that may threaten the state. State-society relations, particularly across scales, are therefore a central problematic of food sovereignty projects.","PeriodicalId":48271,"journal":{"name":"Journal of Peasant Studies","volume":"41 1","pages":"1175 - 1200"},"PeriodicalIF":5.1,"publicationDate":"2014-10-15","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"https://sci-hub-pdf.com/10.1080/03066150.2014.964217","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"59429390","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":1,"RegionCategory":"社会学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"Historicizing food sovereignty","authors":"P. McMichael","doi":"10.1080/03066150.2013.876999","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1080/03066150.2013.876999","url":null,"abstract":"To historicize food sovereignty is not simply to recognize its multiple forms and circumstances across time and space, but also to recognize its relation to the politics of capital in a crisis conjuncture. This paper traces the evolution of the food sovereignty vision from the initial stages of the food sovereignty countermovement to the present, arguing that food sovereignty politics have not only traveled from countryside to city as consumers/citizens anticipate ecological constraints and compensate for unequal food distributions, but also they have been confronted with transitions in the food regime following the recent food crisis. New enclosures, in the forms of land grabs and value-chains, administered by public-private ‘governance’ partnerships, have contradictory effects: threatening the peasant base of the food sovereignty countermovement, but also threatening to exacerbate the food crisis, as evidenced in recent food riot politics animated by the food sovereignty vision. As the food regime restructures, it reconditions the possibilities of food sovereignty politics. Arguably, the ultimate historicization of food sovereignty possibility is immanent in cumulative energy and climate feedbacks.","PeriodicalId":48271,"journal":{"name":"Journal of Peasant Studies","volume":"41 1","pages":"933 - 957"},"PeriodicalIF":5.1,"publicationDate":"2014-10-15","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"https://sci-hub-pdf.com/10.1080/03066150.2013.876999","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"59428599","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":1,"RegionCategory":"社会学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"Food sovereignty: forgotten genealogies and future regulatory challenges","authors":"M. Edelman","doi":"10.1080/03066150.2013.876998","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1080/03066150.2013.876998","url":null,"abstract":"‘Food sovereignty’ has become a mobilizing frame for social movements, a set of legal norms and practices aimed at transforming food and agriculture systems, and a free-floating signifier filled with varying kinds of content. Canonical accounts credit the Vía Campesina transnational agrarian movement with coining and elaborating the term, but its proximate origins are actually in an early 1980s Mexican government program. Central American activists nonetheless appropriated and redefined it in the late 1980s. Advocates typically suggest that ‘food sovereignty’ is diametrically opposed to ‘food security’, but historically there actually has been considerable slippage and overlap between these concepts. Food sovereignty theory has usually failed to indicate whether the ‘sovereign’ is the nation, region or locality, or ‘the people’. This lack of specificity about the sovereign feeds a reluctance to think concretely about the regulatory mechanisms necessary to consolidate and enforce food sovereignty, particularly limitations on long-distance and international trade and on firm and farm size. Several regulatory possibilities are mentioned and found wanting. Finally, entrenched consumer needs and desires related to internationally-traded products – from coffee to pineapples – imply additional obstacles to the localisation of production, distribution and consumption that many food sovereignty proponents support.","PeriodicalId":48271,"journal":{"name":"Journal of Peasant Studies","volume":"41 1","pages":"959 - 978"},"PeriodicalIF":5.1,"publicationDate":"2014-10-15","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"https://sci-hub-pdf.com/10.1080/03066150.2013.876998","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"59428556","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":1,"RegionCategory":"社会学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"Life in a shrimp zone: aqua- and other cultures of Bangladesh's coastal landscape","authors":"K. Paprocki, J. Cons","doi":"10.1080/03066150.2014.937709","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1080/03066150.2014.937709","url":null,"abstract":"This essay questions the possibilities of food sovereignty for producing a radical egalitarian politics. Specifically, it explores the class-differentiated implications of food sovereignty in a zone of ecological crisis – Bangladesh's coastal Khulna district. Much land in this deltaic zone that had previously been employed for various forms of peasant production has been transformed by the introduction of brackish-water shrimp aquaculture. This has, in turn, caused massive depeasantization and ecological crisis throughout the region. Through an examination of two markedly different polders (embanked islands) – one which has been overrun by shrimp production and one that has resisted it – we ask how coastal communities and their members have variously negotiated their rapidly changing ecologies and food systems based on their relative class position and access to land. We highlight the multiple meanings that peasants from different classes ascribe not just to shrimp, but also to broader questions of adaptation, community and life in uncertain terrains. We show that while food sovereignty in non-shrimp areas has averted the depeasantization affecting shrimp areas, it has not necessarily led to greater equality in agrarian class relations. To achieve such ends, we suggest that a broader conception of agrarian sovereignty provides a critical and necessary corollary to self-determination in agricultural production.","PeriodicalId":48271,"journal":{"name":"Journal of Peasant Studies","volume":"41 1","pages":"1109 - 1130"},"PeriodicalIF":5.1,"publicationDate":"2014-10-15","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"https://sci-hub-pdf.com/10.1080/03066150.2014.937709","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"59429367","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":1,"RegionCategory":"社会学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}