Abstracts of Papers

September 14�15, 2013
Yale University

Available abstracts and titles (to date) of the accepted/invited papers that will be presented at the conference

Food security, Food Sovereignty and Democratic Choice: Addressing Potential Contradictions

Bina Agarwal, Manchester University, UK

This paper outlines potential contradictions between efforts to achieve food security, some key elements of the concept of food sovereignty and the exercise of democratic choice by farmers, drawing especially on examples from South Asia. It also reflects on the extent to which and the conditions under which these contradictions can partially be resolved.

To elaborate, much of the developing world depends on food imports from the developed world for fulfilling its aggregate food needs. Given the uncertainties underlying such dependencies, rising and volatile food prices, and the growing shadow of climate change, efforts at national and local food sufficiency and low chemical, environmentally sustainable agriculture (both important cornerstones of the food sovereignty argument), clearly appear desirable. But would farmers seeking to make democratic choices necessarily move in that direction? An increasing proportion of farmers (men more than women) are leaving farming; many others (of both genders) would like to do so, or enable their children to do so. And many of those who choose to stay (including small farmers) opt for commercially viable crops rather than largely subsistence crops; the use of some chemicals rather than none; and to connect with national or global value chains which offer them assured markets, or use a range of outlets depending on crops grown, prices obtained and transaction costs, rather than depend solely on community markets.

It can of course legitimately be argued that the choices farmers make are subject to the constraints they face and the alternatives before them. It is important to identify those constraints � economic, institutional, technical, informational and political � and reflect on alternatives, in particular little discussed alternatives based on small-farmer cooperation. But it is equally important to recognize that the valuable rights of voice and choice, exercised by the disadvantaged in local contexts, cannot always fall in line with preconceived trajectories defined by global movements on behalf of the disadvantaged. Therein lies the contradiction and the paradox.

Food sovereignty: A skeptical view

Henry Bernstein, School of Oriental and African Studies (SOAS)

This paper attempts to identify and assess some of the key elements that �frame� Food Sovereignty (FS): (i) a comprehensive attack on corporate industrialised agriculture, and its ecological consequences, in the current moment of globalisation; (ii) advocacy of a (the) �peasant way� as the basis of a sustainable and socially just food system; and (iii) a programme to realise that world-historical goal. While sympathetic to the first of these elements, I am much more sceptical about the second because of how FS conceives �peasants�, and its claim that small producers who practice agroecological farming - understood as low-(external) input and labour intensive - can feed the world. This connects with an argument that FS is incapable of constructing a feasible programme (the third element) to connect the activities of small farmers with the food needs of non-farmers, whose numbers are growing both absolutely and as a proportion of the world�s population.�>read entire paper

What Place for International Trade in Food Sovereignty?

Kim Burnett and Sophia Murphy

International agricultural commodity trade is central to the livelihoods of millions of farmers across the globe, and to most countries� food security strategies. Yet global trade policies are contributing to food insecurity and are undermining livelihoods. Food Sovereignty emerged in part as a mobilization in resistance to the WTO�s Agreement on Agriculture and its imposition of multilateral disciplines on domestic agriculture policy. While not explicitly rejecting trade, there is a strong, albeit understated, resistance to international commodity trade that risks marginalizing broader trade concerns in the visioning of what food sovereignty comprises. Our paper argues that trade is important to the realization of food security and to the livelihoods of small-scale producers, including peasants active in the Food Sovereignty movement, yet it remains underexplored in food sovereignty discourse and that further developing of its position on trade is strategically important.�>read entire paper

International agricultural commodity trade is central to the livelihoods of millions of farmers across the globe. It is also central to most countries� food security strategies. Yet global trade policies are contributing to food�insecurity and are undermining livelihoods. Food Sovereignty emerged with La Via Campesina as a mobilization of peasants in resistance to the World Trade Organization�s Agreement on Agriculture and its imposition of multilateral�disciplines on domestic agriculture policy. Proponents of food sovereignty present food sovereignty as an alternative to food security. While not explicitly rejecting trade, food sovereignty emphasizes the importance of locally and nationally determined policies. There is a strong, albeit understated, resistance to international commodity trade that risks marginalizing broader trade concerns in the visioning of what food sovereignty comprises. Our paper argues that trade is important to the realization of food security and to the livelihoods of small-scale producers, including peasants active in the Food Sovereignty movement, yet it remains under-explored in food sovereignty discourse.

