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Paper 2: Food Systems

For this assignment, you will view a film about your research country. ( THAILAND) You will then write a short essay (about 500 words) in which you critically evaluate the film. In your essay, you must incorporate four course concepts from at least two different weeks (by first defining the concept and then applying it to your discussion).

These are the concepts you may choose from:

Week Eight: Cheap Food, Green Revolution, Gender, Social Reproduction, in situ dispossession, ex situ dispossession, Imperialism

Week Nine: adverse incorporation; exogenous agribusiness expansion; endogenous commodity market expansion; small-scale narrative; industrial narrative; differentiation

Week Ten: Imperialism; labor productivity; solidarity economy; peasant; food sovereignty; agroecology;

In order to critically evaluate the message of the film, you must first describe the message. You should do this by answering the following two questions: (1) What social consequences have resulted from the transition from ‘farming’ to ‘agriculture’ as depicted in the film? (See the powerpoint from Week 8 for definitions of ‘farming’ and ‘agriculture’) (2) How have people in your research country resisted or sought alternatives to this transition?

Then critically evaluate the film. You may do this by arguing that the filmmaker accurately portrays the transition from ‘farming’ to ‘agriculture’ by describing the strength of the evidence that s/he marshals in support of their argument or by describing how this process has unfolded in similar ways in different parts of the world (citing evidence from the readings or from your own knowledge). Alternatively, you might suggest that the filmmaker’s portrayal of the transition from ‘farming’ to ‘agriculture’ is inaccurate or one-sided. You could do this by pointing to inadequacies in their evidence or by introducing another perspective from which the transition could be viewed.

Be sure to review the rubric for the details on how your essay will be evaluated!

General points about effective writing

A. Don’t bury your thesis. Tell me right away what your paper is about. Start off with a clear statement of your topic.
B. Write with clarity and concision
1. Avoid wordiness. Don’t tell me a bunch of necessary stuff.
2. If you use any technical terms or jargon, explain them. (Especially pertinent advice for this assignment, as you’ll be graded on the extent to which you explain and apply the course concepts).
3. Make the structure of your paper easy to follow. Don’t jump around randomly. Help the reader see how you are moving from point to point. What ties this paragraph to the one before it? How is the point you are making now related to what you said above?

INFORMATION For week 10

(((WEEK 10

https://www.versobooks.com/blogs/4083-what-lasted-for-3000-years-has-been-destroyed-in-30-the-struggle-for-food-sovereignty-in-tunisia

Attached in files:

-Douge-prosper

_Mckay et al. )))

From Farming to Agriculture: Agricultural Modernization

Week Eight

Today is the first day of our three-class unit on Agricultural Modernization.
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Assignments
Country Assignment 1
Presentation
Test
Participation
Mid-term Grades
Response for next week

Country assignment 1: please read feedback, improvement
Test: plus 10
Participation: will be released today/tomorrow
Mid-term grades: will be released today/tomorrow
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Module 2: Agricultural Modernization
From Farming To Agriculture: Intro to Agricultural Modernization
Agro-Industrialization Otherwise
Alternative Food Systems

Before I discuss this thought it would be fun to take a Poll!
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Today’s Class
Understand the relationship between the global farm and the global factory
Key concepts: cheap food, farming, agriculture, green revolution, gender, social reproduction, in situ dispossession, ex situ dispossession
Consider how agriculture is reshaping gender relations and social reproduction
Presentations

Country Assignment #2 (1/3)
For this assignment, you will view a film about your research country. You will then write a short essay (about 500 words) in which you critically evaluate the film. In your essay, you must incorporate four course concepts from at least two different weeks (by first defining the concept and then applying it to your discussion).
These are the concepts you may choose from:
Week Eight: Cheap Food, Green Revolution, Gender, Social Reproduction, in situ dispossession, ex situ dispossession,
Week Nine: boom crop; adverse incorporation; exogenous agribusiness expansion; endogenous commodity market expansion; small-scale narrative; industrial narrative; agrarian developmental state
Week Ten: solidarity economy; peasant; food sovereignty; agroecology

*films for 2 countries up, for 2 countries still trying to acquire…
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Country Assignment #2 (2/3)
In order to critically evaluate the message of the film, you must first describe the message. You should do this by answering the following two questions: (1) What social consequences have resulted from the transition from ‘farming’ to ‘agriculture’ as depicted in the film? (See the powerpoint from Week 8 for definitions of ‘farming’ and ‘agriculture’) (2) How have people in your research country resisted or sought alternatives to this transition?
Then critically evaluate the film. You may do this by arguing that the filmmaker accurately portrays the transition from ‘farming’ to ‘agriculture’ by describing the strength of the evidence that s/he marshals in support of their argument or by describing how this process has unfolded in similar ways in different parts of the world (citing evidence from the readings or from your own knowledge). Alternatively, you might suggest that the filmmaker’s portrayal of the transition from ‘farming’ to ‘agriculture’ is inaccurate or one-sided. You could do this by pointing to inadequacies in their evidence or by introducing another perspective from which the transition could be viewed.

Country Assignment #2 (3/3)
General points about effective writing
A. Don’t bury your thesis. Tell me right away what your paper is about. Start off with a clear statement of your topic.
B. Write with clarity and concision
1. Avoid wordiness. Don’t tell me a bunch of necessary stuff.
2. If you use any technical terms or jargon, explain them. (Especially pertinent advice for this assignment, as you’ll be graded on the extent to which you explain and apply the course concepts).
3. Make the structure of your paper easy to follow. Don’t jump around randomly. Help the reader see how you are moving from point to point. What ties this paragraph to the one before it? How is the point you are making now related to what you said above?

What is the relationship between the global factory and the global farm?

The global farm has been exploded over years and increase their production at a cheaper cost and that what favors the global factory. The example given in the text is that in order to avoid the civil war, the empires needed to become imperialist. Those empires needed to provide their workers with food and they got it at a cheaper price but at a high cost for others. Therefore the relationship between these two is dependent on one on the other. The global factory needs the global farm to provide at a cheap cost while the global farm needs the global factory to keep consuming these products because is their main source of income.

LABOR
FOOD (for factory workers)

Patel and Moore describe the Farm as the source of labor for the Factory and the source of food for factory workers. The basic idea here is that for society to support people who are not farmers, farmers need to produce enough food to feed themselves and the non-farming population. So the farm contributes to the factory in a couple ways. In the first image, we see family farmers plowing the fields. As farming becomes mechanized fewer people are required to produce the same amount of food. This releases labor to the factory who can be fed through a more efficient, higher surplus producing agriculture.
This basic idea of the interrelationship between the farm and the factory (and the farm as supplier of both labor and food for the industrial workforce) is not specific to Patel and Moore of course. This idea of a smaller (but modernized) agriculture sector supporting industrial growth is taken for granted by theorists of development of various political persuasions, including, for example, both Rostow and the dependency theorists in the first week.
However, Patel and Moore’s analysis does not stop here. What Patel and Moore’s chapter argues is that proletarianization (symbolized here by the factory) propels the transformation of farming through the imperative for cheap food.

Cheap Food
Food, like other commodities, is priced according to the average amount of labor-time required to produce the food according to prevailing production methods
Labor-time = time in which labor-power is exercised
“More calories produced with less average labor time in the commodity system”

When Patel and Moore describe cheap food they mean something very specific. According to Patel and Moore, a food is cheap when it contains “more calories produced with less average labor time in the commodity system”. What does this mean?
Patel and Moore, explain that food is priced according to the amount of labor-time that was required to produce it. And by labor-time they mean time in which labor-power was exercised, or time in which people work. And this an average across the commodity system.
And so here we have a picture of a harvester that harvests whatever plant that is…And we would suspect that this machine makes food cheaper according to Patel and Moore’s definition because it now takes significantly less labor to produce the same amount of calories because harvesting is much less labor intensive than previously.

And as Patel and Moore point out, this division of labor is not even unique to modern society. Pre-capitalist societies also had non-farmers. However, Patel and Moore note that there are two
“a system of agricultural productivity premised on land rather than labor, and a system of controlling food surplus through politics rather than the market”

Cheap food = rate of exploitation can rise
EMPIRE = colonialism…

Increase ag surplus/ expel labor from farm…
Poland/England collapsed b/c of soil exhaustion…
Rural / Urban []
Farming / Industrialization [Agriculture]
BUT agriculture also became its own commodity…
Land reforms / political change
Empire vs. metropole
Agriculture not for the rural is for the urban – keep wages low (for capital) and keep dissent low
NAFTA and chicken example (see 65, 66)
System designed for…

Wage work = people won’t be growing food themselves; so they either need to be supplied food or a wage with which to purchase food
BY making food cheaper, can pay them less
So cheap food is food that is produced with minimal labor-time

Ecology of cash agriculture – single-minded focus on profit/drive for cheap food to feed urban workers and families NOT just to prevent riots but to keep work cheap
Pre-capitalist ag: ag productivity premised on land rather than labor; controlling food surplus through politics rather than the market
Capitalism – Increase ag surplus and expel labor from the farm
Curing urban hunger
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Cheap Food Illustrated
Ex. It take 1000 hours of labor-time to produce 100 kilograms of “hearty” variety rice (this could be one person working 1000 hours or 10 people working 100 hours each)
Then, a new variety of rice is developed (“quick yield” variety) which yields twice as much but requires the same amount of time to sow, harvest, etc.
Now it takes 1000 hours of labor-time to produce 200 kilograms of rice.
Rice is now cheaper!

Or consider a second sample, involving the development of a new rice seed that is high yielding.
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What end does cheap food serve?
Value of labor-power = “the value of the means of subsistence necessary for the maintenance of its owner”
Means of subsistence = socially determined needs (food, clothing, housing etc.) for worker and workers’ children

Well, we might think that one benefit of cheap food is that it will collectively save us a lot of time. We as a society would have to work less in order to eat and so we would have more time to devote to leisure.
But in a capitalist system, the end that cheap food is most likely to serve is to reduce the value of labor-power for the benefit of those that purchase labor-power.
Patel and Moore assume that labor-power, like other commodities, is priced according to its value, which is the amount required to produce or replenish it. The value of labor-power is determined by means of subsistence.
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Cheap Food = Cheaper Means of Subsistence
MEANS OF SUBSISTENCE
(“Hearty Variety”)
$10 per day
$4 – rice
$2 – vegetables and beans
$3 – housing
$.50 – medical care
$.50 – entertainment
MEANS OF SUBSISTENCE (“Fast Yield”)

$8 per day
$2 – rice
$2 – vegetables and beans
$3 – housing
$.50 – medical care
$.50 – entertainment

And this is just a simplified illustration of how reducing the value of food would make the means of subsistence cheaper.
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Cheaper Means of Subsistence = More Profit

If food is cheaper and therefore the means of subsistence is cheaper then the rate of profit can be higher.
Moore and Patel assume that the working day is divided into two parts: necessary labor time and surplus labor time.
Take the case of a factory worker.
For part of the day, the worker works in order to cover his means of subsistence (and this is amount that he is compensated for with the wage).
Any work above and beyond that which goes toward covering the workers means of subsistence (and the other factors of production, such as food) becomes profit for the factory owner or the person that the laborer is working for. (This is called surplus labor time).
These two diagrams illustrate how when rice becomes cheaper a smaller part of the day is devoted to covering the worker’s means of subsistence and therefore the surplus labor time (in orange) which is the factory owner’s profit expands.
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Working Day (“Hearty Rice”) Necessary Labor Time75 Surplus Labor Time 75 25
Working Day (“ Quick yield Rice”)
Working Day (“Hearty Rice”)
Necessary Labor Time75 Surplus Labor Time 56.25 43.75

LABOR
FOOD (for factory workers)

Imperative for cheap food

Therefore, there is not a one-way relationship between the farm and the factory. Farms produce food for factory workers and create children that become factory workers. But at the same time, the factory (and here the factory is really a symbol for the wage relation under capitalism) creates an imperative, or a compulsion, for the transformation of farming.
Factory owners want their rate of profit to increase. One way to increase the rate of profit is to cheapen the cost of labor by reducing the cost of workers’ food. So the wage-labor system creates a compulsion to transform farming, to produce more food in less time.
It’s not that factory owners themselves are necessarily investing in agricultural research so as to reduce the cost of food for the workers that they hire. Patel and Moore write, “this system of cheap food didn’t emerge on purpose”. It was not planned or centrally orchestrated. But this is something that is happening on a systematic level.
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What are some of the consequences of cheap food?

What are some of the consequences of cheap food according to Patel and Moore?
I’ll describe 4 consequences from the readings.
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Consequences (1/4): From ‘Farming’ to ‘Agriculture’

Uniformity, Homogenization, and Industrialization of Crops

They note that “nowhere was rising labor productivity in agriculture sustained for large concentrated populations until the rise of capitalism”.
Cheaper food was created through the uniformity, homogenization and industrialization of crops.
They illustrate with a number of different cases, one of which is the chicken. As they recount, “the meat production system can turn a fertile egg and a nine pound bag of feed into a five pound chicken in just five weeks. This requires the invention of intensive breeding, hormonal supplementation, antibiotics, and concentrated animal feeding operations.”
The industrialization of agriculture has changed the nature of farming.
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SOURCE: Bernstein, H. (2010). Class Dynamics of Agrarian Change. VA: Fernwood Publishers.
FARMING
“what farmers do and have done through the millennia: cultivate the soil and raise livestock, or some combination of the two, typically within a system of established fields and pastures” (p. 62)
Typically local in scope
Embedded in simple divisions of labor
AGRICULTURE
“farming together with all those economic interests and their specialized institutions and activities, ‘upstream’ and ‘downstream’ of farming, that affect the activities and reproduction of farmers” (p. 65)
Global in scope
Embedded in complex divisions of labor

To understand this, it’s helpful to bring in an argument from the scholar Henry Bernstein who makes an analytical distinction between farming and agriculture.
And so what we see occurring with agriculture is a much more complex division of labor as you now have businesses downstream of farming (such as grocery stores, for example, that are requiring food to be produced to certain specifications) and upstream of farming (such as seed companies which are producing high yield varieties).
We’ll talk about this in later classes – but we can see that the process of farming itself is really changing from one on which the farmer is reliant upon this knowledge and practices that have been built through the millennia to a process guided by agribusiness and informed by scientific research.
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Consequences (2/4): Imperialism
“I was in the East End of London yesterday and attended a meeting of the unemployed. I listened to the wild speeches, which were just a cry for ‘bread’, ‘bread’, ‘bread’ and…I became more convinced of the importance of imperialism…The Empire, as I have always said, is a bread and butter question. If you want to avoid civil, war you must become imperialists”.
Cecil Rhodes (1895)

Imperialism: “I was in the East End of London yesterday and attended a meeting of the unemployed. I listened to the wild speeches, which were just a cry for ‘bread’, ‘bread’, ‘bread’ and…I became more convinced of the importance of imperialism…The Empire, as I have always said, is a bread and butter question. If you want to avoid civil, war you must become imperalists”. Cecil Rhodes (1895)

From Global Factory to Global Farm
Cost of subsistence in a locality may rise
Land becomes depleted
Ex. Poland (1550 – 1700); England (1700 – 1750)
Labor becomes scarcer or more organized
Sourcing food globally allows cost of subsistence to remain cheap
Industrial Revolution fueled by Caribbean sugar

Consequence (3/4): Inequality between Rural/Global South and Urban/ Industrial North
Satiation of URBAN/Northern hunger at the expense of RURAL /Southern hunger
Irish potato famine (1845-48): 300,000 tons of grains to England
Mexico’s Green Revolution: Intensified production of wheat by commercial farmers for urban markets when most peasants ate corn

Look at Green Revolution in a new light…Not to produce food to feed the world but for urban/northern markets.
Wheat grown by commercial farmers; corn grown by peasant farmers
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Private chat: what do you think about this mixed legacy of Green revolution? Does this trade off seem worth it to you?
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The Green Revolution
Conventional definition: “use of new (hybrid) varieties of seeds, fertilizers, and modern management techniques to increase yields in rice, wheat, and corn beginning in the 1960s”
Patel and Moore: “use of agriculture, new crop varieties, fertilizers, pesticides, irrigation, landholding mechanisms, marketing approaches, and state power to maintain cheap labor”

Mixed impact of Green Revolution
Globally grain output and yields more than doubled between 1950 and 1980 AND food prices declined
But…Heavy use of fertilizers and increased yields did not necessarily feed rural hungry
Suppressed political dissent…esp. calls for land reform
“[Recent] developments in the field of agriculture contain the makings of a new revolution. It is not a violent Red Revolution like that of the Soviets, nor is it a White Revolution like that of the Shah of Iran. I call it the Green Revolution.”

*yields doubled…but unclear how much of this came from new var
Heavy use of fertilizers…cancer villages
India’s wheat production doubled over 70s…but amount of wheat consumed by Indians hardly improved
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Consequence (4/4): Climate Change…And the end of cheap food?
Uniformity, homogenization, industrialization of crops has globally transformative effects on quality of food, soil, water, and air
Still debated, but potentially 3% reduction in yields since the 1980s
Cheap food system may break down in next century with 5 – 50% reduction in yields

As Patel and Moore observe, one way that yields have been increased is through the application of fertilizer. This produces nitrous oxide which is a strong greenhouse gas. Agriculture is also implicated in climate change in a number of other ways such as the global meat industry (a huge producer of methane) and deforestation for cropland for animal feed. (Also see here: https://ourworldindata.org/ghg-emissions-by-sector)
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Thoughts on Moore and Patel?
Review – What is the relationship between the global factory and the global farm?

