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Understanding Links Between Food and Social Justice as Expressed Through Food Sovereignty

Introduction

Up till the advent of capitalism and the industrialization of food production and agrarian processes,

the right to access food was essentially "imbedded in social relations within each society through a

variety of redistributive mechanisms" (Spitz 1985). However, the 20th century and beyond has been

witness to direct attacks on the sovereignty of communities to manage their food systems from a

cartel of transnational corporations, international financial institutions, think-tanks, philanthropic

organizations and geopolitical entities. Consequently, food sovereignty has arisen as a concerted

international grassroots movement to challenge a global food regime, and reclaim the power to

produce food for a future defined by human dignity and prosperity.

This essay critically evaluates the various facets of the reigning paradigm linking food and social

justice in a broader scheme of things rather than within the scope of specific case studies. The

undercurrent of food sovereignty is explored in an ontologically constructive manner, which

demanded more philosophical insight and reflection into the subject matter. However, varied

examples taken from journals, reports, books and news articles have been used throughout to

illustrate the analytical thought process.

Social Justice and Food

Rawls (1999) weighs in the principles of social justice as the rights and duties assigned through social

institutions for an equitable distribution of the benefits and burdens of social cooperation.

Therefore, social justice demands a form of a social contract, as advanced in the philosophical

treatises of social thinkers such as Kant, Rousseau and Locke, and thus becomes a case of "rational

prudence applied to an aggregative conception of the welfare of the group" (Rawls 1999, pg. 21).

Hence, when the welfare of communities is at stake, such as due to increasing food insecurity and

malnutrition (Greenberg 2010), inequality in addressing basic human needs becomes more acute

(Basok et al. 2006) and freedom from want and oppression as well as "access to equal opportunity"

are compromised (Allen 2008, pg. 158), the indicators of social justice worsen. The state's failure as a

guarantor further disenfranchises traditional food producers, creating space for alternative food

movements to coalesce and challenge the dominant neoliberal food regime (Patel 2009).

The Struggle to Define Food Sovereignty

La Via Campesina defined food sovereignty as the right of each nation to maintain and develop its

own capacity to produce its basic foods respecting cultural and productive diversity during its

second international conference in April 1996, in Mexico (Claeys 2013, pg. 3). Via Campesina is the

world's leading peasant farmer-led grassroots organization and grew out of Latin American social

movements such as those in Brazil, Mexico and Ecuador during the 1980s and 1990s that confronted

the neoliberal and oligarchic policies of globalist entities such as the World Trade Organization

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(WTO) as well as the North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA). After bearing the brunt of the

conditionality measures and structural adjustment programs of the World Bank and the

International Monetary Fund (IMF), it finally emerged as a social "movement, not just a mere

coordination" at the turn of the century (Torres and Rosset 2010, pg. 159). Henceforth, new human

rights, referred to as the "rights master frame," would shape the "cosmopolitan, multicultural, and

anti-hegemonic" assertions of a transnational agrarian movement (Claeys 2012).

It was in the setting of the Food and Agriculture Organization's (FAO) World Food Summit of 1996

that food sovereignty was formally expressed by Via Campesina as being integral for ensuring social

justice on a global scale (Hickey and Mitta 2003). The statement by the NGO Forum, representing

1,200 such organizations, stressed upon the de jure recognition of food sovereignty as a basic human

right and not as an "international political weapon" (FAO 1996).

The Green "Mean" Revolution

Where the Marxist revolutions in Russia and China were acts of imposing an ideological and political

framework on "value systems and ways of life of entire populations" (Fukuyama 1992), the 'Green

Revolution' of the 1960s and 1970s was an assault on the ecological systems supporting human life

itself (Shiva, 1991). In an apparent response to the food shortage crisis prevailing in Mexico in the

early 1940s, the Rockefeller Foundation (RF) initiated an agriculture research program to improve

the yields of the basic food crops, (Kohler 2009, pg. 52). However, the program failed to adapt the

hybrid seeds to the Mexican agricultural milieu and was modified to carry forward those elements

that had already been Americanized (Fitzgerald 1968), whereby leading to the establishment of the

International Centre for Maize and Wheat Improvement (CIMMYT) in 1966. Its wheat lines were

credited with enabling Pakistan and India to avert mass starvation, eventually becoming self-

sufficient in having their food production surpass the rate of population growth (CIMMYT 2015,

Kohler 2009). But this was to come at the cost of a heavy dependence on chemical fertilizer inputs,

which in addition to decreasing soil fertility, incurred price hikes during gas shortages in 2010-11,

with the burden passing on to the farmers and consumers, leading to food inflation, poverty and

worsening socioeconomic indicators (Omar 2011).

Ideological Invasion of Food Sovereignty

Malthus (1798) had voiced fears that geometrically increasing human populations would outpace

the arithmetically governed food supply, whereby burdening the planet's natural resources. Even

though Malthus overtly asserted, rather than demonstrated, the causal link between population and

natural resource scarcity (Barnett and Morse 2011), his views formed the basis of a Hegelian

dialectic surrounding the links between human population, social justice and food sovereignty. The

thesis thus is that increasing populations will not be able to feed and support themselves and thus

industrial means have to be employed under a technological elite to deliver the required volumes

(Ross 2003). The antithesis dictates that social inequalities, conflicts and famines, purportedly having

resulted from a runaway population explosion, caused environmental degradation and natural

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resource depletion. The synthesis that emerges is that unabated human existence itself is the root of

the problem.