Advocates of food sovereignty argue for locally and nationally determined�agricultural policies and fight for the reprioritization of agricultural production for local markets. Markets belong first to local producers. While food sovereignty allows for international trade in theory, its role and parameters are left unspecified. In practice, members of La Via Campesina and other advocates of food sovereignty have differing answers to the question of what role trade should play. �Food sovereignty has evolved significantly in the past decade, from a resistance movement to a movement that claims a positive agenda for agriculture. But the movement has yet to set out the parameters for what a food sovereign international trade regime might look like.

Does international trade matter for food security? If so, how might food sovereignty integrate trade? How do farmers that sell produce in export markets take up food sovereignty? How would rules be negotiated to�ensure sovereignty�is not compromised and yet other countries’ needs are respected? As the notion of food sovereignty gains traction among governments and among civil society organizations active on food policy, where will trade find its place? What are the implications of the deadlock now paralyzing WTO negotiations? Are there opportunities to reform trade rules along more “food sovereign” lines? If so, what would that look like? If not, are there alternative spaces in which to agree to trade rules across national borders?

We begin with a detailed overview of food sovereignty perspectives on trade and how they have evolved � proponents� resistance to trade, views on trade, and visions for trade. We then examine how this relates to the reality of trade: the existing trade regime, the relationship between trade and food security, and the relationship between agricultural trade and livelihoods. We look carefully and analytically at what a food sovereignty analysis might make of these realities, reading food sovereignty and trade literature, interviewing leaders in both the food sovereignty and trade worlds, and exploring ways trade might be integrated into a food sovereignty vision.

The Financialization of Food: Distancing and the Externalization of Costs

Jennifer Clapp, University of Waterloo

This paper provides a new perspective on the political implications of intensified financialization in the global food system. There has been a growing recognition of the role of finance in the global food system, in particular the way in which financial markets have become a mode of accumulation for large transnational agribusiness players within the current food regime. This paper highlights a further political implication of agrifood system financialization, namely how it fosters �distancing� in the food system and how that distance shapes the broader context of global food politics. Specifically, the paper advances two interrelated arguments. First, a new kind of distancing has emerged within the global food system as a result of financialization that has a) increased the number of the number and type of actors involved in global agrifood commodity chains and b) abstracted food from its physical form into highly complex agricultural commodity derivatives. Second, this distancing has obscured the links between financial actors and food system outcomes in ways that make the political context for opposition to financialization especially challenging.�>read entire paper

This article seeks to unpack the implications of financialization in the food system. It examines the forces and actors involved in the financial investment in agricultural commodities, how financialization manifests and with what potential impact for global hunger and the environment. The article argues that financialization has given new actors � financial investors, including banks, financial services firms, and large-scale institutional investors � greater influence over outcomes in the food system. There are two important implications of this development. First, a new kind of �distancing� has emerged within the food system whereby financialization increases the number of the actors and the steps involved in global agrifood commodity chains while at the same time it abstracts food from its physical form into highly complex agricultural commodity �derivatives� that are largely opaque to the general public. Second, because food-related financial transactions take place largely outside of public view, the �real world� physical implications of increased investment are not always transparent to the outside observer. While these investments may be only virtual for the investors, they generate a number external costs that have a real influence on the world�s poorest people and the natural environment.

Farmers, Foodies, & First Nations: Getting to Food Sovereignty in Canada

Annette Desmarais, University of Regina, and Hannah Wittman, University of British Columbia

While there is a growing body of literature on food sovereignty at a global level, much less is known about what food sovereignty movements look like in specific places and how their expression is largely shaped by local and regional histories, cultures, politics and ecologies. This article provides a critical analysis of how a diverse range of intentions, strategies, tactics and discourses collide under the �big tent� of food sovereignty in Canada. We are particularly interested in looking at how food sovereignty has been incorporated in the food policy discourse across diverse sectors of Canadian society, each of whom attribute distinct meanings and practices to the framework. In assessing the political impact of using a food sovereignty framework in a Northern context, the article explores the various meanings of food sovereignty developed by distinct social movements and other actors in the Canadian context and discusses the interactions and dynamics among the various movements to better understand existing tensions and convergences. This leads us to question the existence of a consolidated food sovereignty movement in Canada.