*farm produces labor and food for factory
*but factory creates an imperative for cheap food which invites the transformation from farming to agriculture
*search for cheap food leads to industrialization of food system, imperialism, and inequality
*system of cheap food not sustainable…propose that climate change will bring about end of cheap food systems.
Important point about cheap food regimes: “they guarantee neither that people are fed or that they are well fed”
Patel and Moore, big picture overview…Historical sociologists of capitalism. But to understand consequences of agricultural modernization also helpful to see how the process is unfolding in particular places. That’s what we’ll turn to now with the readings, but first, just to give a sense of larger context let’s look at a couple maps.
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Process of agricultural modernization is highly uneven.
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US = 1/100
Madaagascar = 7.5/10
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Processes of Agricultural Modernization in the Global South

Now we’ll turn to understanding how this process of agricultural modernization is unfolding in two places: Tanzania and Chili, and at two moments in time. Chung’s piece was published in 2017, while Barrientos et al published their book almost two decades earlier in 1999.
Authors are researching two different moments/processes in agricultural modernization.
Non-traditional Agro-Exports
Global Land Grab. 2007-8, dramatic rise in food prices (many competing explanations put forward for why including use of biofuels, financial speculation, fertilizer price increase, demand for resource intensive food) allegedly led to an increase of land acquisitions by countries in Global North acquiring land for food production in the Global South.
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Non-Traditional Agro-Exports (~1970s & 1980s)

Global Land Grab (~ 2008, 2009)

Chile
Population: 18.73 million (2018)
Per capita income: $15,091 (2019)
Gini co-efficient: 50.5 (2013)
Life expectancy at birth: 79.91 (2017)

Back in Week 5, we talked about Chile. To review, here are the statistics.
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Non-Traditional Agro-Exports in Chili
“Fruit Plan” (1960): Christian Democratic government aimed to develop Chili as fruit exporter; State provided technology and infrastructure
Pinochet (1973 – ): Agrarian Counter-Reform; Private Commercial Farming Sector
Return to Democracy (1990 – ): continuation of fruit exports…
Today: top exporter of non-traditional ag commodities (fruit, wine, salmon/trout)

Consequence – peasant-based agriculture eliminated in fruit growing regions of the country
-large numbers of rural households lost access to land
-generated a large rural labor force (los temporeros)
The piece that we read focuses on grape production in the Norte Chico region of Chile.
Grape plantations = large-scale estates owned by commercial farmers who have received support from international marketing companies

Tanzania
Population: 56.32 million (2018)
Per capita income: US$1,122 (2019)
Gini co-efficient: 40.5 (2017)
Life expectancy at birth: 64.48 (2017)

Land Grabs in Africa
2008 crisis of fuel, food and finance spiked an increase in large-scale land acquisitions for agriculture by foreign companies/governments in states in Global South
Chung’s Research in Tanzania: Tanzanian government gave rights of occupancy of 20,000 ha of land to a Swedish company in exchange for 25% ownership in invests

Chung – abandoned state cattle ranch; plan was to produce sugar, electricity, and ethanol for the Tanzanian domestic market
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Guardian investigation 2011
Case where the land grab was actually carried out – In Chung’s case it was stalled, she argues because the state hadn’t figure out how to compensate the 1400 people on the land
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How is the transition from agriculture to farming remaking gender relations and practices of social reproduction?

Gender
“The ways in which cultures imbue…biological difference [male and female] with meaning”

Source: Pessar, Patricia R., and Sarah J. Mahler. 2003. “Transnational Migration: Bringing Gender In.” International Migration Review 37 (3): 812–846.

Social Reproduction
“An assemblage of diverse labor processes…necessary for the sustenance and resilience of human life” (Chung 2017: 103)

What kinds of activities count as social reproduction?
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What are some key similarities and/or differences in the way that agriculture is reshaping gender relations and/or social reproduction in the Tanzanian and Chilean cases?

In situ Displacement in Tanzania
“a situation in which people are displaced in place through the loss of entitlements, social exclusion and alienation of rights and identities” (Feldman and Geisler, 2012 cited in Chung 2017, p. 103) [contrast is ex situ displacement – where people are removed from the land]

Case of Tanzania…
NOT immediately strip of land and turn them into wage laborers
BUT uproots them from socio-ecological knowledges, cultural practices, and historical memories
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Chili: Uneven Incorporation of Peasants into Agriculture
Tome Alto
Communal land remains in tact
March – November: peasant agriculture (tomatoes, peppers, beans) on their family’s land
Nov – Feb: work the grape plantations
Identified as peasants
Chanaral Alto
Regularized land tenure in 1980s
Work the grape plantations sometimes longer than 3 months
Combine with other paid work/migrant labor
Identified as labor

March – November: peasant agriculture (tomatoes, peppers, beans) on their family’s land
Nov – Feb: work the grape plantations
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Ambiguous Impacts of Transition from Farming to Agriculture
Positive
New opportunity for employment in region of scarce job opportunities
Presents women with new wage-earning opportunity
Negative
Work is of limited (seasonal) duration
“Arduous, repetitive, and poorly paid”
“burden of the double day”

Social production = could be better standard except poorly paid…issue of combining domestic work and paid work during grape season
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“Women workers in the Chilean grape sector are not experiencing in situ displacement because although they are given different tasks from the male workers in the sector, their work is not downgraded. The tasks they perform, and the skills required to perform them, are rewarded with a high earning potential, sometimes higher than the men’s. In situ displacement would mean that the women were experiencing loss of entitlement, deprivation of rights or social exclusion- all of which, in this case, I don’t believe they are experiencing. ”
Female workers began working in the grape plants starting in the 1960s and throughout the 1970s and 1980s and were forced to take the job due to husbands being unemployed. Although the land reforms did help with the poverty, it caused disruption in their traditional lives and way of life as well as relationships. Since women were usually know to stay home while the men went to work, it caused Situ Displacement and shifted the cultural norms.

Chile (2019 – 2020 Protests): “Estallido Social” / Social Outbreak
Protesters, Santiago image: Hugo Morales, Wikipedia: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2019%E2%80%9320_Chilean_protests#/media/File:Marcha_Mas_Grande_De_Chile_2019_Plaza_Baquedano_Drone
“Chile se quema y él come pizza” / Chili burns and he eats pizza

Massive protests began in Chile in October 2019 – and you can see something of the scale of the protests on the figure of the left.. The proximate cause was a 4% raise in Metro fares – but more generally people were outraged by the rise in the costs of living and income inequality.
According to a UN agency, 1% of Chili’s population controls 26% of the wealth and the bottom 50% access just 2% of the wealth. (See https://www.bbc.com/mundo/noticias-america-latina-50115798] When the protests over the fare increase began, Chile’s President Piñera was seen eating at an upscale pizza restaurant in Santiago further inflaming the protests. As the protests have evolved with the pandemic, one of the demands was for food (see: https://fr.reuters.com/article/instant-article/idUKKBN22V00G). Many Chileans struggle to put food on the table because for those in the bottom strata of society the cost of living exceeds earnings/income. Almost 10% of credit cards in Chile are issued by Wal-Mart and it is not uncommon to purchase food on credit (see: https://www.jacobinmag.com/2020/06/latin-america-covid-19-food).
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Export-Agriculture and Food Security
“Wheat and Maize Imports vis-à-vis Cultivated Surface for Wheat, 1990-2019” Orange = Wheat Imports; Blue = Corn Imports; Green = Cultivated Area
Source: Martin Arboleda, “The Free Market Can’t Prevent Latin America’s Coming Food Crisis”

The Chilean sociologist, Martín Arboleda argues that part of Chileans’ struggle to put food on the table may be attributed to the dynamics of agro-industrialization. On the one hand, the growth of export crops had displaced production of basic food stuff such as grain, legumes, and tubers. The above chart shows how wheat and maize imports have increased as the land area devoted to wheat production has declined over a 20-year period (from 1990 to 2019).
Export-oriented agriculture has risks that are not inherent in grain production for self-provision. The profitability of agro-exports is subject to volatile swings in world commodity prices. (In one case that I study, Thai shrimp farmers discovered this the hard way. Back in the 1980s, they sold shrimp almost exclusively to Japan, the country that was then the largest shrimp importer in the world. But when the Japanese emperor died in 1989 the nation went into a period of mourning for six months during which time it was not customary to consume shrimp. So the price of shrimp in Thailand fell dramatically. Of course, this is an extreme example – but, in times of economic downturn, consumers may purchase less shrimp, salmon, or fresh fruit). So Arboleda argues that Chile’s export-oriented agricultural sector makes it vulnerable.
Additionally, he points out that Chile’s both export-orientated agriculture sector and domestic food marketing is dominated by large-scale farmers. Only 5% of small and medium-scale farms supply to supermarkets.
He envisions a future in which food production in Chile is more internally oriented in which small and medium-scale farmers are incorporated into urban consumer markets and agro-food production guarantees more and better employment.
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Next class:
Agriculture Otherwise?
A return to farming?
Also present in US…
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SOURCE: Bernstein, H. (2010). Class Dynamics of Agrarian Change. VA: Fernwood Publishers.
RETURN TO FARMING
“what farmers do and have done through the millennia: cultivate the soil and raise livestock, or some combination of the two, typically within a system of established fields and pastures” (p. 62)
Typically local in scope
Embedded in simple divisions of labor
AGRICULTURE OTHERWISE
“farming together with all those economic interests and their specialized institutions and activities, ‘upstream’ and ‘downstream’ of farming, that affect the activities and reproduction of farmers” (p. 65)
Global in scope
Embedded in complex divisions of labor

Agro-Industrialization Otherwise?

Week of Monday, March 15th (week Nine)

Last week, we examined some of the features of the contemporary agro-food system. As we saw, food has become increasingly commodified. Corporations are more involved in food production, and food is globally traded more than ever before. Last week, we also saw that some observers consider this development largely negative for peasants in the Global South. For example, Chung’s work on Tanzania demonstrated that agrarian development was displacing production for self-consumption and with it peoples’ ability to provide for their families. The supposed benefits of large-scale sugar production hadn’t materialized. Next week, we’re going to consider alternative food systems, or cases where production for self-consumption according to agro-ecological methods is prioritized instead of production for the market using inputs produced by agri-firms.
But for this week, we’re considering three pieces of scholarship which argue that agro-industrialization doesn’t necessarily negatively impact peasants in the Global South. Rather, in order to understand the impact of agro-industrialization, we must consider the terms on which smallholders come to produce agro-commodities and the types of support they are given by the state.
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Announcements
Exam grades
Participation grades
Presentations
Extra Credit
Paper Two (March 21)

Module 2: Agricultural Modernization
From Farming To Agriculture: Intro to Agricultural Modernization
Agro-Industrialization Otherwise
Alternative Food Systems

So, here we are, the second week in our model on agro-industrialization.
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LABOR
FOOD (for factory workers)

Imperative for cheap food

Last week, we considered Patel and Moore’s argument that capitalism is premised upon a system of cheap food.
Therefore, there is not a one-way relationship between the farm and the factory. Farms produce food for factory workers and create children that become factory workers. But at the same time, the factory (and here the factory is really a symbol for the wage relation under capitalism) creates an imperative, or a compulsion, for the transformation of farming.
Factory owners want their rate of profit to increase. One way to increase the rate of profit is to cheapen the cost of labor by reducing the cost of workers’ food. So the wage-labor system creates a compulsion to transform farming into agriculture, to produce more food in less time.

We talked about one of the implications of cheap food is that is hastening this transition from FARMING to AGRICULTURE.

Mixed impact of Green Revolution
Globally grain output and yields more than doubled between 1950 and 1980 AND food prices declined
But…Heavy use of fertilizers AND increased yields did not necessarily feed rural hungry
EX. Mexico – Green revolution crop, ‘wheat’ produced by commercial farmers for urban markets; peasants continued to produce corn using traditional practices

And so, the promise of agriculture is that it will be MUCH MORE productive than farming.
*And so, we looked at the case of the green revolution – a method of agriculture dependent upon hybrid seeds and fertilizer
*And so, we saw that during the green revolution era, output and yields more than docubled
*But there were some negative consequences…(1) heavy use of fertilizers bad for environment (2) increased yields did not go to the Rural poor
Last week we had a couple case studies, we went to Tanzania and read Chung’s argument that conversion of ‘farmland’ to ‘agriculture land’ by Swedish company in Tanzania was having a deleterious impact on the rural poor. They were experiencing ‘in situ displacement’ loss of access to land on which they depended for social reproduction. We also went to Chili and saw impacts of agriculture more mixed – some women experienced jobs created by grape economy as liberating and appreciated cash income to purchase commodities. Others less sure.

I argued in the last class, there are two main responses to the perceived negative consequences of the transition from ‘farming to agriculture’….
7

Last week, we looked at how this transition from farming to agriculture is highly ueven.
High productive ag. Sectors mostly found in Global North.
8

In Global South, ag. Sector less productive and so more people concentreated within.
9

I want to introduce this data on food security.
Food insecuirity is an issue most places in the world including in the US. ONE in FOUR people globally are moderately or severely food insecure (lack enough access to safe and nutritious food) including in the US.
In the US ¼ households experienced food security in the pandemic (https://www.npr.org/2020/09/27/912486921/food-insecurity-in-the-u-s-by-the-numbers)
Food pantry at FIU: https://studentaffairs.fiu.edu/get-support/student-food-pantry/index.php

But issues of access to food more of a problem in the South than in the North.
*This chart does not include countries with less than 2.5% undernourished…
So ¼ people is member of small-farmer family. And small farmers are members of world’s population most likely to be living in extreme poverty.
And so, one idea for how to do ‘agriculture otherwise’ or how to do agriculture without all the negative consequences for the rural poor/subsistence farmers is…what if we get the small farmers involved in agriculture?
And, I want to point out, that this is a very mainstream idea.
Chung wrote about a land grab in Tanzania. And last week, we watched a portrayal of a land grab in Ethopia by the Guardian.
11

Land grabs, understandably, got a lot of negative attention in the international media.

Because of negative consequences resulted from transition from ‘farming’ to ‘agriculture’ activist groups have claimed that globally traded food commodities should not be produced in the GS
Exemplary of this approach is the Mangrove Action Project. Here is a video in which they instruct consumers in the GN not to eat shrimp grown in GS.
Activists will say, countries in the GS shouldn’t produce it. For instance…Mangrove Action Project…

(Watch through 4:30)
No doubt at least in part as a response to this, many mainstream international development organizations (like the World Bank) are arguing that the transition from farming to agriculture shouldn’t displace small farmers BUT instead it should work through small farmers.
And in fact, small farmers should become agriculturalists.
So this video was produced by the World Bank and it was about a research project which was trying to get a better understanding of how small farmers use money. But it also gives some depiction of the life of small farmers…not a lot of extra money, but in this video, the farmer was at least able to produce more of what is family eats..But clearly didn’t have enough for all their wants, education etc.
So the idea is that these farmers need to become more integrated into the market (mention their relations with food distrbutors), to use modern methods (hybrid seeds, fertilizer) and that will raise their standard of living. Does that seem like a good idea? What are some of the positive and negative consequences of small farmers taking up agriculture?
[Discussion]
***

Agriculture = Good
World Bank
Spurs economic growth
Reduces rural poverty
Offers link to market in remote, uneconomic areas
Agriculture = Bad
NGOs
Corporate agriculture will dispossess small farmers of land, livelihood, means of social reproduction
Weakens the food security of the most vulnerable actors

Scholars today, take the idea, maybe ‘agriculture’ itself isn’t good or bad, but depends on the way that its implemented.
So, I’d like you to entertain this idea today as we go into our readings.
We don’t have to accept this idea – can leave thinking (a) always good (b) always bad BUT we’ll consider the argument that its not the commodity that is good or bad but the terms on which the farmer becomes incorporated into agriculture.
15

Oil Palm: Background
World’s most versatile vegetable oil (and doesn’t contain transfats)
Found in cosmetics, adhesives and many other products
Important biofuel
10% of global cropdom
85% grown in Malaysia and Indonesia

Image and information: https://www.theguardian.com/news/2019/feb/19/palm-oil-ingredient-biscuits-shampoo-environmental
85% Malaysia/indonesia
16

Jambi, Indonesia

Indonesia, 17,000 islands; 267 million people; world’s most populous muslim-majority country / 4th most populous country
Jambi on Sumatra

Research Questions
What are the characteristic trajectories of agrarian change associated with oil palm expansion?
What causal processes lead to the key distributional outcomes that we can identify and how is this related to processes of differentiation?

What are the characteristic trajectories of agrarian change associated with oil palm expansion? What causal processes lead to the key distributional outcomes that we can identify and how is this related to processes of differentiation?
19

Methodology
Fieldwork in Jambi (2004 – 2009)
Interviews with local actors (farmers, land brokers, entrepreneurs, local officials)
Survey

What causal processes lead to the key distributional outcomes that we can identify and how is this related to processes of differentiation?
Inclusion/Beneficial Inclusion –
Exclusion
“Adverse Incorporation” – inclusion in commodity chains on disadvantageous terms such that poverty is the ultimate result

Anyone remember adverse incorporation?
21

What causal processes lead to the key distributional outcomes that we can identify and how is this related to processes of differentiation?
Prosperous Farmers
Progressive Farmers
Poor Farmers
Laborers

*Pre palm oil characterized by relative equality in landholdings.
*prosperous farmers = 22,000 USD per year; inferior planting material but fertilizer
*progressive; income 8000 USD per year; less land and capital than former category but as their holdings mature may be able to shift up
*Poor farmers =2500; no inputs; small holdings; had to take lots of off farm activity to make ends meet
*Laborers = had lost their land or had migrated from Java
22

What causal processes lead to the key distributional outcomes that we can identify and how is this related to processes of differentiation?
Temporal Variation
State Developmental New Order
Transitional KKPA
Post-1998 “laissez-faire”/Reformasi
Geographic Variation
State-supported oil palm scheme
Private development (no state support)

New Order Regime (1966 – 1998)
“Developmental Agenda”: financed infrastructure, directed agricultural extension
Nucleus estate-transmigration program
20% (estate area) / 80% smallholder
State facilitated access to land (“accumulation by dispossession”), infrastructure development, and credit
Transmigrants received free land and credit in exchange for submission to agribusiness model

“accumulation by dispossession” = land formerly forest land/ swidden agriculture practiced
25

Transitional Period: KKPA (1998 – 2008)
Encourage private sector initiative, facilitate FDI, accelerate crop development
State withdrawal
State still provided incentives for companies to invest in oil palm
BUT management is completely given over to company
Melayu villagers provided the land / company provided development capital

sukarno v. Suharto?
“accumulation by dispossession” = land formerly forest land/ swidden agriculture practiced
26

Reformasi Period: Laissez-Faire (2008 -)
“Neoliberal State” – shift to market-driven policies; Further withdrawal of the state

*state formerly absent but individual members of state working to enlarge landholdigns
27

What are the characteristic trajectories of agrarian change associated with oil palm expansion?
Exogenous Expansion
Agribusiness initiated
“ injection of inputs into formerly remote settings”
Coordinated through the contract
Scheme mediates the terms of inclusion (i.e. cooperatives, division and allocation of land, credit relations)
Endogenous Expansion
“Individuals embrace the new opportunities offered by expanding commodity markets for oil palm”
Coordinated through the open market
Farms develop oil palm plots independently (difficulty – access to capital, planting material, fertilizer)

Generally vulnerable landowners more exposed under endogenous than exogenous
State, at least in early period (but with great variability) involved in distributing land to villagers/ensuring villagers received land
Also agribusiness supported in support for smallfarmers (with financing)
Latter period – smallholders likely to sell land as more prosperous landowners seek to acquire it and they don’t yet realize what it is worth AND/OR commonland is privatized AND/OR villagers have need for cash/livelihood distress; also no access to improved materials; and…can disadvantaged in selling
28