Public Enemy: Humanity

The founding of the Club of Rome in 1968 brought together prominent and influential statesmen,

businessmen, scientists, economists to deliberate upon "The Predicament of Mankind" (Roebuck

2012). The Club's publication The Limits to Growth asserted rising population levels as directly

responsible for ecological disruption through the demand for food, labelling it as the "world

problematique" and laying the onus of responsibility on developing countries (Meadows et al. 1972).

However, the second publication Mankind at the Turning Point conveyed the antithesis to the

problematique; looming environmental and economic disasters were dependent on factors within

human control, and were thus preventable (Mesarovic and Pestel 1974). The synthesis or final

solution to the problematique was presented as the "world resolutique" in The First Global

Revolution. Calamities such as resource scarcity, famines and global warming are merely symptoms

and not causes of the problem and thus do not suffice as a common enemy against whom the world

can unite. What emerges is that the "real enemy is humanity itself" and so constitutes "a common

threat that must be confronted by everyone together" (King and Schneider 1991, pg. 75).

WTO's Attack on Food Sovereignty

Properly managed local, national as well as regional food and grain reserves are key for enhancing

food security and price stability (ActionAid 2011). In a sort of a catch-22 situation, the volatility of

agricultural prices intensifies the climate of uncertainty surrounding farmers' decisions, delaying

investment and related revenue streams (UNEP 2009), whereby adversely affecting the

replenishment of local food reserves. WTO's 'one-size-fits-all' approach towards global agriculture,

especially in developing countries, erodes food sovereignty and weakens social justice (Watkins and

Mahmood 2005).

This situation becomes all the more acute when initially an influx of cheap foodstuffs drives the

prices below the cost of production, consequently putting family farmers and peasants out of a

livelihood (Rosset 2006). Such practices are overtly facilitated by the WTO's Uruguay Round progeny,

the Agreement on Agriculture (AoA), which essentially enables cartels of transnational

agribusinesses, such as Monsanto, Cargill and Dupont to benefit from taxpayer funded government

subsidies to exploit economies of scale in food production (NFFC 2003). The AoA enables global food

corporations, amongst others, to bypass domestic market protection mechanisms, such as price

control policies, and "dump" surplus food (Murphy 2005). AoA's Article 4 mandates that member

nations have to do away with any border control measures that "restrict the volume or distort the

price of imports of agricultural products" and be replaced by regular customs duties that are more

geared towards unfettered market access (WTO 1994).

Intellectual Property Abhors Biodiversity and Breeds Inequality

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Plant and agricultural biodiversity is both the backbone and the safety net of the food security and

sovereignty of communities across the world. However, hybrid seeds developed under the

Consultative Group on International Agriculture Research (CGIAR) consortium of research centres

have served as mini Trojan horses in hijacking access to indigenous seed varieties and agrarian

knowledge. The magnanimously dubbed 'Miracle' rice seeds developed by the International Rice

Research Institute (IRRI) destroyed around 4,000 traditional rice cultivars alone (GRAIN and PEAC

2010), thus earning the former the reprehensible moniker of 'Seeds of Imperialism' (Shiva 1992, pg.

44). Such seeds were the veritable harbingers of the invasion of industrial agricultural technologies

such as petrochemical fertilizers, pesticides and farming machinery that subjected not just the local

growers but also the consumers to a form of corporate colonialism.

Terminating the Right to Food Sovereignty

In recent years, not only have the trusses of social justice around food been weakened, but have also

been made a mockery of. It is quite inexplicable that by modifying or inserting a single gene in a

plant, especially an edible one such as wheat, soy bean or corn, one can file a patent for ownership

of the entire organism as if it had been created anew (Shiva 2013). In a bid to safeguard the

intellectual property (IP) rights of its genetically modified seedsMonsanto Company was on the

verge of acquiring a "Technology Protection System" in 1998 that would essentially "terminate" a

seed in the successive generation of the original parent GMO seed. Monsanto reportedly refrained

from commercializing the "terminator technology" amidst a flurry of worldwide protests from

farmers that rely on saving seed each season to sustain their livelihood (Ohlgart 2002, pg. 477).

Even though Monsanto claims to have upheld its commitment since 1999 of not having

commercialized sterile seed technology (Monsanto 2015), it could still be prompted to resort to

employing it if patent control begins to fail (Ledford 2013). Moreover, Tiruvadi Jagadisan, the former

director of Monsanto India revealed in 2010 that the company has a history of falsifying scientific

data in order to get approval, casting further doubt on Monsanto's claims and credibility (Sharma

2010).

Codex Alimentarius

The Codex Alimentarius Commission of the United Nations is one body that can be credited with

ushering in a 'New Food Order' for the world at large. Under the pretext of food safety standards,

the Codex is going to serve as the ultimate challenge to food sovereignty and social justice. Having

been elevated from a voluntary agency since its creation in 1963 to a global regulatory agency by the

WTO Appellate Body in the last two decades, the Codex is "part of a more general trend of

transferring power from national governments to international organizations" in a legal and binding

framework (Livermore 2006, pg. 769). The Codex is creating a precarious slope for future food

sovereignty to tread on, where "technocratic rationality and universal claims of science" trump

consumer food choice and personal freedom (Winickoff and Bushey 2010, pg. 360).

The indefatigability of the human will is indeed admirable and would be our only hope if we are to

avert a future portrayed in Aldous Huxley's Brave New World, where humans are grown from

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embryos in a giant incubator facility and fed food through tubes. As one of the characters after

witnessing it remarks, "even science must sometimes be treated as a possible enemy. Yes, even

science" (Huxley 1932). Certainly not Humanity.

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