Among the most prominent social actors in Canada using the food sovereignty approach are the National Farmers Union, Qu�bec�s Union Paysanne, the Food Secure Canada coalition and Indigenous peoples. Each of these has followed a unique path to food sovereignty and each has a distinct social and political agenda in using this framework. Food sovereignty was initially introduced in Canada through the work of the National Farmers Union (NFU) and the Union Paysanne, the two Canadian members of La V�a Campesina. While representatives of the NFU had been central to shaping the international debates on food sovereignty within La V�a Campesina, it took years before the NFU began using the framework in Canada. Meanwhile, food sovereignty was central to Qu�bec�s Union Paysanne when it emerged in 2001. Consequently, in Canada, food sovereignty remained focused primarily on production issues.

This changed after the Ny�l�ni International Forum on Food Sovereignty held in 2007 when the Canadians who participated in that event came back to home committed to working together to consolidate a national food sovereignty movement. Food Secure Canada played a key leadership role in developing the People�s Food Policy Project (PFPP) that successfully integrated urban populations, including �foodies� and urban agrarians, in using food sovereignty language to redefine food and agricultural policies for Canada. While some Indigenous peoples actively participated in the PFPP, several leading indigenous organizations also sought to deepen their own indigenous food sovereignty approach, an approach highly critical of a version they view as agriculture-centric. Indigenous food sovereignty activists stress the importance of including fishing, hunting and gathering as key elements of a food sovereignty approach to sustainable food systems in Canada, and highlight the complexity of issues of rights, equity, land access and (re) distribution that are central to the food sovereignty framework.

In conclusion, this paper will critically assess how the �unity in diversity� principle of food sovereignty works (or doesn�t work) in a Canadian context, paying particular attention to power relations and policy implications of debates about the meaning of food sovereignty.�>read entire paper

Food sovereignty: an appreciation and critique

Marc Edelman, Hunter College, City University of New York (CUNY)

�Like gold with yield�: Evolving intersections between farmland and finance

Madeleine Fairbairn, University of Winsconsin

Since 2007, capital markets have acquired a newfound interest in agricultural land as a portfolio investment. This phenomenon is examined through the theoretical lens of financialization. On the surface the trend resembles a sort of financialization in reverse � many new investments involve agricultural production in addition to land ownership. Farmland also fits well into current financial discourses, which emphasize getting the right kind of exposure to long-term trends and �value investing� in genuinely productive companies. However, capital markets� current affinity for farmland also represents significant continuity with the financialization era, particularly in their treatment of land as a financial or quasi-financial asset. Capital gains are central to current farmland investments, both as a source of inflation hedging growth and of potentially large speculative profits. New types of farmland investment management organizations (�FIMOs�) are emerging, including from among large farmland operators which formerly valued land primarily as a productive asset and source of use value. Finally, the first tentative steps toward the securitization of farmland demonstrate the potential for a much more complete financialization of farmland in the future.�>read entire paper

Beyond the Price Paradox: Towards Deepening the Ecological/Material Foundations of Alliances Across the Food System

Harriet Friedmann, Professor Emerita, University of Toronto

As a diverse set of ideals and practices, food sovereignty faces a central/intractable dilemma (among others) of forging alliances between farmers who need good livelihoods and eaters who need affordable food. This price paradox, which is naturalized by the role of markets in capitalism, leads to a number of tensions that food sovereignty must come to grips with. Among these is mutual distrust between farmers and those who buy food: one version is consumers who �only want cheap food� versus �farmers who expect �unreasonable prices.� Another is the rising class association of local and organic food (�yuppie chow�, as Guthman puts it), where only privileged consumers are able to eat the most healthy and �sustainably produced� food and the implicit claim that everyone has the right to choose bad food (in all senses). The common phrase �food is not (or not only) a commodity� ignores the present reality of the price paradox and misses an opportunity to grapple with a crucial practical and conceptual challenge: how can the many products of farmers become good commodities in markets that function as part of just and sustainable food systems?