Implications
Initial State-agribusiness intervention gave smallholders and entrepreneurs access to capital, technology, and land
After state withdrawal, these prosperous farmers could use their economic/social power to gain control of more land
Other smallholders continue to attempt to take up palm oil but without the advantage of state-facilitated capital, technology
Need a “developmental state” – technical support, improved planting material, government price-setting, supervision of land tenure

So what do you think? Do you think with a developmental state, we should support the farming of palm oil in Indonesia as a development strategy?
Before we discuss this question, let’s watch one more video.
29

Need pressure on the state.
Would this initiative likely correct problem? Why or why not?
31

Summary of Findings
Changes associated with oil palm expansion are highly variable
Need to distinguish exogenous processes of agribusiness expansion from endogenous commodity market expansion
Commodity-specific nature of oil palm has implications for agrarian outcomes
Vulnerable landowners more exposed to risk under the laissez faire scenario than under state-agribusiness mode
Effect of oil palm on rural farmers’ livelihoods depends on the terms in which smallholders are incorporated into oil palm economy

Summarize in one sentence – “changes associated with oil palm expansion are highly variable”
Wants to resist simplifying narrative – it is either good or bad, for it depends…way it depends…
32

Alliance for a green revolution in Africa – funded by bill and Melinda gates
33

Move on now to Rwanda. Here we won’t be talking about a specific crop BUT rather about the government of Rwanda’s overall orientation to agriculture.
34

Vision 2020: Rwanda Agricultural Reform
“A sustainable agricultural sector…where farming is seen as a business, rather than subsistence, activity. This will create a sector that uses its comparative advantage, for example in labor-intensive, high-value crops, to compete in open regional and international markets” –Rwanda Gov’t Report, 2010 cited in Huggins 2014

Gov’t goal is to hasten this transition from FARMING to AGRICULTURE.
Want high productivity, want greater integration into markets, more use of improved planting materials.
Land constraint – so want to promote value added agriculture, highly branded crops.
*Govt of Rwanda aims to reduce number of people in ag sector from 90% to 50%
36

Agriculture Development Policy in Rwanda (2007 – )
“Chain Integration”: “the increasing connection of smallholder farming with upstream and downstream activities such as seed and fertilizer supply and the selling of crops to processors and traders”
“Upgrading”: “efforts to improve the quantity and quality of agricultural production”
Crop Intensification Program (2007 -)
Zoning
Improved seeds and fertilizer (subsidized or free)
Extension
Cooperative Formation
Each cooperative has a business plan to increase productivity, value added etc. Govt supports cooperative in realization of the plan.
Govt exercises influences on processors/purchasers to make sure farmers get fair price

Crop intensification program – 7 crops for regional specialization (maize, rice, wehat, beans, soybeans, irish potato, cassava) (huggins 2014)
*yields have doubled and in some cases tripled
37

“The Rwandan government is [attempting to bring about] a muscular and ambitious transformation of agrarian society into a diversity of production units formally named as cooperatives and integrated through contracts with businesses upstream and downstream of the farm.”

Facets of Rwanda’s Agrarian Strategy
“Productivist developmentalism”
“A concern with general well-being”
“a top-down statism which aims to reorder agrarian society”

Agriculture = Good
Increases productivity
Spurs economic growth
Reduces rural poverty
Offers link to market in remote, uneconomic areas
Agriculture = Bad
“Gov’ts agrarian strategy leads to differentiation”
Govt strategy is authoritarian

Again there are a couple lens through which can be viewed.
*good emphasize how it works through the smallholder instead of displacing as we saw in Ethopia and Tanzania last week

Critique of Gov’t of Rwanda Agrarian Policy
Control Grabbing: “the power to control land and other associated resources such as water to derive benefit from such control” (Borras et. al 2012 cited in Huggins 2014)
“Primary dynamic is transfer of control away from the smallholder petty commodity-producing farm households, towards state agencies”
Policy-making is a state driven affair; smallholder majority has little voice
Ex. Farmers can be fined for growing an unapproved crop outside of the zone
Ex. Cooperatives founded by elite and small farmers can be pressured to join
Ex. “Can we eat flowers?”

Market crops risky for subsistence farmers…
41

Harrison Response
Laissez-faire won’t work: peasants coming together to upgrade at their own initiative is “a pleasing political image” but won’t likely attract foreign investment or generate large-scale taking up of new crops and methods so if we want this outcome state intervention is inevitable
Peasants have complex attitudes toward the state, “a desire not to be imposed upon by the state and an anxiety that the state might leave them behind…and they might not get access to the benefits of ‘development’”

What do you think about this state-driven transition from farming to agriculture? Should peasants be left alone or do you think the government is right to pursuit this transition?
42

Aquaculture in the Global South: In Popular Perception
Industrial Narrative = Agriculture is Bad
Farmed fish consumption in the Global South is destined for Global North/elite
Degrades environment and does little to help those in GS
Industrial, input-intensive farms
Small-scale Narrative = Agriculture is Good
Low intensity small-scale fish farming contributes to food secure and producer incomes
Small-scale farms with minimal inputs

Decline in natural fisheries…
Third reading today considers the transition from farming to agriculture through the lens of aquaculture in the Global South
43

The Global Trade in Shrimp
Statistics: Infofish (L); Thai Frozen Food Association (F)

Shrimp is among the most globally traded of animal proteins. In America, we import the vast majority of the shrimp that we consume; whereas Thailand exports the majority of shrimp it produces.
Shrimp is part of an international trade in fresh fruits, vegetables and animal proteins that has grown enormously since the 1980s. The direction of the trade is largely from the Global South to the Global North.
This trade is often celebrated as it is purported to be beneficial for consumers in the Global North (who can acquire shrimp despite a decline in natural fisheries) and to producers in the Global South for the livelihoods that it creates.
45

Shrimp Consumed in US
Imported Domestic 0.92 0.08

Shrimp Farmed in Thailand
Exported Consumed Domestically 0.85 0.15

Aquaculture in GS in fact
Aquaculture produces range of low-moderate value fish
Aquaculture has driven down the price of fish making it more affordable
Urban food security in GS a huge concern…gets fish to the market
Most fish produced by the “missing middle” – commercially-oriented farmers who use some inputs to produce fish for domestic markets

Key Considerations
Consideration of question of transition from ‘farming to agriculture’ must be informed by empirics
Consideration of question of transition from ‘farming’ to ‘agriculture’ must consider the needs of urban consumers

Short piece, so parts we can’t consider:
-what are implications of these ‘middle-scale’ for rural neighbors…leading to differentiation and/or dispossession
-should urban consumers be eating fish (describes this in some detail in article…or is there a better way to feed urban consumers?)
-are middle-scale farms best way to grow fish…
48

Agriculture = Good
World Bank
Spurs economic growth
Reduces rural poverty
Offers link to market in remote, uneconomic areas
Agriculture = Bad
NGOs
Corporate agriculture will dispossess small farmers of land/livelihood/means of social reproduction
Weakens the food security of the most vulnerable actors

Thoughts at end of class?
Transition from farming to agriculture. Is it good? Is it bad? Or do you want to say like the authors today that is nuanced.,,,
49

Next week we consider a return to farming
50

Solidarity Economy Praxis in Limonade

: Reintellecting Woman
as Subject

Mamyrah A. Dougé-Prosper

WSQ: Women’s Studies Quarterly, Volume 47, Numbers 3 & 4, Fall/Winter
2019, pp. 190-211 (Article)

Published by The Feminist Press
DOI:

For additional information about this article

[ Access provided at 24 Jan 2021 18:18 GMT from Florida International University ]

https://doi.org/10.1353/wsq.2019.0043

https://muse.jhu.edu/article/736592

https://doi.org/10.1353/wsq.2019.0043

https://muse.jhu.edu/article/736592

190

Solidarity Economy Praxis in Limonade:
Reintellecting Woman as Subject

Mamyrah A. Dougé-Prosper

Abstract: In 2013 the Limonade Women’s Association for the Develop-
ment of Agricultural and Craft Production (AFLIDEPA) in Haiti unveiled
its transformation center and seed bank. Invoking the Black radical konbit
tradition, the organization declared its commitment to food sovereignty
and called on its fanm djanm (valiant women) to contribute to the devel-
opment of their home(land). In this article, I examine AFLIDEPA’s for-
mation and operations, and its relationship to the Haitian Platform for
Advocacy for an Alternative Development (PAPDA) to appreciate the
organization’s pursuit to reconfigure woman, family, and nation in and be-
yond extractive zones. Keywords: solidarity economy, konbit, woman,
family, anti-capitalism

Introduction
On March 26, 2013, the Asosyasyon Fanm Limonad pou Devlopman Pwo-
diksyon Agrikòl ak Atizana (AFLIDEPA)—the Limonade Women’s
Association for the Development of Agricultural and Craft Production—
unveiled its transformation center and seed bank in the presence of family
members, community residents, and government officials, and local, na-
tional, and international partners. Invoking the konbit tradition of work,
the federation declared its commitment to food sovereignty. AFLIDEPA
coordinator Olga Marcelin lauded members as “fanm djanm, as women
who have values, as women with principles” and called on them to serve
as models of “what is good, what is just, what is necessary for everyone
to be happy, for no one to regret being a woman, and instead to be proud

191

of being a woman, to be proud of being a person who contributes to her
country’s development and to the development of her home(land).”1
Ricot Jean-Pierre from the Platfòm Ayisyen Pledwaye pou yon Devlopman
Altènatif (PAPDA)—the Haitian Platform of Advocacy for an Alternative
Development—recounted that PAPDA and AFLIDEPA are “in love . . .
and remained faithful to one another” since the Association resisted be-
coming “a political tool for those seeking power . . . and money.” Turn-
ing to the benches donated by his organization, Collectif Citoyen pour le
Développement et l’Intégration des Personnes Handicappées de Limonade
(CCDIPHL)—the Citizens’ Collective for the Development and the In-
tegration of Handicapped People of Limonade—coordinator and local
doctor Romel Jean-Pierre asserted that “solidarity without profiteering”
would lead to Limonade’s development. The organizers then served kasav
ak manba (cassava and peanut butter) sandwiches and Lèt a Gogo2 yogurt,
stressing the importance of consuming local products. This inaugural
event signals AFLIDEPA’s reintellection of sovereignty, democracy, and
development, centered on the human (woman) and based on the values
of solidarity and love.

In this article, I examine AFLIDEPA’s solidarity economy praxis in
Limonade through its structure and operations, and its relationship to
PAPDA to appreciate its struggle to reorganize life in and beyond ex-
tractive zones. Though scholars of the solidarity economy point to its or-
igins in the aftermath of neoliberal globalization, they also recognize that
noncapitalist practices are not new. I contend that AFLIDEPA refashions
century-old schemes of resistance to ongoing colonization and capitalism.
Further, while critics of the solidarity economy underline its tendency to
rely on women to fill in for an absent state, feminist economists neverthe-
less foresee women’s liberation in cooperative economics. I invite readers
to suspend purist critiques of AFLIDEPA’s solidarity economy praxis and
instead to visualize the horizon fanm djanm draw for us, that is the refor-
mation of family and nation.

Solidarity Economy and the Black Radical Tradition
“Solidarity economy” is a concept that emerged in the 1990s out of Latin
American social movements’ experiences with not-for-profit arrange-
ments of cooperative production, consumption, distribution, and land
use, governed through collective decision-making processes and direct

Mamyrah A. Dougé-Prosper

192

participation (Lechat 2013). Globally, the neoliberal turn engendered
unemployment, deprivation, and resourcelessness (Wilkes 2004), and
social movements the world over sought to generate a “humanist econo-
my” (Dacheux and Goujon 2012) driven by community reciprocity rath-
er than profit-based state redistribution (Nederveen Pieterse 1998). The
structures and denominations these endeavors take vary according to the
place’s relationship to the market economy and the state, agricultural and
climate issues, and its access to inter/national networks of people theo-
rizing and experimenting with alternatives. Local conditions determine
the varying scales at which they operate (Williams 2014). For example,
the largest worker-cooperative in the world today, the Mondragon Coop-
erative Corporation, which regroups over thirty-five thousand worker-
owners occupying one territory, was founded after World War II by isolated
Basque people who leveraged Spanish state protectionism (Gibson-Gra-
ham 2006). In contrast, bankruptcy laws uphold Argentine worker-
cooperatives resulting from worker takeovers of abandoned factories after
the 2001 financial crisis (Ranis 2010). Even within one given nation-state,
distinct configurations emerge (Lemaître and Helmsing 2012), as exem-
plified by Cooperation Jackson in the United States that strategizes to seize
state power (Akuno and Nangwaya 2017) while Central Brooklyn Co-op
operates as a civil society organization. Nevertheless, these grassroots for-
mations with a profound critique of racial capitalism are a “series of ex-
periments, becomings, emergent possibilities and prefigurative practices”
(Williams 2014, 51). In this article, I bring to bear this tension between
the possibilities that the solidarity economy promises and its limitations
within the current configurations of state and power (Stahler-Sholk, Van-
den, and Kuecker 2007).

The solidarity economy seeks to revalorize and formalize already ex-
isting non-market-based practices and to broaden the concept of econ-
omy beyond capitalist realism (Fisher 2009). It pluralizes the economy
(Laville and Cattani 2005); other activities that do not take the form of
wage labor, commodity production for a market, or capitalist enterprise
are also economic. Most experimenters and observers identify its roots in
century-old schemes organized by women, who still predominate in non-
capitalist formations at the planetary level (Bell et al. 2018; Verschuur and
Calvão 2018; Glave 2010; Escobar 1992). However, most studies of the
solidarity economy remain “gender-blind” (Verschuur and Calvão 2018)

Solidarity Economy Praxis in Limonade

193

and the few that take on a gendered perspective point to a lack of signif-
icant change in women’s material conditions and decision-making power
(Bauhardt 2014; Starr, Martínez-Torres, and Rosset 2011; Gibson-Gra-
ham 2006). Women’s overwhelming participation in the care and sub-
sistence economies ensures the social reproduction of the family and the
community. Yet it does not always yield them autonomy over their own
households and bodies (both in their productive and reproductive capaci-
ties). Formalizing women’s othered economic practices into the solidarity
economy further legitimizes the state’s abandonment of surplus popula-
tions. Nevertheless, feminist economists anticipate the solidarity econo-
my’s capacity to liberate women (Federici 2012; Bennholdt-Thomsen and
Mies 1999; Mies 1998). No economy can be solidary without being fem-
inist (Matthaei 2009).

This article, and the larger project of which it is part, attempts to hold
still an unfolding process. As such, I urge readers to exercise patience and
restraint in their evaluation of AFLIDEPA women’s innovative rebuttal to
neoliberal predation and to see the alternative possibilities they present us.
Following H. L. T. Quan (2005), who suggests we use Cedric J. Robinson’s
(1983) “vocabulary and grammar” of Black Marxism to reimagine a past
and present marked by Black radical women, I situate AFLIDEPA women
in the historical and present history of resistance to ongoing colonization
and capitalism. To do so, I bring to light AFLIDEPA and PAPDA’s cocon-
struction of solidarity economy praxis in Limonade as a refashioning of
konbit in collaboration with their inter/nationalist comrades. Konbit is
a mode of nonmonetized exchange of labor and resources between fam-
ily members and neighbors occupying a given territory.3 Though these
labor and production arrangements varied in scale and took on different
forms and appellations in different territories, they marked captive peo-
ple’s opposition to and transcendence of plantation politics, what Robin-
son calls the Black radical tradition. In these different places, African and
African-descended people preserved and (re)constructed kinship rela-
tions based on solidarity and reciprocity. An African worldview that sur-
vived the transatlantic slave trade and chattel slavery animated resistance
and rebellions in the Americas. In the “first Black republic,” communalist
practices not only endured the plantation system, they weathered the so-
called postcolony, the longue durée of U.S. imperialism, dictatorship, and
globalization. The solidarity economy in Haiti rests on these histories.

Mamyrah A. Dougé-Prosper

194

Constructing the “(Home)land” as the Field
I met Olga Marcelin (and other AFLIDEPA women) in May 2012 on my
first trip to Limonade with PAPDA coordinator Ricot Jean-Pierre to study
the praxis of solidarity economy. After the 2010 earthquake, in search of
“new narratives about Haiti” beyond the tropes of poverty (Ulysse 2015),
I turned to my network of Black Marxist militants in the United States to
connect me to their homologues in the Caribbean country. At the time,
PAPDA was already fifteen years into its struggle against neoliberalism,
already experimenting with alternative-development models, and had
renewed its campaign denouncing the United Nations military occupa-
tion. I sought to find out how cadres intellect sovereignty and citizenship,
practice community-based autonomy, reconstitute gender regimes, form
collective identities, and negotiate their uneven connections with other
militants the world over. Heeding Dána-Ain Davis’s (2013) reminder of
our responsibility as feminist ethnographers to ensure that our research
pursues social justice and the systemic transformation of our subjects’ lives,
I not only wanted to expose the workings of Empire in Haiti but also flaunt
the places in which nonexploitative human relations are being forged.

Between April 2010 and August 2013, I conducted formal interviews
with over forty leaders of PAPDA member and allied organizations at
their offices, and I conversed with more than one hundred others at var-
ious gatherings mostly in the north of Haiti. All of my exchanges were
carried out in Haitian Kreyòl. With PAPDA cadres, I traveled unpaved
roads, scaled mountains, and traversed rivers to consort with a new gen-
eration of radicals. Out of the dozen solidarity economy practices with
which PAPDA cogitates, AFLIDEPA, with a membership of almost one
thousand women, most swayed me. I spent three months in Limonade,
intermittently over a year, harvesting and grilling peanuts to transform
into butter while telling stories and jokes, singing and debating over poli-
tics at organizational meetings and workshops, and drinking and eating at
members’ homes. I witnessed these militants in their roles as facilitators,
moderators, orators, experts, expedition leaders, and caretakers. Overall,
I reassembled an undertold thirty-year-old history of people rebutting
against ongoing colonization. To un-“silence the past” (Trouillot 1995)
and present that Haiti shapes as the first Black republic, I expressly name
and situate the public actors who partook in my research.