To get past this particular obstacle to common purpose, it is crucial to understand that all relative prices are determined by institutions; that is, by human-made rules that have taken shape over long historical periods. Although hidden from present view, these institutions result from historical legacies of power and accumulation, and of struggles over both. They are fundamentally about not only labour, but also land. Farmland, as opposed to mines and forests, has been cyclically appropriated by capital and then shed in favour of controlling farmers through other mechanisms. Land is now again appropriated in ways familiar from the colonial era and at the same time quite novel.

Food sovereignty may have the potential to reframe the political economy question of land, and expand it into a bigger political ecology question of how people govern themselves in relation to ecosystems. In this conception, food sovereignty would mean finding ways to improve the exchanges � or metabolism � between human societies and their habitats; or in plainer terms, to find ways of supporting sustainable interrelationships between growing and eating in mutually beneficial ways. I take several steps to take to consider how this might happen.

The first step, following Cronon (Nature�s Metropolis), is to rethink markets and money, bringing to the foreground natural cycles which are disrupted,replaced and hidden by new material flows. The new material flows then provide expanding opportunities for accumulation and thus finance, which further disrupts and more deeply hides what remains of self-organizing natural systems. Capital subordinates functioning ecosystem metabolisms to abstract monetary relations. So capital finances first railways and then all subsequent means of transport and storage that create great physical distances/separations among ever more specialized edible commodities. These allow capital to expand from all the profit opportunities created by successive disruptions. (I will offer some examples.) This challenges us to think at once critically and constructively about real relationships, and perhaps aim towards something resembling a �land theory of value�. To this end, ecologists of various disciplines offer several material rather than monetary measures.

For instance, following Bayliss-Smith (The Ecology of Agriculture), energy flows allow different measures of efficiency in comparing farming systems and the human nourishment they provide (along with fuel, fodder, fibre, etc.). But sustainable metabolism, where �wastes� are simply part of healthy natural cycles, does not mean abolishing markets � which would limit the sphere of social life to direct relationships � but instead it means embedding markets within ecosystems.

The second major step is to recognize that embedded markets imply different types of institutions/rules, including those governing money, quality regimes, land use, and of course, livelihoods. Democratic institutions, if they are to effectively govern a healthy metabolism between societies and ecosystems, must emerge/be designed appropriately first and foremost to foodgetting, following Duncan (The Centrality of Agriculture). Here, following Kloppenburg et.al., it is useful to think of foodsheds, a concept that offers a dual approach to territory: defining both what exists and what is possible, a chart to guide social ships sailing across fluid territories from the crisis-ridden present to a sustainable future.

My final step here is to wrestle with the inescapably urban nature of present foodsheds. Following Steel (Hungry City) as well as Cronon again, I consider how the increasing concentration of humans in cities compounds the disguise (by price relationships) of the dependence of most people upon ever more distant farming . We cannot know with certainty what population biologies and what concentrations of humans are sustainable. But history can guide us not only in understanding how present unsustainable foodsheds came to be as they are, but also how to find ways to tack with winds and waves, to wait out doldrums and storms , in sailing towards sustainable foodsheds. These include revaluing the practical knowledge of specific ecosystems by peoples who have sustained foodgetting for much longer than the experiment in industrial agriculture has so far lasted (Davis). It means, following Ostrom, learning how to regulate commons (at every scale and across scales to the biosphere) for foodgetting and all other social relations with natural processes.

The political economy of contemporary financialization and agrarian transformations: a review

S. Ryan Isakson and Jacqueline Morse

Much of the current research on agrarian transformation has focused upon three interrelated phenomena: the dramatic increase in the production of agrofuels/flex crops; the volatility of food prices and the attendant food crisis; and the profusion of large-scale land transactions that are commonly referred to as �land grabs.� The rise of these events, in turn, is often attributed to the contemporary process of financialization and the current financial crisis. A nuanced explanation of how and why the financial sector is driving these processes, however, is often lacking. So too is a consideration of mutual causation: even as finance is shaping the agrarian sector, are agrarian transformations shaping finance? Moreover, despite identifying capitalist investment and speculation as catalysts for contemporary agrarian transformation, a coherent narrative of how financialization is shaping agrarian social relations of (re)production and (dis)accumulation has yet to emerge. Reviewing the existing literature and analyzing it through the twin lenses of financial political economy and agrarian political economy, our paper will address these gaps. In so doing, we will explicitly articulate the relationship between financialization and contemporary agrarian transformations and identify key areas for future research.