Solidarity Economy Praxis in Limonade

195

Founding PAPDA: Toward a Feminist Tradition of Inter/nationalism
The Haitian Platform of Advocacy for an Alternative Development
(PAPDA) was founded after the miscarriage of the Revolisyon 1986.4 The
transnational efforts that led to the removal of the twenty-nine-year dicta-
torship of the Duvalier family produced the necessary conditions for the
rise of an anti-imperialist candidate, the (then) catholic priest Jean-Ber-
trand Aristide, who democratically secured the seat of the presidency in
1990 only to be deposed less than a year later by the U.S. Central Intelli-
gence Agency (CIA)–trained Haitian Armed Forces and Police (Fatton Jr.
2014; Dupuy 2007). Revolisyon 1986 radicals were further disillusioned
with Aristide’s restoration to power in 1994 by then U.S. president Bill
Clinton and his United Nations multinational military entourage. Move-
ment historian William Thélusmond from Centre de Recherches Action et de
Développement (CRAD)—the Center for Action Research and Develop-
ment (CRAD)—revealed to me that

when Aristide came back, we experienced a strong neoliberal offensive,
where nothing was clear and the whites [read: foreigners] had invaded the
country, and then the neoliberal projects were launched. . . . There was a
fragmentation on the Left . . . so we saw the necessity to at least have one
discourse. That’s where the alliance was born. All of us who were already
strong . . . And we saw the need to get together so we can be stronger, so we
can have a certain representation, so we can do certain things, so we could
have an entity that was really doing things that would contribute to the
construction of another type of economy in the country, another type of
society using another framework, another perspective, you see. Anti-neo-
liberal. You see? (pers. comm., May 2013)

Aristide’s homecoming indicated his commitment to implementing the
Washington Consensus. 1986 revolutionaries reconsidered their partici-
pation in a proxied electoral process. In 1995, nine organizations retreated
“to reinforce the capacities of our country’s social movements especially in
regard to their capacity to intervene on the political and social stage.”5 Sol-
idarite Fanm Ayisyèn (SOFA)—Haitian Women in Solidarity—is among
PAPDA’s cofounders and serves on PAPDA’s secretariat. Among the
founders are lawyers, economists, sociologists, philosophers, and agrono-
mists, “petit bourgeois” men and women, according to Chenet Jean-Bap-
tiste from Institut de Technologie et d’Animation (ITECA)—the Institute
of Technology and Animation—who, cognizant of their positionalities,

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196

instrumentalized their access to capital. They agreed that grassroots
movements lacked coordination and that rural associations needed more
training. They established PAPDA endeavoring to connect popular neigh-
borhood (read: urban) associations and organizations of peasants, work-
ers, and women across departmental lines and national borders in order
to amplify resistance to the neoliberalization of the capitalist world order.

Many PAPDA founders studied abroad and developed networks with
other militants, notably in France, Belgium, Venezuela, Brazil, Argentina,
Mexico, Puerto Rico, Cuba, Guadeloupe, Saint Lucia, the United States,
and Canada. PAPDA director Camille Chalmers cautioned me against an-
tiquated concepts of nationalism. Chalmers explained,

We noted that one of the obvious problems that we have is isolation. It is
an isolation that functions in two ways. That means at the international
level, no one knows about Haiti. So the quarantine that had been put in
place by France and the other Western powers had worked well. It is total
ignorance. Even among those who are professionals of history, even the
folks who study slavery and revolutionary processes, they don’t know the
country’s history. . . . Additionally, Haitians have in general a deformed
vision of the world and of others. So it’s a double difficulty that always
plunges us into solitude. They don’t understand us. But we, too, in defining
our strategies, we are often clumsy on this issue of our relationship with
the international, with the issue of international solidarity. So it’s a double
difficulty. . . . That’s why within PAPDA, we decided that one work pri-
ority we had was to weave relations with movements, with international
movements that share our vision, our analysis, that have almost the same
critique of globalization, and that want to build alternatives. (pers. comm.,
November 2012)

Chalmers called for a “rupture with the colonial discourse” that convinces
us to “think of ourselves as something separate, completely different than
all the rest” (pers. comm., November 2012). Hence, liberation in Haiti
is interlinked and contingent upon liberation everywhere else. In 1998,
PAPDA solicited the collaboration of the Cuban Asociacíon Nacional de
Agricultores Pequeños (ANAP)—the National Association of Small Farm-
ers—to set up expert teams of Cuban and Haitian agronomists to cogitate
on organic agriculture with a special focus on the rice-producing Depart-
ment of Artibonite. In 2001, PAPDA participated in the “First Forum
on Food Sovereignty” in Havana. That same year, the cadres presented

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197

themselves at the first World Social Forum in Brazil. Subsequently, the
organizers hosted the Third Assembly in 2003 in Cap-Haïtien during
which attendees visited the historical mythical site of Bwa Kayiman6 and
paid tribute to the transcendent figure of Boukman, who sparked the
Revolution of 1804. PAPDA sat on the forum’s international council for
twelve years. Organizers also have ties with Movimento dos Trabalhadores
Sem Terra (MST)—the Landless Workers’ Movement. In 1999, PAPDA
joined the transnational platform Jubilée Sud to denounce the practices of
the International Monetary Fund (IMF) and the World Bank. It served on
the coordinating committee of Jubilée Sud-Amérique for ten years. At every
meeting of the Assembly of Caribbean People (ACP), leaders accompany
a delegation of more than one hundred militants. PAPDA is also a member
of the Committee for the Abolition of the Third World Debt (CADTM),
as well as the World Forum for Alternatives (WFA). By engaging the inter-
national Left, PAPDA seeks to overcome the quarantine of the first Black
republic. Cadres move across continents to exchange stories, experienc-
es, and strategies, and act together with other militants. By doing so, they
secure the necessary resources to support the development of solidarity
economy in Haiti.

For over twenty years, PAPDA leaders journeyed throughout the
country to identify potential allies and to abet peasant reimaginings of
labor and land relations. Former PAPDA director of program Frank Saint-
Jean insisted that

when we select a pilot area, it involves a series of actions towards a type of
experimentation . . . that serves us as an example to fuel our advocacy. The
objective of the pilot for us, it’s that there are actions being done, on the
basis of alternative construction, you understand? And these alternatives
are supposed to help us fuel our global advocacy work. This means that
the advocacy work that we are doing at the global level is not that of an
intellectual in an office. These are things firmly grounded in a reality. It is
something fueled by local processes . . . A dialectic. (pers. comm., Novem-
ber 2012)

During the last four years, with the assistance of the Groupe de Recher-
che et d’Appui en Milieu Rural (GRAMIR)—the Research and Support
Group in Rural Areas—PAPDA convened 153 peasant collectives at re-
gional and national retreats to facilitate dialogues about their vision for

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an alternative Haiti and to formulate a Kaye Nasyonal Revandikasyon Òga-
nizasyon Peyizan ak Peyizàn Ayisyen yo (National Notebook of Demands
of Haitian Peasant Organizations). This dialectical consultation between
local (peasant) and national (Western-educated) forms of knowing is
what María Elena Martínez-Torres and Peter Rosset (2010) call a “di-
alogue of knowledges.” Positing that food sovereignty is fundamental to
self-determination,7 the Kaye details a (popular) national proposal for an
agroecological development centered around the (extended) family—the
collective. Founding-member Allen Henry from Association Nationale des
Agro-professionnels Haitiens (ANDAH)—the National Haitian Associa-
tion of Agro-professionals—clarified in an earlier interview,

We still encourage family-based agriculture. For a simple reason, because
the social relations, the economic relations, they are very different than
when you enter into massive production that are based on salary rela-
tions, which means classic relations of exploitation. We are not down with
that. You see? Family-based agriculture is the best model for establishing
healthy relations between people. (pers. comm., May 2013)

Family here is theorized as a “quality of relations, a principle of coopera-
tion and responsibility” between human beings and not as exclusive bio-
logical relations (Federici 2012, 145). This reconceptualization of family
reconjoins the processes of production, reproduction, and consumption
that the social division of labor in capitalism divides and fetishizes (Fed-
erici 2012; Mies 1998). For PAPDA, family is a prefigurative formation
that draws from preexisting ways of being and doing before and under cap-
italism. Former director of SOFA Carole Pierre-Paul Jacob specified in a
separate exchange,

Patriarchy is old but it is not tradition. Similarly, capitalism is old but it
does not emanate, it is not an emanation of the people, meaning it is not
the popular way of life, you see. So you have tradition that emanates, that is
the emanation of the popular masses, meaning a reclamation of historical
roots, historical things. (pers. comm., May 2013)

Tradition in Jacob’s case stands outside of the “overrepresented Western
bourgeois ethnoclass human figure,” what Sylvia Wynter terms “Man”
and his emanations of patriarchy and capitalism (2003, 260). SOFA fem-
inists reclaim Man’s centering of the human experience around himself.

Solidarity Economy Praxis in Limonade

199

Patriarchy and capitalism are not inevitable and timeless. Other subjectiv-
ities beyond Man are possible. It is this theory of a “popular” way of life as
a “feminist” way of life that I try to ground below.

Locating and Uncovering AFLIDEPA
An hour drive southeast from Labadie, a private destination offered by
the Miami-based Norwegian cruise line Royal Caribbean, the AFLIDEPA
center is located in the commune of Limonade off the National Route No.
6, less than ten kilometers south of Haiti’s second-largest city Cap-Haïtien,
and up the road from the Dominican-funded State University King Henri
Christophe Limonade Campus. Built in the early nineteenth century to
defend independence from European reinvasion, the Citadel Laferrière
rests 970 meters atop the Massif du Nord mountain chains, twenty-five
kilometers south of Limonade, surveilling the Caracol Bay in which a free-
trade industrial park financed by the United States Agency for Internation-
al Development (USAID) disgorges chemical waste from the manufacture
of Old Navy clothing. The fortress overlooks the Morne Bossa gold-min-
ing project of U.S. company VCS Mining. Though Dubout is sited in the
Department of Nord, it is only twenty kilometers from an old United Na-
tions Stabilization Mission in Haiti (MINUSTAH) base in Terrier Rouge
in the Department of Nord-Est, outside of the Blondin-Douvray copper
mines of the Canadian company Majescor. Dubout is an hour drive away

Fig. 1. Map of AFLIDEPA center in relation to extractive zones. Produced by author.

Mamyrah A. Dougé-Prosper

200

from the militarized border on the Massacre River where Haitians buy
Dominican goods at the so-called binational market.

A few kilometers outside the Limonade city center stands a hand-
painted sign with the organization’s and supporting partners’ logos. A
narrow path large enough for the passage of one Nissan Patrol leads to
the gate, above which hangs “Byenvini nan Sant AFLIDEPA (Welcome to
the AFLIDEPA Center).” The seafoam green ranch-style edifice sits on
six acres of land; it occupies less than one-fourth of the property. Its large
porch serves as a stage during events and as a gathering space for assem-
blies and training workshops. A window on the left side of the center opens
up to a shop. To its right sits a smaller building in which local seeds are
stored. On the rest of the land, AFLIDEPA plans to erect another structure
to house organizational activities and accommodate participants.

Founding AFLIDEPA: Woman as Subject
The center is a milestone in the vision of the six women who established
AFLIDEPA in January 2004, the year marking the bicentennial of the Hai-
tian Revolution. The founders are former members of the peasant collec-
tive Asosyasyon Pwodiktè Lèt Limonad (APWOLIM)—the Association of
Milk Producers of Limonade. The separation was not the result of discord.
They cite the most recent 2003 census to recognize that women comprise
52 percent of the population, and that 53 percent of all households are
headed by women; 41.2 percent of households in the country include four
to six people; and 31.2 percent of all women are unemployed (IHSI 2003).
Marcelin explained, “When a woman has an economic activity, it is in fact
the entire family [that benefits]” (pers. comm., November 2012). At the
time of the inauguration, there were 224 cows in circulation, and fourteen
young women had recently joined the “manman bèf (mother cow)” pro-
gram. Marcelin elated:

The manman bèf program, this is something in which we are greatly in-
vested. Because before—I will give you a little history lesson . . . before,
women didn’t use to raise cows. It was men in Limonade. . . . But now
women are integrated—as they should be—in animal husbandry, and
there are many women who shepherd cows. . . . So this is something very
exciting for the organization. (pers. comm., November 2012)

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201

Cow husbandry (in Limonade) is traditionally the domain of men.
AFLIDEPA challenges and seeks to dismantle this occupational segrega-
tion. Marcelin reminds us that women, too, labor—women, too, are peas-
ants. Woman becomes subject; the world is imagined and ordered from
her standpoint.

Volunteers coordinate the federation; Marcelin functions as its direc-
tor. There are various committees that oversee the management of proj-
ects, popular education, and health, to name a few. AFLIDEPA holds
monthly membership meetings. Every January, the Association organizes
a General Assembly during which adherents reevaluate and recommit to
its principles. In 2017, membership counted 520 adult women and 325
young women ages nine to twenty-five distributed over ten branches in
varying communal sections of Limonade, or 3.11 percent of the female
population. The organization integrates the disabled, the elderly, and chil-
dren in all its activities, including laboring in the gardens. At the inaugu-
ration, a CCDIPHL spokesperson applauded the collective for believing
“that all people are people.” Every year, the federation honors a woman
of Limonade who is almost one hundred years old. Life expectancy for
women in Haiti is sixty-four years. The organization embraces single preg-
nant teens. Members also involve their children:

We mentor them in all ways, in sports, in agriculture, animal husbandry,
in all AFLIDEPA activities. These children are there to ensure continuity
since we have noticed that times are modern, there are other things that
are increasing and coming. So we are trying to orient them in it so that we
may save them so that they may become a resource for the country—I
won’t only say Limonade—but for the country. (Marcelin, pers. comm.,
November 2012)

The organization subsidizes and monitors the schooling of members’ chil-
dren. Consider that 42.6 percent of children six years or older living in
rural areas have never received formal schooling. AFLIDEPA started Sous
Espwa Limonad (SEL)—Source of Limonade’s Hope—for members’
children five and over. The collective provides its youth with judo training
though Romel Jean-Pierre’s Centre de Réflexion et d’Action sur les Problèmes
Sociaux (CRAPS)—the Center for Thinking and Acting on Social Prob-
lems. AFLIDEPA administers classes on cleanliness and behavior. With
rivers compromised by chemical residues from mining expeditions and

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industrial projects like Caracol and by the MINUSTAH-derived cholera
epidemic that killed ten thousand Haitians and sickened tens of thousands
of others, organizers are vigilant. The collective also offers its younger
members (so far up to eleven) “credit” to pursue higher education, es-
pecially in accounting, veterinary medicine, and agricultural technique.
AFLIDEPA conducts workshops on women’s reproductive health. Note
that the maternal mortality rate in Haiti in 2017 is 529 deaths per one hun-
dred thousand live births, and the infant mortality rate is fifty-nine deaths
per one thousand live births (IHE 2017).

The organization owns four plots of land, controls previously unused
governmental territory (through usufruct rights), and utilizes individual
members’ “private” property to cultivate mainly corn, beans, and peanuts
using a tractor AFLIDEPA shares with APWOLIM. The federation buys
crops from members’ personal gardens and from other collective farms
in Limonade. The women raise chickens, goats, and cows. Together, they
also possess a bull with which they breed their cows. AFLIDEPA remains
a partner in APWOLIM’s Lèt a Gogo Limonade, which distributes milk to
local schools. Their chwal batay (battle horse) is agriculture “to kick out
foreign milk.” AFLIDEPA also produces pastries and fruit preserves. It
fabricates sandals, purses, belts, necklaces, and earrings with solid waste
and string. The federation’s national and international partners donated
the stationary and the mobile equipment. Member contribution facili-
tated the purchase of organizational land. The peasant women sell their
products at Limonade and surrounding marketplaces. AFLIDEPA relies
on its members’ social networks and its ties to other organizations for
distribution.

The federation controls three mutuals, and plans to open another
seven in the next ten years. Only members who regularly attend organiza-
tional meetings and volunteer on committees can partake. They convene
once a month and contribute five gourdes (about seven U.S. cents) to an
emergency fund that covers members’ illnesses, deaths, and childbirths.
AFLIDEPA also collects large sums from supporters to provide loans (for
a period of time determined by the member herself ) at a 2 percent inter-
est fee (1 percent for AFLIDEPA proper and the other for the mutual).
Marcelin testified that “the mutuals bring about solidarity because the
women learn about one another’s problems” (pers. comm., May 2013).
Unlike in microcredit systems, money here is a commons; it is not simply
accumulated for profit and consumption. The organization strategically

Solidarity Economy Praxis in Limonade

203

appeals to individual women with opportunities for personal economic
growth to inscribe them in a collective movement of creative work, wealth
sharing, and self-determination through a ritualistic initiation it calls “Pase
Kado,” or passing on the gift.

Pase Kado is: we give three goats and these three goats need to be re-
turned. The person returns them once her original have had offspring by
giving them to next member. This means that even if a partner ceases to
be in the field, the activity will continue within the organization. We do
this with everything . . . chickens. We do it with goats, we do it with cows,
we do it with the gardens. So if you have a garden activity, you have beans,
you give a woman four pots of beans to plant. After she plants, she harvests
them and we do follow-ups. . . . So when the beans are harvested, not only
does the person have beans to eat, she also has some to sell, as well as
to return to the organization to benefit another. (Marcelin, pers. comm.,
November 2012)

AFLIDEPA’s solidarity economy praxis resubjectivizes participants be-
yond the transactional and exploitative categories capital imposes on
them. Cooperation and responsibility underpin “healthy relations.”

Accordingly, the fanm djanm are careful and strategic about not get-
ting swallowed in “projects that do not match who we are” (Marcelin, pers.
comm., November 2012). Since 2006 AFLIDEPA and PAPDA have been
friends. Marcelin affirmed at the inauguration of the mill that

we don’t need anyone dictating anything to us. Because this is ours. We
have our own objectives, we know what we want. We don’t want to mis-
match what we believe, our acronym and all. We find that PAPDA has not
come to dictate anything to us . . . We can say that PAPDA has always re-
mained in the line of vision in which we believe. And we have stayed in the
line in which PAPDA believes. This is why we are friends. (pers. comm.,
November 2012)

At every yearly assembly, AFLIDEPA invites PAPDA and CRAPS to muse
together on ways to develop Limonade. AFLIDEPA coorganized the re-
gional workshops for the Departments of Nord and Nord-Est, coordinat-
ed the follow-up meetings to ratify the regional Kaye Revandikasyon, and
cofacilitated the national gatherings to approve the final text. Via PAPDA,
AFLIDEPA is a member of the transnational peasant movement La Via

Mamyrah A. Dougé-Prosper

204

Campesina (The Peasant Way) and participates in inter/national con-
ventions on the solidarity economy. Moreover, the federation’s collective
enterprise is made possible by funding from INGOs AgriSud, Entraide
& Fraternité (Mutual Aid & Fraternity), and Grassroots International, to
name a few allies. Grounded in Limonade, AFLIDEPA’s solidarity econo-
my operations involve a multifarious construction of the nation as unique
but also tied to other nations in a larger project of human emancipation.

Woman as Subject: New Intellections of the Family
The 2013 opening of the complex (mill and bank) in the presence of gov-
ernment officials and community members firmly roots AFLIDEPA as
a central actor in Limonade and in the Departments of Nord and Nord-
Est, and indicates that the federation seeks to be influential, to serve as a
model, to return to Marcelin’s words, for “what is good, what is just.” As
such, AFLIDEPA counters the Rural Code8 and free trade and mining laws
that expulse peasants andeyò (outside) the national imaginary and dispos-
sess them of ancestral lands. As in other Latin American countries (Petras
and Veltmeyer 2007), the Haitian state’s relationship with the peasantry
has always been tumultuous (Casimir 2018; Dupuy 2007; Fick 1990).
(Post)colonial elite men prove(d) they are “modern” by ignoring, un-
derdeveloping, and abusing peasants, and by turning to development
practices that promote industrialization. They construe(d) peasants as
an inexhaustible unskilled labor pool of nonpersons deserving and capa-
ble only of menial and subservient work for capitalist accumulation (of
transnational others). Conversely, peasant communities and movements
resisted through marronage and armed rebellions (Hector 2000). Like-
wise, AFLIDEPA women refashion the Black radical tradition of konbit to
scheme against the zones of extraction that envelop them.

In this imperfectly colonized space, abandoned people reintellect labor,
land relations, and kinship. Land, labor use, and value are repurposed. The
domestication of land is intentional and contingent upon ecologically
sound, collectively driven projects. AFLIDEPA improves land according
to its environmentalist commitment to resituating the human in nature.
This revaluation of land engenders the reconceptualization of labor and
the laboring body. In a solidarity economy, the worker and her labor are
not commodities. Instead, labor is a distinctive commons, the application
of “the human capacity to create” (Wainwright 2014, 74). AFLIDEPA

Solidarity Economy Praxis in Limonade

205

rethinks people’s capacity to labor and produce according to their creativ-
ity and for “everyone to be happy.” Capacity is not reduced to the worker’s
corporeality as a factor in production. The worker directs her own actions.
Work is thus not tedious and humiliating; the worker’s body is not simply
an “accumulation strategy” (Harvey 1998). The member’s entire person
(committed to a myriad of human relations) is engaged in the collective
process.

For AFLIDEPA, kinship is based on reciprocity; people without bio-
logical attachments produce and distribute together in exchange for labor
on personal gardens and the consumption of their harvest and products.
As a refashioning of konbit, the solidarity economy advances a democratic
mode of regulation that decommodifies human relations in order to trans-
form households, lives, and livelihoods. Though AFLIDEPA’s politics of
the body seemingly point to the child as the horizon and beneficiary of
political action, contrary to queer theorist Lee Edelman’s (2004) claims,
they are not inevitably heteronormative. The child here is not the product
of compulsory marital relations. Biological reproduction is not to be bar-
gained with husbands and national elites (whose interests align with those
of Global North development agencies). AFLIDEPA affords women tools
with which to design their own families. Accordingly, solidarity economy
praxis in Limonade pushes against the bourgeois-liberal model of the nu-
clear family and the genre of human it constructs. These altered “bodily
practices” (Harvey 1998, 99) dislocate “woman” from bourgeois concep-
tions that conjoin, oppose, and hierarchize men and women. Family here
is a place where humans can reimagine and reorder their relationship to
one another.9

AFLIDEPA offers us emanations of family and tradition that PAPDA
lifts and amplifies nationally and inter/nationally as an alternative ar-
rangement to patriarchal capitalism, and SOFA ensures that one hundred
years of feminist struggles and intellections in Haiti ground this “dialogue
of knowledges.” Together, AFLIDEPA and PAPDA endeavor not only to
create a robust civil society or a “third sector” (Laville 2010) but also to
challenge the market economy and the underpinning ideology of growth
in capitalism, a limitation of the solidarity economy critical scholars usu-
ally bemoan (Smith 2011; Coraggio 2011; Santos and Rodríguez-Gara-
vito 2006). AFLIDEPA and PAPDA do not seek rapprochement to the
colonial state but instead aim to expose the contradiction in the coupling
of democracy and participation with capitalism. If we indeed interpret

Mamyrah A. Dougé-Prosper

206

my findings in this article as an open-ended process, we inevitably see a
movement in construction vying for control of state power rather than co-
existence. We also recognize the revival of inter/nationalism at a time we
desperately need it.

Conclusion
To remove Haiti from quarantine is to unsilence the past and present. It
is to place Haiti at the center of modernity and its discontents—not in
order to continue exceptionalizing the first Black republic, but rather to
remind us that colonialism is alive and well, and that capitalism relies on
the devaluation and exploitation of African people. Thinking through
and with Haiti also offers an alternative to the capitalist system. For over
five centuries, the people who have walked its land have intellected be-
yond Man. AFLIDEPA organizers pursue these revolutionary goals of
relating to other human beings on a nontransactional basis. Fanm djanm
invite women in extractive zones to experiment with a konbit economy.
Living the “popular” way of life necessitates the reconstruction of family.
AFLIDEPA recognizes the plurality of family composition; it extends its
limits beyond (heterosexual) biological ties. Living the “popular” way of
life involves the transformation of the body from a mere capitalist instru-
ment for accumulation to a peasant subject who directs her productive
and reproductive actions. The body’s desired output is solidarity rather
than productivity. Consequently, nonnormative bodies, too, can labor.
AFLIDEPA counts among its members the disabled and the elderly, preg-
nant teens and children. Living the peasant way of life requires cogitations
with national others. It also entails reimagining the nation beyond its ter-
ritorial cage, as linked to other nations engaged in the struggle for human
liberation.

Acknowledgments
I thank PAPDA and AFLIDEPA for their ongoing collaboration, and my
colleagues at the Center for Place, Culture, and Politics at the CUNY
Graduate Center for helpful comments. This research was supported by
Florida International University.

Mamyrah A. Dougé-Prosper is a postdoctoral fellow with the Institute for Research on the

Solidarity Economy Praxis in Limonade

207

African Diaspora in the Americas and the Caribbean at the CUNY Graduate Center. Her

research program focuses on the construction of neocolonial nationalist ideologies and

collective identities in relation to race and class, gender and sexuality, education and

language, and religion. She can be reached at mprosper@gc.cuny.edu.

Notes
1. Lakay in Haitian Kreyòl stands for one of two words: “home” and “home-

land.”
2. Lèt a Gogo (Haitian for “milk in abundance”) transformation centers pro-

duce dairy products.
3. Though Haitian anthropologists Rachel Beauvoir and Didier Dominique

([1989] 2003) clarified in their Haitian Kreyòl–language book Savalou E
that democratic modes of organizing life varied and took on different appel-
lations—eskwad, asosye, sosyete travay, kòve, gwoupman peyizan—it is pre-
cisely because konbit enjoys colloquial use across Haiti that I retain it here.
U.S. anthropologist Jennie Smith’s (2001) most recent English-language text
When the Hands Are Many: Community Organization and Social Change in
Haiti reconfirms this diversity.

4. Radical social movement thinkers refer to the three-decade-long struggles
against and subsequent removal of the Duvalierist dictatorship in 1986 as
Revolisyon 1986.

5. See www.papda.org for PAPDA’s mission statement.
6. Bwa Kayiman in the Department of Nord, a few miles from Cap-Haïtien, is

the site where a Vodou ceremony took place in 1791 and ignited the Revolu-
tion of 1804. See James 1989.

7. According to the World Bank, in 2016, 51.2 percent of Haiti’s GDP was com-
prised of imports of goods and services.

8. The current Rural Code of 1962 is president François Duvalier’s version,
which arranges and governs peasant life in contradistinction to urban life ad-
ministered by the Civil, Penal, Commercial, and Criminal codes.

9. Research on the Cuban peasant movement after the Special Period reveals
that over time family-based cooperative practices make women’s emancipa-
tion possible (Rosset et al. 2011). Family then promises to be an emancipa-
tory space for peasant women.

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The ‘state’ of food sovereignty in Latin America: political projects and
alternative pathways in Venezuela, Ecuador and Bolivia

Ben McKay, Ryan Nehring and Marygold Walsh-Dilley

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.

Keywords: the state; food sovereignty; state-society relations; Venezuela; Ecuador;
Bolivia

Introduction

While its origins can be traced back to the early 1980s (Edelman 2014), the concept of food
sovereignty most commonly deployed by social movements today emerged in a 1996
declaration presented by La Via Campesina at the World Food Summit of the Food and
Agriculture Organization (FAO) in Rome. In this document, food sovereignty is defined
as ‘the right of each nation to maintain and develop its own capacity to produce its basic
foods, respecting cultural and productive diversity’ (Via Campesina 1996, emphasis
added). This notion echoes earlier conceptions of food sovereignty used in Mexico to
imply ‘national control over diverse aspects of the food chain, thus reducing dependency
on foreign capital and imports of basic foods, inputs, and technologies’ (Heath 1985, 115,
quoted in Edelman 2014, 6). In good part, Via Campesina’s 1996 declaration was motivated
by the failure of the World Trade Organization’s 1995 Agreement on Agriculture (AoA) to
adequately address the issue of agricultural subsidies in the United States and Europe, and in

An early version of this paper was presented at the Yale Conference on Food Sovereignty, and bene-
fited from the comments received there. The authors would also like to acknowledge the editors of this
special collection, chiefly Saturnino M. Borras Jr., and three anonymous reviewers as well as Sara
Keene and Stalin Herrera, who provided helpful comments and constructive criticism. Authors are
listed in alphabetical order.

The Journal of Peasant Studies, 2014
Vol. 41, No. 6, 1175–1200, http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/03066150.2014.964217

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particular the flooding of developing country markets with heavily subsidized agricultural
goods. Rather than solve the subsidy issue, the AoA had the effect of institutionalizing
the disparity between the two agricultural powerhouses (the United States and the European
Union) and the rest of the world (Bello 2005, 38). This agreement marked a turning point in
the assault on small-scale agriculture, particularly in the developing world, and Via Campe-
sina’s declaration was issued in response to this failure.

Just five years later, in a 2001 Declaration on Food Sovereignty, Via Campesina rede-
fined the concept as

the right of peoples to define their own agriculture and food policies, to protect and regulate
domestic agricultural production and trade in order to achieve sustainable development objec-
tives, to determine the extent to which they want to be self-reliant, and to restrict the dumping
of products in their markets. (Via Campesina 2001, emphasis added)

A similar definition is found in the 2007 International Forum on Food Sovereignty, which
defines food sovereignty as ‘the right of peoples to healthy and culturally appropriate food
produced through ecologically sound and sustainable methods, and their right to define their
own food and agriculture systems’ (Nyéléni 2007). These definitions emphasize direct,
even ‘local’, control over food production and consumption. Here, food sovereignty is
understood as a set of commitments leading to a food system that (1) provides sufficient,
healthy, nutritious and culturally- and locally-appropriate food for all; (2) values and sup-
ports food providers, with a particular focus on small-scale family farmers, peasants etc.; (3)
localizes the food system; (4) localizes control over and access to land resources; (5) values
and contributes to local knowledge and skills; and (6) works with nature, with a focus on
agroecological production (Nyéléni 2007).

This subtle change in the scale and location of sovereignty – from the national to the
local and from the accrual of sovereignty in the hands of the nation-state to those of
‘peoples’ – marks an important definitional shift in mobilizing food sovereignty as a tool
for political change. At the same time, food sovereignty has been taken up at the national
level by a number of countries, which have written the concept into their constitutions as a
guaranteed right. In Latin America, the constitutional inclusion of food sovereignty
emerged in the context of a political shift to the left – the so-called ‘pink tide’ – that has
united social movements protesting against the neoliberal reforms of the 1990s with pro-
gressive governments that are more responsive to public demands. That is, food sovereignty
is being brought into the state precisely as many Latin American states become more expli-
citly linked to civil society groups and movements.

These overlapping shifts, both definitional and constitutional, raise important questions
and tensions, not least about the role of the state in generating and supporting food sover-
eignty within its national borders. In what ways does food sovereignty as a concept and a
practice call upon and mobilize – or reject – the state? And how do state-level interventions
in the name of food sovereignty intersect with and/or contradict the goals of social move-
ment proponents and the ‘local peoples’ that food sovereignty is ultimately intended to
serve? These questions become particularly important in a context of ‘distinct national, pro-
vincial, regional and cultural concerns in terms of community identity and subjectivity, and
relationships to political and institutional authority’, meaning that ‘food sovereignty doesn’t
map tidily onto a national, or even provincial, scale’ (Desmarais and Wittman 2014, 16). At
the same time, however, visions of food sovereignty outlined in the Nyéléni Declaration
and elsewhere require institutional, infrastructural and legal support and protections,
which will rely at least to some degree on state involvement.

1176 Ben McKay et al.

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In this paper, we interrogate the ‘state’ of food sovereignty through a comparative
analysis of the three countries in Latin America where food sovereignty has been enshrined
as a constitutionally guaranteed right: Venezuela, Ecuador and Bolivia. We rely principally
on secondary sources, archival documents such as newspapers and legal documents, and, to
a smaller degree, on the experiences of the authors living, working and conducting quali-
tative fieldwork in each of the three countries. We outline the political processes through
which constitutional, legal and policy measures were adopted, how food sovereignty was
conceived in this process and to what degree food sovereignty objectives were achieved.
We focus on state-society interactions, and ask how efforts by the state contribute to trans-
formative aspirations or if they simply serve the political purposes of elites. The case studies
presented here are necessarily (for space and comparative considerations) drawn in broad
strokes, but nonetheless we find such a comparison helpful for addressing this question
of how the state fits into food sovereignty aspirations.

Food sovereignty cannot be conceived of as a finite outcome; it is a political space and
terrain of struggle around control over food systems. As such, state efforts around food
sovereignty open up new political spaces in this ongoing contest. To unpack the transfor-
mative potential of such state-led food sovereignty efforts, we draw from Edelman’s (2014)
work that asks ‘who is the sovereign in food sovereignty’, and add as well a question about
against whom or what this sovereignty is exercised. We suggest that state engagement in
food sovereignty projects – and how well they are able to achieve their own stated goals
or contribute to transformative reform – depends in large part on how the state interprets
these questions.

Struggles around food sovereignty are struggles over sovereignty (i.e. self-determination,
see Clark 2013; Mesner 2013) at different scales. Sovereignty in this context simultaneously
accrues to both state and communities (broadly defined). Clearly, food sovereignty at the
regional or community level depends in large part on the sovereignty of the state. But the
accrual of sovereignty at sub-national scales does not necessarily complement state sover-
eignty, and may be seen as a threat to it. Embedded in food sovereignty, then, is a contra-
dictory notion of sovereignty – a contradiction that has the potential to create significant
tensions as states pursue national food sovereignty frameworks and policies. State-society
relations, particularly across scales, are therefore a central problematic of food sovereignty
projects.

The state cannot ‘stand alone’ on food sovereignty, but neither can ‘local’ communities,
groups or people. If food sovereignty is to be about the ability of ‘local’ peoples to have a
say in defining, managing and controlling their own food and agricultural systems, then
state efforts to support food sovereignty must involve some degree of structural reform
to distribute power in ways that facilitate such local autonomy. State efforts around food
sovereignty thus depend on the nature of state-society interaction and the ability of refor-
mists to engage in symbiotic, mutually empowering relationships (see Fox 1993; Borras
2007). But this shifting distribution of power is necessarily shot through with conflicts
and tensions, as actors across the state-society terrain interpret food sovereignty goals
differently and place them against other priorities.

In Venezuela, the inclusion of food sovereignty in the national constitution has been
accompanied by significant structural changes in governance systems, most notably with
the decentralization of governance into community hands. This process has allowed
greater local control over food and other systems, ultimately contributing to the sovereignty
of local communities vis-à-vis the Venezuelan national state as well as foreign capital or
political interests. In Bolivia, food sovereignty has been taken up by the state as part of a
de-colonial project in ways that assert Bolivian state control over food systems vis-à-vis

The Journal of Peasant Studies 1177

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foreign governments and international institutions. While a central element in this process is
the rhetorical elevation of indigenous models of community, thus far there has been rela-
tively little devolution of this control to the regional or community level. Indeed, the
state in Bolivia is critiqued for failing to bring structural changes to the extractivist and dis-
equalizing models that have guided rural development in the country thus far, relying
instead on consolidating power and state-led redistribution of mineral wealth to historically
excluded populations. Finally, in Ecuador, food sovereignty has been mobilized neither as
part of a radical shift in governance that gives local spaces more power, nor as part of a
sovereignty project vis-à-vis foreign powers, but rather as a state consolidation project to
simplify, and ultimately adjudicate between, different visions of food sovereignty.

These cases demonstrate how the food sovereignty concept is used by state actors in
particular ways to support their own strategies and goals. Not all of these strategies have
the same potential for transformative change of the sort promoted by the rural and
peasant movements that make up La Via Campesina. Indeed, the political project of the
Bolivian state and the simplification strategies of the Correa administration in

Ecuador

have arguably done little to support such goals. Food sovereignty in these contexts has
been used to galvanize consent and popular support, with state actors co-opting or conso-
lidating food sovereignty as their own in ways that result in state-society power dynamics
that significantly favour the former. In this context, food sovereignty becomes little more
than a legitimating discourse (Kerssen 2013) and/or, as in Ecuador, is simplified and stan-
dardized (see Scott 1998) in ways that transform food sovereignty into ‘one-size-fits-all’,
manageable projects.

Among the cases examined here – the three countries that have a constitutional guaran-
tee of food sovereignty for their citizens – only in Venezuela are these nominal rights
accompanied by partial structural changes that contribute to empowering people at the
local level to have greater control over their own food production and consumption. This
has been achieved through a radical re-envisioning of the locus of governance, creating
and supporting community-level structures that put political power in the hands of the
people in a new way.1 This strategy is transforming relations around access to resources
and decision-making control in favour of participatory institutions in communities, result-
ing in a symbiotic relationship between state and society that contributes to institutional
reform and empowers local producers and consumers (see Fox 1993, 2005 for general back-
ground discussion).

The ‘state’ of food sovereignty

Food sovereignty is, unlike other popular concepts aimed at enabling stable access to food,
‘essentially a political concept’ (Windfuhr and Jonsén 2005, 15), and the state is necessarily
part of the food sovereignty process. Nonetheless, Bernstein (2014) calls the relationship
between state and society ‘the elephant in the room of the programmatic aspirations of
Food Sovereignty’ (24). There is no consensus about what effective state action would
look like or what policies effectively support food sovereignty – though this question
has certainly generated debate (Rosset 2003; Rosset 2008; McMichael 2008; Patel 2009;
Martinez-Torres and Rosset 2010). But as Schiavoni (2014a, 2) reminds us, ‘the state
has often been a facilitator of many of the very policies and structures that the food

1This, however, is not a point of consensus among observers and researchers. See Kappeler (2013) for
a very different take and argument on the Venezuelan case.