While financial capital has long played a formative role in composing the institutions and social relations that shape agricultural production and the distribution of agricultural surplus, the zeal with which the contemporary financial sector is �investing� in the means and outputs of agricultural production is undeniably novel. In much of the agrarian studies literature this process is attributed to a �crisis of capitalism� where, in the face of downturns in the �real economy� and traditional financial markets, wealthy investors have identified flex crops, crop futures, and land (especially in the global South) as novel and profitable places to invest their surplus funds. We will unpack this tidy narrative by examining the political economy of deregulation and the emergence of a �New Financial Architecture,� giving particular attention to the logics and actors that promoted � and continue to promote � the creation of new speculative markets for the means and outputs of agricultural production. This study will provide the foundation for the second analytical part of the paper, in which we will query the relationship between financialization and agrarian social structures and relations and processes of (re)production.

As articulated by Henry Bernstein (1992), the traditional framework of agrarian political economy asks four questions: (1) who owns what? (2) who does what? (3) who gets what? and (4) what do they do with it? A more �modern� agrarian political economy might also intersect Bernstein�s emphasis on class with, inter alia, concerns for gender, ethnicity, and the environment (White and Dasgupta 2010). Drawing upon existing research on land grabbing, agrofuels production, and food price volatility, our paper will subject the process of financialization to the objectives of agrarian political economy. Our analysis will tease out the broad trends that cut across these three manifestations of contemporary agrarian change. In so doing, we will (a) identify key questions for future research and (b) develop a coherent description of how financialization relates with rights to land, water, genetic material, and other �resources;� relations between and among different groups of social actors; and how agricultural surplus is distributed and deployed.

The Perils of Peasant Populism: Why Redistributive Land Reform and �Food Sovereignty� Can�t Feed Venezuela

Aaron Kappeler, University of Toronto

Since 2001 the Bolivarian government of Hugo Chavez has embarked on an ambitious agrarian reform program aimed at establishing food sovereignty and reducing overwhelming import dependency. This project has centered mainly on the reconstitution of the national agriculture system, which was destroyed over the course of the twentieth century by resource extraction, the petroleum economy and waves of neoliberal trade policy. Paying for food imports with revenue derived from the petroleum industry, at one point, Venezuela imported more than eighty-five percent of its food from foreign sources. Venezuela was effectively held hostage to price fluctuations on international energy markets and left in a precarious position. Realizing the tremendous vulnerability this created, the Venezuelan government wrote the concept of food sovereignty into its constitution in 1999 and began to take drastic steps to reduce imports.

The food sovereignty concept has received considerable attention from activists and scholars associated with the international NGO La V�a Campesina. Supporters of the concept argue that nationally-based food systems founded on local markets and peasant agriculture represent the best means of combatting hunger and poverty in the global south and that food sovereignty is an �anticolonial� project. Its defenders argue the concept is applicable to all contexts and have tried to explain away the failures associated with the concept as the fault of unresponsive governments. The Bolivarian government of Venezuela is arguably the most materially supportive and ideologically pro-peasant government in Latin America and agrarian populists have lauded its efforts, but Venezuela has still faced significant difficulties to achieving this vision.

This article examines the inherent contradictions in the transition from a food system based largely on imports to a model of agriculture grounded in the principle of food sovereignty. It takes as its case study the recent efforts of the Bolivarian government of Venezuela to shift to endogenous food production and build an agriculture sector oriented toward satisfying the food requirements of its majority-urban population. This article underscores the many challenges faced by the populist government after decades of economic policies designed to integrate Venezuela into global markets and the difficulties involved in enacting redistributive land reform in this peripheral capitalist context. The failure of the Venezuelan government to recruit a labor force to reestablish peasant agriculture in the interior suggests that food sovereignty cannot be applied to every national context and that Venezuela lacked the basic preconditions for a model of agriculture based predominantly on smallholders. This basic incompatibility accounts for the current turn toward a state-run food system incorporating aspects of the factory-in-the-field model and industrial enterprises and populist food distribution programs, accounting for the bulk of the domestic food.