1178 Ben McKay et al.

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sovereignty movement seeks to dismantle, from land grabs to free trade agreements’, com-
plicating the question of what role the state might take in support of food sovereignty goals.
Supportive state policies might include: protection against dumping, trade and speculation
in agriculture; supply management; floor prices; marketing boards; agrarian reform;
farmer-owned food inventories; hoarding controls; a moratorium on agrofuels; a shift to
agroecology; and state-directed food provisioning (Rosset 2008; McMichael 2014). The
food sovereignty goals of localizing and domesticating trade and maintaining limited
farm sizes will similarly require strong regulatory controls (Edelman 2014, 17). While
such policies might facilitate spaces for building food sovereignty, they require a radical
political transformation (Holt Giménez and Shattuck 2011) that is much easier said than
done. Further, there is the distinct potential that such ‘food sovereignty’ policies actually
strengthen the state vis-à-vis food sovereignty advocates or local communities (Edelman
2014).

This raises a central tension regarding the possibilities for state action in supporting
food sovereignty: food sovereignty requires a simultaneous ‘developmentalist’ state and
a redistribution of power to facilitate direct control over food systems in ways that may
threaten the state. If food sovereignty necessarily involves the ‘right to self-determination,
for communities to redefine for themselves the substance of the food relations appropriate to
their geographies’ (Patel and McMichael 2004, 249), how might food sovereignty be
defined, led, controlled, or implemented by the state? Indeed, this implies what Patel and
McMichael (2004, 249) call a ‘contradictory understanding of rights’ with the state as guar-
antor but not author of food sovereignty rights.

The concept of food sovereignty entails a reformulation of the formal, Westphalian vision
of the sovereignty of nation-states (McMichael 2009), while at the same time calling upon it.
Indeed, it seems to rely upon ‘multiple sovereignties’ (McMichael 2009), which may in turn
be harmonious or competing. How can you have a powerful notion of food sovereignty at the
level of the nation state, particularly in the context of plurinationality like in Bolivia and
Ecuador, when different groups (peoples, nations or communities) have divergent ideas
about what food sovereignty means and looks like in practice? Food sovereignty involves,
as McMichael writes in this collection (2014; see also McMichael 2012), a form of strategic
essentialism that calls upon the idea of sovereignty to claim juridical ground in the short run,
but, in forcing a rethinking of the locus of sovereignty, it also has the potential to reformulate
the meaning of sovereignty itself in the long run. The actual forms and visions for food sover-
eignty are quite diverse and its meaning has an elasticity as it is taken up by groups (including
states) beyond its roots in the countryside (McMichael 2014, see also Hospes 2014; Edelman
2014). These visions of what food sovereignty looks like are sometimes corresponding or
approximate enough to be brought together, but are just as likely (as the Ecuador case dis-
cussed below demonstrates) to be too dissimilar. This multiplicity of forms indicates that a
one-size-fits-all pathway to food sovereignty is impossible. Indeed, framing food sovereignty
as an objective and achievable outcome unproductively reifies what is essentially a terrain of
contestation, a political space and project – complicating our questions as to the role of the
state in building and supporting food sovereignty.

The state is understood here an arena of complex, strategic relations between political
and social spheres (Gramsci 1971; Poulantzas 1978; Jessop 2007). That is, we do not con-
ceive of the state as a monolithic entity, but rather a contested system of social relations. The
possibility of reform is influenced by the degree of autonomy and capacity of pro-reform
state and societal actors and the nature of their interaction (see Fox 1993). That is, reformers
must be both free to form and pursue goals independently (autonomously) as well as able to
get people ‘to do what they want them to’ (Migdal 188, xi). Distinguishing between these

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two dimensions of power is important because they are both necessary in order for reforms to
be implemented. For example, state or societal actors may have the autonomy to pursue a
food sovereignty agenda, but lack the capacity to implement such reforms, or vice-versa.
In both instances, it is unlikely that a pro-poor reform will be carried out (Borras 2007,
70). However, these two relational dimensions of power – autonomy and capacity – are
not pre-determined or unchanging; they are shaped and reshaped by actors in both the
state and society. Strategic interaction between pro-reform state and societal actors can
mutually reinforce reform agendas and alter degrees of autonomy and capacity.

Nominal rights to food sovereignty potentially open up spaces for the pursuit of a trans-
formative agenda, but are not sufficient. A transformative agenda requires both the rights
and the pro-empowerment institutional reforms that make these rights meaningful. Fox
notes (2005, 7) that

Institutions may nominally recognize rights that actors, because of imbalances in power
relations, are not able to exercise in practice. Conversely, actors may be empowered in the
sense of having the experience and capacity to exercise rights, while lacking institutionally
recognized opportunities to do so.

Our task is to examine the ways in which state frameworks for food sovereignty in Vene-
zuela, Ecuador and Bolivia are accompanied by institutional reforms which empower non-
state actors to define the substance of their food-related institutions and capacities. Under-
standing that there are variations within pro-reform (interested in structural change in
support of food sovereignty goals) and anti-reform (attempting to block such changes)
groups within both state and society, the challenge is to create environments in which
pro-reformists within the state and society can enact mutually reinforcing agendas (Fox
1993; Borras 2007). However, this is no easy task, as it requires a continuity of perceived
shared interests from reformists both ‘above’ and ‘below’ (see Fox 2005). Indeed, this must
be an ongoing project, as ‘anti-reform forces attempt to block the reform process through
their own state-society alliances’ (Borras 2007, 279). The alignment of reformist goals
and strategies across levels benefits from the inclusion of intended beneficiaries in the
design, implementation and resource allocation for reform agendas (Fox and Gershman
2000; Fox 2005). Hence the importance of state-society interaction around food sovereignty
or other empowerment reforms.

Food sovereignty in Latin America: three cases

The election of leftist leaders in Latin America signified a new regional shift in anti-US
imperialism and the reintroduction of the state into development planning and policy.
Notably, the election of Hugo Chavez in 1998 defied the Monroe doctrine and historical
precedent of maintaining US interests within Latin American capitals. After the turn of
the last decade, the elections of Rafael Correa in Ecuador, Evo Morales in Bolivia,
Daniel Ortega in Nicaragua, Fernando Lugo in Paraguay and Luis Inácio ‘Lula’ da Silva
in Brazil (among others) represented a significant defiant bloc united around a reinvigorated
civil society and anti-imperialist discourse (Cockcroft 2006). At the same time, increased
transnational ties between rural social movements helped bring agrarian concerns to the
national and international political stage (Borras et al. 2008).

In Venezuela (1999), Ecuador (2008) and Bolivia (2009), new constitutions were
adopted as part of this turn to the left, and a ‘new Andean Constitutionalism’ emerged
(Schilling-Vacaflor 2011). While these governments nationalized key industries,

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strengthening their control of the economy, they also increased social spending, created
legislation aimed to increase participation and representation, and adopted measures to
increase the fulfillment of human rights – including the right to food sovereignty. There
is still doubt as to whether these measures signify an alternative to free market principles
or a ‘bending and moulding’ of existing political and economic structures that is more
‘pro-regulation’ than ‘anti-capitalist’ (Arditi 2008; Panizza 2005). In the following
section, we critically review each country’s insertion of food sovereignty into its consti-
tution and their subsequent policies and programmes. We examine the tensions around
the various forms of sovereignty, paying particular attention to how state-society inter-
actions have developed around state-level food sovereignty efforts. Since the pursuit of
food sovereignty ultimately requires changing the relations of access to and control over
food and agricultural systems (from decision-making to productive resources), it is impera-
tive that food sovereignty strategies are approached in a relational way – changing ‘social
relations of production and reproduction, of property and power’ (Bernstein et al. 1992, 24).

Venezuela

Background

After a failed coup attempt in 1992, Lieutenant Colonel Hugo Chavez continued a move-
ment ‘from below’ against years of social and economic exploitation by elite classes, before
spending two years in prison. Declining socio-economic conditions amongst the middle and
lower classes created a conducive environment for a dramatic transformative change. From
1979 to 1999, real per capita income declined by 27 percent – the worst in the region –
while poverty increased from 17 percent in 1980 to 65 percent in 1996 (Wilpert 2007,
13). In 1998, Chavez was elected as President with 56 percent of the vote, marking the
start of a political, social and economic transformation. Approving a new Constitution in
1999, President Hugo Chavez consolidated state power, while simultaneously opening
up spaces to facilitate decentralized participatory democratic processes at the local level
through social ‘Misiones’ and Communal Councils. While these reforms are intended to
be redistributive and empower the marginalized, the highly contentious and conflicting
‘dual power’ that persists within and between state and societal forces has produced
uneven, inconsistent and contested outcomes (Enriquez 2013, also see Kappeler 2013).
This dual power is characterized by the co-existence of class powers which frequently
exert conflicting influences over the state apparatus, presenting both opportunities and bar-
riers to food sovereignty and other reformist agendas. When reformists within the state
engage with like-minded societal actors in a mutually reinforcing way, pro-poor reformist
agendas like food sovereignty can be realized (see Schiavoni 2014b).

Although Venezuela’s Organic Law of Agro-food Security and Sovereignty was only
approved in 2008, elements of food sovereignty were enshrined in its 1999 Constitution,
specifically in Articles 305, 306 and 307. The 1999 Constitution was written by a consti-
tutional assembly comprising 24 members elected nationally, three indigenous representa-
tives and 104 elected representatives from their respective states (Wilpert 2003).
‘Chavistas’ represented 95% of the total representatives, and within six months the new
constitution was subjected to a national vote where 71.8 percent approved, with an
abstention rate of 55.6 percent (Wilpert 2003). Venezuela’s 2008 Law, however, is a com-
prehensive 143-page document covering many key principles inherent in a food sover-
eignty concept (Gaceta Oficial 2008). Instead of outlining a few specific programmes,
Venezuela has a variety of complementary initiatives that seek to build a pathway

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towards food sovereignty. Despite being a major net importer of food based on a history of
urban-biased industrialization policies and an extremely high rate of urbanization, Vene-
zuela has demonstrated significant structural reforms that distribute power in ways that
support self-determination of food systems.

One element of Venezuela’s food sovereignty strategy has been its state-led redistribu-
tive agrarian reform programme (see McKay 2011; Enríquez 2013 for the details of this
programme). This programme encompasses a multitude of complementary programmes
and policies for credit (FONDAS,2 INDER,3 BAV4), technical assistance (INTI,5

CIARA,6 FONDAS, Misión Ché Guevara, Cuban-Venezuela Agreement for agro-technical
expertise), agroecology (INIA,7 INSAI,8 Cuba-Venezuela Agreement), infrastructure
development (INDER), marketing (CVAL,9 MERCAL10), and even a government
agency established to defend the rights of agrarian reform beneficiaries for legal disputes
free of charge (Enríquez 2013). This programme is oriented towards improving access to
land, food and markets.

Access to land. In 2001, Misión Zamora was established under the Land Law with the
following key objectives: set limits on the size of landholdings; tax unused property as an
incentive to spur agricultural growth; redistribute state-owned land to peasant families and
cooperatives; and lastly, as of 2005, to expropriate/recover fallow/illegally-held land from
the private sector for the purpose of redistribution (Delong 2005). While in 2001 land
subject to expropriation was defined as ‘only high-quality idle agricultural land of over
100 hectares or lower quality idle agricultural land of over 5000 hectares (latifundia)’
(Wilpert 2007, 111), as of 2010, latifundia is defined as being ‘a piece of land that is
larger than the average in its region or is not producing at 80 percent of its productive
capacity’ (Suggett 2010). This agrarian reform programme is designed to dismantle the lati-
fundia and reinvigorate the countryside with more equitable resource distribution. From
2001 to 2010, over 5.5 million hectares of arable land has been ‘recovered’, benefitting
over 1 million people (Wilpert 2011; Enríquez 2013, 622). While this radical reform pro-
gramme has not gone uncontested by capitalist elites within and outside the state, the most
recent modification integrates rural workers into implementing the reform themselves by
giving ownership to those working (renting) land and thus incorporating a ‘land to the
tiller’ element in the Land Law (Enríquez 2013, 631). This modification cedes a certain
degree of responsibility and political power to rural workers to hold state and societal
actors accountable to reformist measures, therefore interacting with efforts by pro-reform
state actors in a mutually reinforcing way (see Fox 1993).

Access to food and markets. Under the Ministry of Food, Misión Mercal was established as
a state-run food company, initially to combat the food shortages that plagued the country
during the corporate lock-out in December 2002. Misión Mercal is a chain of

2Development Fund for Socialist Agriculture.
3Rural Development Institute.
4Agricultural Bank of Venezuela.
5National Land Institute.
6Foundation for Training and Innovation for Rural Development.
7National Institute of Agricultural Research.
8National Institute of Integral Agricultural Health.
9Venezuelan Food Corporation.
10Mercados de Alimentos.

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government-subsidized grocery stores that sell food at prices ‘roughly 39 percent below tra-
ditional supermarkets’ (Isaacs et al. 2009). The Mercals, along with PDVAL,11 are distri-
bution links of the state-run intermediary chain which provide low-income Venezuelans
with food staples at affordable rates. Large storage spaces, distribution centres and transpor-
tation networks have also been set up to combat food speculation, hoarding and sabotage
(Isaacs et al. 2009). In 2010, there were 16,600 Mercals nationwide, employing roughly
85,000 workers (Smith 2010). In addition to Mercals, the Mission has set up 6075 Casas
de Alimentación, or food banks, which provide free meals to roughly 900,000 people in
need (Schiavoni and Camacaro 2009). Mercals account for roughly 20–30 percent of
total food sales in Venezuela, with roughly two-thirds of the population visiting the
stores regularly (Government of Canada 2011).

Despite these notable successes, including being recognized by the FAO as one of the
16 countries to reach the 1996 World Food Summit’s goal of halving the total number of
their undernourished, processes of agrarian transformation in Venezuela are not without
problems (FAO 2013). Kappeler, for example, highlights the struggles in incentivizing
urbanites to move to the countryside and notes the many failures when urbanites with
‘little practical experience in the field of agriculture’ resettled to work on rural cooperatives
(2013, 6). Kappeler also points to the contradictory processes that exist with Venezuela’s
agro-industrial state enterprises and the food sovereignty agenda. Despite replacing the lati-
fundia in many parts of the country, Kappeler argues that these state enterprises have ‘not
reduced divisions of labor in the agriculture sector (as many supporters of food sovereignty
suggest is required), but replaced one set of tensions with another’ (2013, 12). While one
could argue that eliminating private capital’s control over a country’s food and agricultural
systems could be a first step towards a food sovereignty process, Kappeler rightly points
out the unevenness and inconsistencies related to Venezuela’s current food sovereignty
agenda.

While these efforts towards improving access to land, food and markets are often held
up as the principal state mechanisms supporting food sovereignty in Venezuela (e.g.
Kappeler 2013), we suggest that a third arena, the Communal Councils, provides the
most significant space for empowerment and social transformation around food systems
(see also Marcano 2009; Schiavoni 2014b). Indeed, it is in the Communal Councils that
we can see the most significant structural reforms, as well as the creation of spaces for
sovereignty at smaller scales.

Sovereignty of whom relative to what?

One central element of Venezuela’s food sovereignty strategy is its Communal Councils,
which are designed to foster a high degree of empowerment, participatory spaces and decen-
tralized decision-making. Communal Councils began forming in 2005 and were officially
recognized in 2006 with the Law of Communal Councils, which was reformed in 2009. Com-
munalCouncilsarelocallyrunorganizationswhichenablepeopletoexercisecommunitygov-
ernance and directly manage their own self-defined development needs over a self-defined
geographic space.12 The latest government figures indicate that there are 41,783 Communal
Councils registered to date, each of which consists of between 150 and 400 families in
urban areas, a minimum of 20 families in rural areas and at least 10 families in indigenous

11Productora y Distribuidora Venezolana de Alimentos.
12Communal Councils are not defined geographically by municipal boundaries.

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zones (MPComunas 2014). Through a participatory decision-making process, all members of
a community over theage of15 canparticipatein thecitizens’ assembly, which is thecouncil’s
principal decision-making body. Development plans and specific projects are put forward and
voted on by the citizens’ assembly who also elect representatives for two-year periods to work
in a variety of committees which focus on issues such as health, education, natural resource
management, finance, social control and monitoring, among others. Once approved by the
assembly, financing from the government and state-funded foundations is transferred to the
council’s finance commission, bypassing any regional, provincial or municipal organs.
Further, these councils are now combining in their respective geographic areas to create
‘Socialist Communes’. As of the time of writing, 612 communes have been officially regis-
tered, which collectively integrate their local Communal Council initiatives to cover larger
social and geographic scales over longer periods of time (MPComunas 2014). These
systems of self-management are intended to empower the formerly excluded classes in politi-
cal processes, enhancing local social capital and ‘the capacity of the poor to network and
organize collectively’ (Petras and Veltmeyer 2006, 84).

According to Venezuelan school teacher and community organizer Jesus Rojas – who is
also a member of the planning committee for his Communal Council in Rio Tocuyo, Lara,
Venezuela – the ‘formation of Communal Councils and Socialist Communes are constantly
growing and are playing the most important role in local community empowerment and the
revolutionary process’ (interview, 10 August 2013). As a member of the planning committee,
Rojas explained how the 14 Communal Councils in his region have officially registered as a
Socialist Commune and are in the process of implementing larger-scale projects including
expanding and improving infrastructure, electricity, water access and sewage systems, but
also providing agricultural inputs and technical assistance for farmers, and expanding ‘los
centros acopios’ (collection centres) where farmers can sell their crops and receive a better
price than the market alternative. This is one part of the state-owned Venezuelan Agricultural
Corporation’s initiative thatprocurescrops from farmers and distributes them toseveralsocial-
ist food markets. Farmers are therefore more able to control their own production needs and
directly take charge of their own situation in terms of inputs, production and access to
markets. For small farmers, one of the most important components of this process is that
‘they are free from the exploitative private intermediaries who used to reap all the profits
andtakeadvantageofbothproducersandconsumer’(interview,JesusRojas,10August2013).

While Communal Councils and Communes are dependent on financial resources from
the state, they represent a new organ and space which work in parallel with traditional
municipal and state-level government structures. This type of arrangement exemplifies
the multiple dimensions of sovereignty across scales and the dynamic state-society relation-
ship which uses ‘state power at one level to sustain activities at another plane’ (Iles and
Montenegro 2013, 9). Communal Councils and their extended networks of Socialist Com-
munes are therefore characteristic of a polycentric system wherein constituting elements act
independently yet are capable of ordering relationships to each other (Ostrom 1972). As
long as the state continues to guarantee the rights and autonomy of the Communal Councils
and Socialist Communes to define, manage and control their own local and regional devel-
opment needs, this kind of polycentric system may be a model for ‘building new insti-
tutional conduits’ for food sovereignty (Iles and Montenegro 2013, 9).

At the same time, decision-making within Communal Councils can be tense and contested,
and struggles over diverging interests mean that councils are also an arena of debate and con-
testation. Forms of class struggle therefore play out during Communal Council and Socialist
Communeassembliesassocietalactorswithdiverseinterestsnegotiatethecommunity’sdevel-
opment needs in a participatory way. While we cannot assume that food sovereignty is being

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advanced in all of the Communal Councils, this type of participatory democratic decision-
making and degree of local sovereignty over development processes by the community
promote the types of political spaces that food sovereignty movements seek to engender.

Lessons from Venezuela

The process of transformation in Venezuela is certainly not without its flaws as deeply
entrenched class conflicts continue and a ‘dual power’ endures (Enriquez 2013).
However, the continued expansion of Communal Councils, Socialist Communes and redis-
tributive agrarian reform programme is shifting power and autonomy to organized commu-
nities and creating dynamic spaces for new forms of state-society collaboration. An
important aspect of this process is that it is not just based on investment injection or
socio-economic protection. Public spaces for political participation are being created
through Communal Councils, which allow newly empowered pro-reformists within
society to engage and make demands to the state. Further, the agrarian reform programme,
though uneven and inconsistent in certain places, is reshaping rural power relations through
direct resource-based transfers of wealth. These pro-poor initiatives are leading to empow-
ering environments which enable people to not only fulfil their rights, but push for further
reforms. The combination of reforms which have facilitated spaces of interaction between
pro-reform state and societal actors and zero-sum resource-based transfers of wealth have
led to forms of empowerment and, despite tensions and inconsistencies, are creating con-
ditions for a transition to food sovereignty.13

Ecuador
Background

The election of Rafael Correa in 2006 was built on his campaign of a Citizen’s Revolution
(Revolución Cuidania) that promised, among other things, a redrafting of the constitution
in order to redefine national development objectives and citizenship rights. His populist rise
followed decades of rural neglect and limited political participation of peasant and indigenous
peoples. Following widespread privatization and economic liberalization in the mid-1990s,
rural organizations launched massive protests that put them, and their demands, on the
national political agenda. In his first year in office, Correa promised a constituent assembly
to incorporate citizen participation in rewriting the constitution which was widely supported
through a public referendum. The referendum was also a democratic means to elect the con-
stituent assembly itself, of which 80 out of 130 members were from Correa’s party (Movi-
miento Alianza Pais) (Conaghan 2008). As the constitution was rewritten through this
assembly, one of the strongest demands from social movements and civil society was for
the constitutional right to food sovereignty and agrarian reform (Fernández and Puente 2012).

The new constitution was ratified and signed into law on 28 September 2008. In it, food
sovereignty and agrarian reform are principally addressed in Chapter IV, which defines
food sovereignty as ‘a strategic objective and an obligation of the state that persons, com-
munities, peoples and nations achieve self-sufficiency with respect to healthy and culturally
appropriate food on a permanent basis’ (Asamblea Nacional 2008, emphasis added). The 14

13These new spaces developed during the Chávez era. How and the extent to which they continue to
evolve in the post-Chávez period remains an open-ended question as a shift in the ‘dual power’ of the
state and extreme class conflict in society could roll back these important spaces.

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‘responsibilities of the state’ include the adoption of fiscal policies to prevent reliance on
food imports; redistributive policies that permit peasants access to land, water and other
productive resources; development of scientific research and technological innovation to
guarantee food sovereignty; and the development and regulation of biotechnology,
among others (see Asemblea Nacional 2008, 138–9).

The explicit responsibilities of the state listed in the constitution are articulated into policy
initiatives through the National Plan of Good Living (Plan Nacional de Buen Vivir) (SEN-
PLADES 2009) and the Food Sovereignty Law (LORSA). This national development
plan establishes a more definitive ‘call to action’ by proposing a framework that outlines
the government’s objectives for ensuring all citizens a right to good living and their consti-
tutional promises. The term Good Living (Buen Vivir/Sumak Kawsay) is intended to reflect
an indigenous worldview of how to organize society around the community, environment
and living within socially determined needs (see Gudynas 2011; Flor 2013). What is particu-
larly interesting about the inclusion of the concept of Good Living in the constitution is that it
has enabled a shared political discourse of resource nationalization to integrate the interests of
indigenous social movements, peasant organizations and the Ecuadorian state. One of the
ways this has been translated in state policies is through the LORSA, which intends to
bridge the interests of civil society with the state in the implementation of the constitutional
mandate for food sovereignty and Good Living development objectives.

Land redistribution. Issues of land use and distribution are central to the way the new con-
stitution addresses food sovereignty. Immediately following the discussion of food sover-
eignty, the constitution states that ‘the state will determine the use and access to land that
should fulfill a social and environmental function’ (Article 282, 138). However, despite the
imperative for land redistribution in the new constitution and the continued calls for
peasant-led agrarian reform, little progress on policies and programmes that significantly
influence the distribution of land has been made (Giunta 2013).

The primary mechanism oriented towards land distribution is the National Land Fund,
which is intended to ‘regulate the equitable access of land for peasants’ (Article 282, 138).
However, while the newly drafted constitution identifies the state as the principal arbiter of
the distribution of land, it does little to elaborate how agrarian reform can and should take
place. In other words, there is no mention of what actors should be involved and what lands
are to be (re)distributed. The same article also prohibits the existence of latifundia and the
hoarding or privatization of water and its sources, but does not elaborate on how lands
would be expropriated (Giunta 2013).

The country’s post-2008 agrarian reform (Land Plan – Plan Tierras) was designed by
the Ministry of Agriculture, Livestock, Aquaculture and Fisheries (MAGAP) with several
ambitious and misleading promises on expropriating lantifundia and redistributing land
(both state-owned and expropriations). Publically, MAGAP has said it plans to transfer
2.5 million hectares to landless peasants through offering state land and expropriating
private and unused land. However, estimates of land in the hands of the state vary, both
by top government officials, and data in the Land Plan itself, from 69,000 hectares to
200,000 hectares (Peralta 2011, 44). Around 1 million hectares were supposed to be pur-
chased through the Land Fund; however, these promises have not been fulfilled (the
Land Plan ended in 2013). The latest budget evaluation in 2010 showed that only USD
4 million went to land redistribution despite an original proposition of USD 10 million
(Herrera et al. 2010). The plan also calls for a budget of USD 38 million over four years
to carry out the reform. As of March 2013, out of the over 2 million hectares promised
to peasants, the state has only distributed 25,000 hectares (MAGAP 2013).

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Despite the lack of comprehensive agrarian reform, the government has implemented
what it calls an ‘Agrarian Revolution’ that utilizes a territorial strategy of increasing
federal resources for agrarian schools and incentivizing farmer organization. A number
of programs and policies complement this strategy by seeking to expand market access
by farmers and their organizations through expanded social spending. However, even
these programs have been subject to scrutiny as federal funding levels have been grossly
unequal between different regions. While overall spending in agriculture has almost
doubled under Correa, his home province of Manabí received 71 percent of all agricultural
funds from 2005 to 2009 (Herrera et al. 2010).

Historically, MAGAP has been a political arm of Ecuador’s latifundia, and large private
interests continue to have a strong influence. These anti-reform actors have constrained the
potential for any structural change through agrarian reform efforts despite public commit-
ments of the president and his political allies. Indeed, MAGAP’s failure regarding agrarian
reform comes after decades of unfulfilled promises to peasant and indigenous agricultural-
ists (Yashar 2005). Thus, even though agrarian reform and food sovereignty is presented as
a goal of the state, there is little to show that MAGAP will substantially change in order to
put these goals into practice (Clark 2013). Even the most recently appointed minister of
MAGAP said, in May of 2011, that ‘peasants should have no illusions regarding the man-
agement [of MAGAP] and that a center-right institution is aiming to increase the pro-
ductivity and competitiveness of Ecuadorian agriculture in the global market’ (Rosero
et al. 2011). Overall, the Ecuadorian constitution fell short of translating the discursive
power of food sovereignty as an ongoing and contested political arena into substantive pol-
itical and economic change through agrarian reform.

Sovereignty of whom relative to what?

One of the key tensions with regards to food sovereignty in national politics in Ecuador is
that there are many civil society actors in Ecuador demanding food sovereignty and agrarian
reform. These groups have divergent conceptions of sovereignty and appropriate land use,
and vary in their approach to negotiate with state bureaucrats and bureaucracies (Yashar
2005, 72, 138–40). Indigenous groups have played an important role in particular,
having gained significant political strength and contributed to Correa’s electoral success
(Becker 2011a, 2011b). Some of the most prominent organizations that have contributed
to communicating demands to the constituent assembly have been: CONAIE,14

FENOCIN,15 FEINE,16 CONFEUNASSC-CNC17 and Ecuarunari.18 These movements
presented their long list of demands to the assembly, which included explicit objectives

14National Indigenous Confederation of Ecuador (Confederación Nacional de Indígenas del Ecuador
– CONAIE) is a confederation that includes some of the organizations also involved in the constituent
assembly (i.e. Ecuanari).
15National Federation of Indigenous and Afro-descendant Peasants of Ecuador (Federación Nacional
de Organizaciones Campesinas, Indígenas e Negras del Ecuador).
16Ecuadorian Federation of Indigenous Evangelicals (Federación Nacional de Indígenas
Evangelicas).
17National Affiliated Confederation of Peasant Social Security – National Peasant Coordination (Con-
federación Nacional de Afiliados al Seguro Social Campesino – Coordinadora Nacional Campesina).
18National Confederation of the Quichua Community (Confederación de los Pueblos de Nacionali-
dad de Kichua del Ecuador).

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for food sovereignty (see CONAIE 2007 and FENOCIN, n.d.),19 and called on the state to
play a central role by nationalizing natural resources, supporting small-scale agriculture
through policy initiatives, and redistributing land. The organization of the constituent
assembly was divided into several groups with specific tasks to coordinate and integrate
the various demands of civil society into the constitution. The sixth assembly took up
food sovereignty and agrarian issues and was specifically tasked with listening to indigen-
ous and peasant organizations. This assembly was where issues of sovereignty – both in
terms of food sovereignty and the sovereignty of indigenous nations – were raised and con-
tested. The various organizations included in this assembly used different strategies for
including their members and representing their voices to the assembly. For example,
while CONAIE sought to unify more generally around broad ‘themes’ of food sovereignty
and insisted on weekly discussions with the assembly, FENOCIN was fixed on land reform
and made demands in a more unidirectional manner (Rosero et al. 2011). Beyond these
divergent strategies, the organizations also had different understandings of what ‘nation’
meant and how and to what degree ‘sovereignty’ was based on collective nation building
independent of the state (in the context of plurinationality). These organizations differed
racially, geographically, demographically, economically and culturally, but were ultimately
required to negotiate and agree upon a coherent national conception of food sovereignty.

From November 2007 until January 2008, the sixth assembly established a ‘citizens’
forum’ throughout numerous towns and cities across Ecuador that resulted in around 250
proposals for food sovereignty and other agrarian issues. Two prominent academics from
Correa’s party analysed the proposals and drafted a synthesized report that was presented
to the assembly (Rosero 2008). After this report passed with a majority vote in the assem-
bly, a meeting was held with leaders of peasant organizations and social movements to vali-
date the results. During this meeting, there were significant disagreements over the
understandings of what food sovereignty meant for each organization – what was described
as ‘putting personal interests [of the organizations] over that of the collective good of the
Ecuadorian people’ (Andrango 2008 cited in Rosero et al. 2011). When the organizations
finally arrived at an agreement (what is called the ‘Consensus of Quito’), many concessions
had been made in order to approve a final plan for the assembly. Conceptually, they all
agreed that food sovereignty and its policies were the right of communities but should
be executed through state policies. Agrarian reform, and the expropriation of ‘unproductive
or unused lands’, was demanded but met with resistance within the assembly, which
informed civil society leaders that such a reform would be dealt with through legal
measures and carried out by MAGAP (Herrera et al. 2010; Rosero et al. 2011). Thus,
while the Constituent Assembly opened up a novel space of democratic engagement
around food sovereignty, the execution of the resulting vision was left in the hands of
the same old structures and bureaucracy. As described above, the execution of the food
sovereignty vision from the constitution was ultimately unsuccessful. The necessity to
produce a single government document in a short amount of time was undoubtedly a pro-
blematic task for civil society. As a result of these conditions and concessions, a strong alli-
ance did not form between these organizations and the pro-reform members of the
constituent assembly.

19CONAIE’s proposal can be read here: http://www.iee.org.ec/publicaciones/INDIGENA/
ConaieAsamblea ;

FENOCIN’S proposal can be read here: http://www.fenocin.org/.

1188 Ben McKay et al.

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http://www.iee.org.ec/publicaciones/INDIGENA/ConaieAsamblea

¿QUIENES SOMOS?

Lessons from Ecuador

While the constituent assembly opened the opportunity for both state and societal actors to
participate in the rethinking of national development priorities, the structural transform-
ations of society and the economy as envisioned in the constitution have yet to be realized.
Many indigenous organizations and peasant movements have since withdrawn support
from the Correa government, with CONAIE’s president even calling his administration
‘capitalist and neoliberal’, as early as 2009 (El Universal 2009). While the constitution
should be celebrated as a significant victory for citizens’ rights to food sovereignty, the
guarantor of those rights will need to revisit longstanding demands for structural change
to fulfil its constitutional duties.

Rather than facilitating spaces for communities to construct and define their own food
systems, constitutional food sovereignty in Ecuador relies almost exclusively on the state as
sovereign rather than any kind of mutually empowering state-society synergy. In other
words, ‘[t]he shift in state-society relations in Ecuador has largely strengthened the
power of the state vis-à-vis civil society’ (Clark 2013, 26). Though the food sovereignty
concept provided a means through which social movements and peasant organizations
could make demands for reform, state-level food sovereignty efforts failed to change exist-
ing relations of production and power (see Giunta 2013). In this context, food sovereignty
was viewed as potential mechanism of agrarian reform, rather than as an end in itself. A
critical obstacle was that redistributive agrarian reform did not materialize, in large part
due to political contestations within the state apparatus (i.e. MAGAP). Nevertheless, the
process of rewriting the constitution did open up what Deborah Yashar (2005, 29) calls
‘political associational space’, or the ability for organizations to dialogue and ‘engage in
sustained legal organizing’. Yet this political moment failed to produce a coherent and com-
pelling enough vision to ensure the restructuring of political and economic resources in the
country. The historical and ongoing constraints of government bureaucracies erected insur-
mountable structural barriers that prevented the radical redistribution of power and material
resources. That is, in this case the state had the autonomy to establish constitutional goals
around food sovereignty that were quite radical, but pro-reform state and societal actors
lacked the capacity, or strong ‘social networks’, to take advantage of the political opportu-
nity and transform these goals into the kind of change that significantly alter food systems in
ways that support food sovereignty (see Yashar 2005, 79).

Bolivia
Background

Bolivia’s military dictatorships in the 1970s and early 1980s, followed by the onset of neo-
liberal policies through the structural adjustment programme’s ‘New Economic Policy’
(NEP) in 1985, dismantled public services and exposed vulnerable rural livelihoods to
foreign competition and capital accumulation. This was compounded by what Kohl and
Farthing call a ‘perfect economic storm’ consisting of:

the inability of two successive governments to generate jobs and significant economic
growth; an aggressive coca eradication programme that destroyed the regional economy
of Cochabamba; the collapse of the Argentine economy, eliminating Bolivia’s largest
labour market and, as important, terminating workers’ remittances; and the decline in gov-
ernment revenue occasioned by privatization of the state oil company. (Kohl and Farthing
2006, 149)

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The privatization of the state-owned water company SEMAPA (Servicio Municipal de
Agua Potable y Alcantarillado) and the resulting ‘Cochabamba Water War’ (Olivera and
Lewis 2004), combined with massive protests by Bolivia’s largest union of peasants,
CSUTCB20 and a general strike called by Bolivia’s Worker’s Confederation (COB),
reflected the general discontent among the Bolivian middle and lower classes. This led
to a tumultuous three years of clashes between protesters and the state, including violent
military repressions of protests and the death of over 60 protesters, and ultimately, the over-
throw of two Bolivian presidents. The 2005 election saw the clear victory of Evo Morales,
leader of the coca growers’ union and a central figure in negotiating the transition of power
from former President Gonzalo Sanchez de Lozada and his Vice-President turned President
Carlos Mesa. This launched a new era in Bolivian politics, led by Morales’ party, the Move-
ment Towards Socialism (MAS), which was closely linked to the emergent indigenous,
anti-colonial and populist social movements that had come together in opposition to the
neo-liberal reforms of the 1990s and beyond. This broad coalition of peasant, worker
and indigenous organizations came to form the Pacto de Unidad (Unity Pact) which was
essential in Morales’ rise to power and became integrated, to varying degrees, within the
new regime.

One of Morales’ first priorities was to initiate a process through which a new consti-
tution would be written. This followed up on the demands for a constituent assembly
made by increasingly visible indigenous and peasant organizations beginning in the early
2000s, which sought to ensure the protection of indigenous territory in light of the new rec-
ognition of Bolivia as a multicultural and pluri-ethnic state (Assies 2006). A Constituent
Assembly was convened in 2006, but the struggles of this assembly to write a constitution
that captured the goals of its highly varied members – 255 elected constituents – reflect the
deep divisions within the country and the difficulties of shifting towards inclusive and par-
ticipatory democracy. When the constitution was written and finally approved in 2009, it
included food sovereignty as a central element of several sections. It first refers to food
sovereignty in the context of international relations and treaties, suggesting that they
must function to meet the interests and sovereignty – including food sovereignty – of the
people. Article 255 (Constitución Política del Estado Plurinacional de Bolivia, 2009)
stipulates:

negotiation, signing, and ratification of international treaties shall be governed by the principles
of … food security and food sovereignty for all; prohibiting the import, production and market-
ing of GMOs [genetically modified organisms] and toxic elements that can harm human health
and the environment.

Further, the chapter on ‘Sustainable Integrated Rural Development’ emphasizes food sover-
eignty as integral to rural development, laying out the objective to ‘ensure food security and
sovereignty, prioritizing domestic production and consumption … and establishing mech-
anisms to protect Bolivian agriculture’ (Constitución Política del Estado Plurinacional de
Bolivia, 2009, art. 405, 406).