The Venezuelan government has reinvented food sovereignty to better suit its own conditions and conceives of the entire population, not just the peasantry, as the guarantor of food sovereignty. In theorizing agrarian change and reform in the global south, we should move to a paradigm of food sovereignties, which recognizes these contextual differences and avoids the pitfalls of the �one-size-fits-all� approach implied by food sovereignty.

Historicizing Food Sovereignty: a Food Regime Perspective

Philip McMichael, Professor of Development Sociology, Cornell University

To historicize food sovereignty is to situate it: first, as a strategic countermovement in/of the food regime; and second, by historicizing the food regime itself to identify the shifting terrain of food sovereignty politics. While the global agrarian crisis of the late-twentieth century precipitated the movement, it was part of a continuing crisis accompanying the long-twentieth century food regime and its competitive assault on farming systems across the world. This assault, in the name of free trade, development, and food security, has imposed a model of �agriculture without farmers� in a world equating industrial efficiency with human progress. Food sovereignty is a culminating protective movement against the deceit of �feeding the world� by undermining farming with the false economy of value relations of the food regime.

At the same time, transformation of the current food regime poses new challenges with schemes to capitalize lands in the global South. Whereas in 2000 V�a Campesina claimed �the massive movement of food around the world is forcing the increased movement of people,� now the massive movement of capital around the world increases the movement of people, and food. Beyond deepening this unsustainable scenario, the capitalization project aims to feed the world a new deceit by converting smallholders into value-chain �outgrowers� for world markets. Such appropriation of food sovereignty claims for smallholder recognition nonetheless confronts smallholders with extractive market relations including a form of land grab. Fallout from the recent �food crisis� indicates that neoliberal re-colonization has the potential to consolidate food sovereignty alliances around the politics of food grabbing.

Risk and Blame in the Anthropocene: Multi-scale Climate Change Analysis

Jesse Ribot, University of Illinois

Climate change and climate-change policies affect food security. Vulnerabilities, however, do not just fall from the sky. Vulnerability is not an attribute of changing hazards. It is produced and reproduced through social and political-economic relations on the ground. Risk of hunger is linked to local hierarchies, government relations, national and global markets, international laws and practices, and highly unequal and interlinked local, national and global political economies that give some access to needed resources, others access to social protections, yet others voice in political and economic decisions. These relations shape how people use, depend on, and are affected by nature. This article frames an analysis of vulnerability � risk of food insecurity, hunger, famine, displacement, economic loss � as it now must be analyzed in the new era of human-nature, the anthropocene. Risk in the anthropocene is now bifurcated with some social causality operating through climate. The focus on climate should, however, not take attention away from causes of vulnerability that remain on the ground.�>read entire paper

Rural Social Movements and Agroecology: Food Sovereignty, Di�logo de Saberes, Peasant Territories and Re-peasantization

Peter M. Rosset, El Colegio de la Frontera Sur (ECOSUR) and el Centro de Estudios para el Cambio en el Campo Mexicano, and Mar�a Elena Mart�nez-Torres, Environment and Society Program of the Center for Research and Advanced Studies in Social Anthropology-Southeast Campus (CIESAS-Sureste)

While many contemporary rural social movements once argued for increased industrial farming inputs and machinery for their members, the past few years have seen an accelerating shift toward the promotion of agroecology as an alternative to the so-called Green Revolution. In this paper we both describe this phenomenon in its historically specific context, and provide some theoretical tools for understanding it. From the construction of the food sovereignty paradigm by the transnational social movement La Via Campesina, which was critically shaped by the encounter and di�logo de saberes (dialog among different knowledges and ways of knowing) between different rural cultures (East, West, North and South; Peasant, Farmer and Rural Proletarian; etc.), and by the increasingly politicized confrontation with neoliberal reality and agribusiness in its most recent phase of expansion. We borrow the concepts of material and immaterial territories from Brazilian critical geography to understand both agroecology-as-practice and agroecology-as-farming in the growing territorial dispute between rural social movements and agribusiness, and the role played in these disputes by both as elements in the (re)construction of peasant territories. The paper provides examples of the construction of peasant territories and partial re-peasantization through agroecology, as part of the search by peasants for relative autonomy from input, credit and output markets around the world.�>read entire paper

The history of this evolution passes through the construction and elaboration of the food sovereignty paradigm by the transnational social movement La Via Campesina, and has been critically shaped by the encounter and di�logo de saberes � internal to the movement � between different rural cultures (East, West, North and South; Peasant, Farmer and Rural Proletarian), and by the increasingly politicized confrontation with neoliberal reality and agribusiness in its most recent phase of expansion. In this process, movements have been informed by their experience with movement forms of agroecology (i.e. farmer-to-farmer methodology and movement) and with their growing number of agroecology and political leadership farmer training schools in the Americas, Africa and Asia.