The constitutional presence of food sovereignty follows up on the inclusion of the
concept in the other important policy documents of Morales’ administration. For instance,
in the first National Development Plan elaborated under Morales in 2006, food sovereignty

20Confederación Sindical Única de Trabajadores Campesinas de Bolivia, or the Confederated Union
of Rural Workers of Bolivia.

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was laid out as a key element of a new vision of development. In 2008, this was elaborated
into the Rural Development and Food Sovereignty and Security policy (PSSA), which was
to be implemented through four main programs: (1) SEMBRAR,21 which promotes private-
public partnerships and is largely dependent on overseas development assistance for short-
term investment projects designed to increase food production (MDRyT 2010, 63, Liendo
2011); (2) CRIAR,22 which finances community-led initiatives to support small-scale agri-
culture (MDRyT 2010); (3) EMPODERAR,23 which funds agro-entrepreneurial develop-
ment projects (Liendo 2011, MDRyT 2010); and (4) Promotion of Agroecological
Production (Fomento a la Produccion Ecologica/Organica), which supports agroecologi-
cal producers with production and marketing {MDRyT 2010, 66). These programs relied
upon external financing and did not significantly restructure agriculture or governance,
nor did they transform relations of production. Thus, the programs had limited impact on
food sovereignty goals.

A more direct potential pathway to supporting food sovereignty was Bolivia’s ‘Agrar-
ian Revolution’ under the 2006 Ley de Reconduccion no. 3545 (Extension Law), which
redefines natural resources as state property, and puts more emphasis on state control
and oversight over land consolidation and labour relations (Valdivia 2010, 74). The pro-
gramme is characterized by four main policy aims: (1) distribution of state-owned land
and redistribution by expropriation of land not serving a ‘socio-economic function’
(FES) to indigenous peoples and peasant communities; (2) mechanization of agriculture;
(3) subsidized credits for small-scale producers; and (4) markets for the products of
peasant origin (Urioste 2010). By 2010, the agrarian reform appeared to be relatively suc-
cessful; more than 31 million hectares were titled and over 100,000 of these titles were dis-
tributed to 174,249 beneficiaries (INRA 2010; Redo et al. 2011). However, in the
Department of Santa Cruz, where over two thirds of total cultivated land is located includ-
ing 98 percent of large-scale soy plantations, a mere 12 percent of the territory has been
regularized (Redo et al. 2011, 234). In addition, 91 percent of titled land has ‘been
endowed by the state and are composed entirely of forest reserves’ (Redo et al. 2011,
237). Thus, while the Agrarian Revolution was intended to challenge the prevailing
unequal agrarian structure, it has failed to do so, while also contributing to widespread
deforestation as new frontiers expand into Bolivia’s rich biodiverse areas of Amazonian,
Andean and Chaco forests (Hecht 2005, 377).

This inability to dismantle unequal agrarian structures is related to a historical consoli-
dation of elite power, particularly in the eastern lowlands region referred to as the ‘Media
Luna’ for its shape that looks like a half moon. Bolivia’s eastern lowlands of Santa Cruz
have been dominated by a capitalist class of agro-elites since the agrarian reform of
1953. This reform, devised by the US-designed Bohan Plan’s ‘march to the east’, distrib-
uted large-scale landholdings between 500 and 50,000 hectares to well-connected capitalist
elites (Valdivia 2010, 69). This was followed by fraudulent land and resource concentration
by the dictatorships from 1971 to 1982 (Webber 2008; Urioste 2010), and the subsequent
neoliberal-era reforms prior to the election of Evo Morales in 2006 (Kay and Urioste 2007).
A high degree of territorial dominance and structural inequality in the lowlands has there-
fore been rooted in historical processes and institutionalized socially through decades of
political and economic influences.

21Meaning ‘to plant’ or ‘to sow’.
22Creación de Iniciativas Alimentarias Rurales.
23Emprendimientos Organizados para el Desarrollo Rural Autogestionario.

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Though the historical class inequalities undoubtedly have created barriers for pro-reform
social forces, the current ‘Agrarian Revolution’ has also failed to dismantle such structures.
The land ceiling of 5000 ha, for example, is essentially rendered obsolete by Article 315 (II)
which states that if a corporation has several ‘owners’ or ‘partners’ each can have up to a
maximum of 5000 hectares, making land-size limits virtually non-existent. Furthermore,
the land ceiling only applies to land acquired after 2009, adding to its ineffectiveness
(Article 399). The ‘Agrarian Revolution’ also encourages and provides credit for farmers
to mechanize their production methods, failing to foresee the increased dependence on pet-
roleum-based inputs and debt creation this would entail for the majority of family farmers
who control under 0.7 ha of land each24 (Urioste 2010, 9; INE 2011; World Bank 2007).
These shortcomings in transforming the unequal land-based social structure impede a
pathway towards food sovereignty. This is compounded by the fact that the externally
funded project-based PSSA programmes are established through temporary capital injection
for relatively short-term project goals.

Sovereignty of whom relative to what?

The Morales administration has mobilized food sovereignty as an element in a broader
project of decolonization. In the newly rewritten constitution and recent framework laws,
they draw upon indigenous and social movement ontologies – like Sumaq Kawsay25 and
food sovereignty – that contest Northern visions of development (Gudynas 2011). The
uses of these concepts are both strategic and essentializing, but are an attempt to build
an anti-colonial foundation while also seeking to address poverty, particularly in the
rural sector, within that global structural environment. However, the Morales adminis-
tration has been heavily critiqued for failing to follow through on its radical positions
and promises, suggesting that this move is simply symbolic, at best, or a strategy to
shore up supporters and expand power, at worst. For instance, Bolivian sociologist and
social critic Silvia Rivera Cusicanqui argues that Morales’ claims of indigeneity and his
calls for decolonization are purely rhetorical, and that the work of his administration has
done little to disrupt the ‘hegemonic models that places [Bolivia] as the back yard of the
large transnational companies’ (quoted in Erbol 2014).

Morales has used the threat of the conservative lowland politics as a way to keep social
movements in line and remove their ability to exert pressure over the direction his adminis-
tration takes – ultimately silencing the social movement threat while at the same time keeping
up the appearance of widespread social movement support and involvement (Silva 2014).
Despite this, however, social movement groups in Bolivia are increasingly stepping away
from Morales and vocalizing a critique that his administration is failing to put into policy
and practice any real structural change that reflects the indigenous ontologies Morales pur-
ports to support. For instance, these groups heavily criticize the continued resource extraction
model of development (Weinberg 2010a, 2010b; Fabricant 2013), which Morales relies upon
to generate the funds to support the expansion of social protections for the poor and rural
sector (Postero 2010). This emerging schism was visible at the 2011 World People’s Confer-
ence on the Rights of Mother Earth, hosted by Morales in Cochabamba, Bolivia, which

24Authors’ calculation based on data from INE (2011) and World Bank (2007, 19) [(2,861,330 ha total
arable land × 14%)/(660,000 total farm units × 87% smallholders) = 0.698 ha per unit].
25Closely related to the Good Living concept deployed in Ecuador, discussed above.

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brought together government representatives and delegates from social movements around
the world. A discussion on resource extraction within the Morales administration was
pushed out of the official conference (see Albro 2013), with the official organizers of the con-
ference seeking to silence these critiques of the Morales government.

Overall, as Morales’ decolonization project unfolds, there is the explicit focus on building
Bolivian sovereignty vis-à-vis international institutions and powers, particularly the United
States. But there is also the threat to national sovereignty from the elites in the eastern low-
lands. In this context, the state policies are guided by defending sovereignty at the national
level such that a significant redistribution of power has not emerged. At the same time,
while there is the appearance of productive state-society relations – particularly with social
movements – in fact these relations have led to a high degree of co-optation by the state,
resulting in a loss of autonomy amongst social movements and thus a lack of empowerment.

Lessons from Bolivia

While in the constitution and elsewhere, such as the National Development Plans, the Law
of Mother Earth and the Integral Development for Living Well, food sovereignty has been
enshrined as a right of Bolivian peoples, the actual policies put into effect erode the possi-
bilities to enact food sovereignty goals in practice. For example, in a follow-up to the Law
of Mother Earth, Law 337 seeks to reduce deforestation and improve agricultural pro-
ductivity in the Amazon region of the country. But this law was supported by the large agri-
business lobby as it actually has the effect of encouraging agribusiness expansion in the
region because it creates the expectations of future pardon for illegal deforestation and
sets very low fines for such transgressions (Mongabay 2013). Despite a general commit-
ment to food sovereignty, there has been an inability to enact meaningful structural
changes that might contribute to the achievement of food sovereignty on the ground.

Thus, in Bolivia, these commitments to support food sovereignty have largely failed
to create spaces for participatory democratic decision-making and control over resources,
or to give local peoples the opportunity to carry out a food sovereignty strategy as
defined by them. Nonetheless, Morales has worked to throw off the mantle of control
by global elites, consolidating state power over national resources and pushing back
against control by external state and international institutions. However, the high
degree of control over land and resources by agro-industrial elites in the ‘Media Luna’
has constrained the capacity of the state to put forth and carry out food sovereignty
reforms. While the Morales administration is much more sympathetic than previous gov-
ernments in Bolivia to the concerns, needs and ideas of rural and indigenous peoples and
popular classes, the challenge of creating a space for alternative notions of development
and exercising sovereignty in the face of global and national elites has constrained the
state’s capacity towards structural change. Furthermore, many of the key social move-
ments have lost a certain degree of autonomy through their alliance and direct affiliation
with the MAS. While recent developments have led to divisions within the Pacto de
Unidad, perhaps the most important organization for food sovereignty, the CSUTCB,
has maintained a strong alliance with the MAS and has arguably lost much of its auton-
omy to push the state for more reforms.

State pathways towards food sovereignty

The rights to food sovereignty as expressed by La Via Campesina and federal governments
in Venezuela, Bolivia and Ecuador appear relatively similar in description. However, the

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alignment of state and social forces and the character of state power (state autonomy and
capacity) differ within each case, leading to different outcomes. In this paper, we argue
that despite similar state-level rhetorical and constitutional uses of food sovereignty in
these three countries, the concept has been carried out according to particular goals, strat-
egies and processes with very different results.

The case studies examined here demonstrate that legal and constitutional frameworks
alone fail to create conditions for food sovereignty. Laws and rights alone do not lead to
social justice, which depends as well on a way to put these nominal protections into prac-
tice. As Patel (2009, 669) argues, ‘it is insufficient to consider only the structures that might
guarantee the rights that constitute food sovereignty – it is also vital to consider the substan-
tive policies, process, and politics that go to make up food sovereignty’. This is particularly
true in relation to rural spaces and poor or marginalized peoples. These legal frames and
protections are interpreted and implemented in a matter that reflects the prevailing social
relations of power in the countryside and nation more broadly. Laws and policies are, as
Borras and Franco (2010, 9; see also Franco 2008) point out,

not self-interpreting and not self-implementing. It is during the interaction between various,
often conflicting, actors within the state and in society that land policies are actually interpreted,
activated and implemented (or not) in a variety of ways from one place to another over time.

This is why it is helpful to think of food sovereignty efforts in terms of autonomy and
capacity, to examine how the ability to undertake meaningful reforms is promoted or con-
strained along these two dimensions of power.

If state food sovereignty efforts are going to truly promote peoples’ ‘right to self-
determination … to redefine for themselves the substance of the food relations appropriate
to their geographies’ (Patel and McMichael 2004, 249; see above), they must put into
place radically new policies, processes and politics that facilitate these goals. This will
necessarily entail rethinking the contemporary structures through which governance
around food and agricultural systems takes place. Thus, food sovereignty is a space of
political and social struggle to radically restructure relations of resource access and
control. Creating such space depends upon a political restructuring that allows for the
democratic conversation about food policy, rather than being the force that brings
about such changes (Patel 2009, 679). Bolivian and Ecuadorian attempts to implement
food sovereignty projects, such as Bolivia’s public-private partnerships for food pro-
duction strategies (SEMBRAR) and their emphasis on agricultural modernization and
mechanization, or Ecuador’s reliance on expanded agricultural credit as a central
element of their agrarian reform, are more aptly described as temporary residual solutions
than a significant restructuring of social relations. Indeed, while such initiatives may help
to resolve immediate needs and bring greater public and political attention to the rural
sector, they fail to directly contribute to the creation of participatory democratic
decision-making or lead to the transfers of wealth and power that are much more
likely to generate the restructuring of social relations necessary for food sovereignty.
These efforts to create favourable market conditions, technological transfers and the injec-
tion of short-term investment represent residual approaches that repackage market-
oriented strategies of food security as food sovereignty rather than facilitate structural
change (see Bernstein et al. 1992). Without any transformative processes being
pursued, food sovereignty as a discourse has been used to galvanize support across agrar-
ian and indigenous populations. Food sovereignty strategies have therefore been ‘simpli-
fied’ as temporary projects and capital injections, which ultimately fail to address the

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structural inequalities that govern capitalist food systems. While this may contribute to
state sovereignty relative to both internal and external forces, it does not contribute to
sovereignty at the community or local level.

Among the three cases examined here, the attempts by the Venezuelan state have come
the closest to facilitating a structural shift that promotes local control over food and food
systems. Venezuela’s Communal Councils have been instrumental in empowering pre-
viously excluded local people through participatory democratic processes. Combined
with a redistributive state-led agrarian reform programme that is working to dismantle an
unequal agrarian structure, Venezuela is undergoing a process of structural transformation
and creating spaces for people to define, determine, manage and implement their food and
agricultural systems in a decentralized, participatory way. In other words, the state is estab-
lishing conditions with the onus on the people to define and create food sovereignty. Pro-
reformist state actors are attempting to restructure the social relations of production through
land-based transfers of power as well as political transfers of power through Communal
Councils and Socialist Communes. Though these processes are not without tensions and
are unravelling unevenly across geographic space and between government initiatives
(see Kappeler 2013), they are facilitating local empowerment through participation and
are conducive to establishing mutually reinforcing symbiotic state-society relations that
can reshape existing power structures. Approaching problems of food systems and
unequal agrarian structures in such a relational way has contributed to the ability of
Venezuela to instigate the transformative change required do develop a viable pathway
toward food sovereignty.

Contemporary corporate assault on land resources and labour in the context of mul-
tiple crises (food, climate, fuel, finance) and the related global land rush provide evi-
dence that the state has an important role to play regarding access to and control over
land and its productive resources (Borras et al. 2012; Wolford et al. 2013). While
state action can promote, prevent, reverse and/or divert pro-poor reforms, societal
actors can influence and shape such actions (see Barraclough 1999). Thus, where oppor-
tunities exist for the initiation of, or engagement in, spaces of participatory involvement,
it is important that politically mobilized and organized societal actors engage in such
processes and, where possible, interact with pro-reform state actors. Food sovereignty
entails, thus, a dynamic state-society interaction – indeed, an interplay of sovereignty
at different scales.

Conclusion

In this paper, we examine the state-level actions in three Latin American countries that have
instituted a constitutional right to food sovereignty. We acknowledge that the state is a
necessary component of food sovereignty efforts, since it is only through state-level
action that structural transformations necessary for food sovereignty can be pursued. But
the state cannot stand alone on food sovereignty. After all, food sovereignty as a contested
terrain entails multiple sovereignties – at the local/community level and the state level.
Thus, the continuous symbiotic interaction between empowered pro-reform state and
societal actors is a necessary prerequisite for food sovereignty.

Even with a shared leftist orientation and commitment in the three countries examined
here, food sovereignty efforts took place within particular contexts, goals and strategies. In
Bolivia, the concept of food sovereignty was integrated into a decolonizing project vis-à-vis
the United States aimed at building up the sovereignty of the nation-state. But this sover-
eignty project ultimately did not involve a devolution of power internally, and, indeed,

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Bolivia’s food and agricultural policy has relied on and reproduced existing inequalities.
In Ecuador, state-level attempts to be inclusive ended up placing state institutions in a
position to adjudicate between differing visions of food sovereignty, ultimately reducing
or ‘simplifying’ food sovereignty into pro-poor ‘residual’ projects rather than a broader
transformative pathway with comprehensive agrarian reform. Additionally, political ten-
sions within government institutions failed to effectively translate and carry out the redis-
tributive demands of civil society. In Venezuela, however, pro-reform state actors are
pursuing a strategy oriented at dismantling existing unequal agrarian structures and trans-
forming relations of access and control, while simultaneously opening up space for par-
ticipatory democratic decision-making at the local level. We suggest this presents the
most promising trajectory for transformative change around food sovereignty. While
such a structural transformation of society and the economy does not necessarily
ensure that food sovereignty be realized (indeed, sovereignty is an ongoing political
project), these changes ‘sow the seeds’ for peoples to cultivate food sovereignty in
ways that enable communities to ‘have the democratic conversation about food policy
in the first place’ (Patel 2009, 670).

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Ben McKay is a PhD candidate at the International Institute of Social Studies (ISS) in The Hague, and
is part of the research programme Political Economy of Resources, Environment and Populations
Studies. He is currently researching agrarian transformation in Bolivia in the context of the ‘soy
complex’ and the rise of BRICS (Brazil, Russia, India, China, South Africa) countries. email:
mckay@iss.nl

Ryan Nehring is a PhD student at Cornell University in the Department of Development Sociology.
His research interests include the political economy of rural development in Latin America and, more
recently, the emergence of Brazilian South-South Cooperation in African agriculture. email: rln53@
cornell.edu

Marygold Walsh-Dilley is a postdoctoral associate in the Department of Development Sociology at
Cornell University. Her research interests include agriculture and rural development, social-ecological
change and globalization, and food and land politics, with a particular focus on agrarian change
among indigenous communities in Andean Bolivia. email: ms396@cornell.edu

1200 Ben McKay et al.

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Venezuela’s New Constitution

An Assessment of Venezuela’s Bolivarian Revolution at Twelve Years

http://documents.worldbank.org/curated/en/2007/09/8476438/bolivia-land-agricultural-development-project

mailto:mckay@iss.nl

mailto:rln53@cornell.edu

mailto:ms396@cornell.edu

https://www.researchgate.net/publication/258884038

Abstract

Introduction
The ‘state’ of food sovereignty
Food sovereignty in Latin America: three cases
Venezuela
Background
Access to food and markets
Sovereignty of whom relative to what?
Lessons from Venezuela
Ecuador
Background
Land redistribution
Sovereignty of whom relative to what?
Lessons from Ecuador
Bolivia
Background
Sovereignty of whom relative to what?
Lessons from Bolivia

State pathways towards food sovereignty
Conclusion
References

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