We provide a theoretical framework for understanding and interrogating this growing interest in agroecology among rural social movements on all continents, situated in the neo-Narodnik tradition of the heterodox Marxist school of peasant studies. In particular we use the work of critical geographers in Brazil on the material and immaterial territories that are increasingly disputed between rural social movements and agribusiness (along with other agents of land grabbing similarly fueled by transnational financial capital), and the role played in these disputes by both agroecology-in-practice and agroecology-as-framing as elements in the (re)construction of peasant territories.

We contrast and compare concrete examples of the construction of peasant territories and partial re-peasantization (in the sense of van der Ploeg) through agroecology, as part of the search by peasants for relative autonomy from input, credit and output markets around the world, paying attention to the main challenges and contradictions that are part of these processes. Finally, we draw on the work of Paulo Freire and his heirs on critical peasant pedagogy to explain the movement form of agroecology and its role in bringing agroecology to scale in peasant (re)territorialization.

The agrarian transition and women’s rights

Olivier de Schutter, UN Rapporteur for the Right to Food

The agrarian transition is a complex process that is characterized by an accelerated switch to input-intensive, capitalized form of agriculture ; a growing importance of global value chains and of export-led agriculture ; and resulting both in increased land concentration and in a massive rural-to-urban migration, and the depopulation of rural areas.

This transition is deeply gendered. First, the general trend has been for men to migrate first, for longer periods and to further destinations. There are exceptions to this pattern. In Sri Lanka and in the Philippines for instance, female migrants formed respectively three quarters and over half of outgoing migrants in recent years � often to become domestic workers or sex workers, or to work in the garment industry, in a heavily segmented employment market �. In general however, it is the men rather than the women who are likely to abandon agricultural work at home and seek income in other sectors, in part because of social norms concerning gender roles, and in part because of the higher levels of education, on average, of men, that allow them to seek off-farm employment.

Women then are then left behind to carry the full burdens of agricultural production. They may be supported in this regard by the receipt of remittances, which can serve to buy inputs or to hire labour for the performance of the more heavy tasks, such as land preparation, that are not generally seen as suitable for women : this appears to be quite common in South East Asia, where the productivity of land could be maintained in part thanks to such remittances. But women often have little legal protection or rights to property ownership, and they face cultural and social norms that are obstacles to their ability to improve productivity as much as they could in the absence of such barriers. In addition, they may find it difficult to reconcile their role of small-scale food producers with their responsibilities in the “care” economy, an obstacle men agricultural producers do not face. These responsibilities reduce the mobility of women, and it therefore affects their ability to market their produce; and they result in time poverty for women and a shortage of labour on the land.

Against this background, concerns have been expressed about the impact the feminization of agriculture may have on local food security, if due to the obstacles they face, women are less productive than men. In 2010, the Food and Agriculture Organisation of the United Nations (FAO) famously concluded that “if women had the same access to productive resources as men, they could increase yields on their farms by 20�30 percent. This could raise total agricultural output in developing countries by 2.5�4 percent, which could in turn reduce the number of hungry people in the world by 12�17 percent”. Whatever the validity of this calculation, the reality is that food security today depends, more even than in the past, on combating discrimination against women, in order to allow women and female-headed farming households to produce in better conditions.

The agrarian transition is also gendered in a second way. An increasing proportion of women have moved to waged employment on large farms, in many cases replacing men who have moved to non-agricultural employment. The growth in the proportion of women employed as agricultural workers occurs at a time when non-traditional agricultural exports are rising, especially for horticultural products. New jobs are created in cut flowers, and in vegetable growing and packing: these are “high-value” products, because they require special handling or some processing, which adds substantive value beyond the farm. For employers, recruiting women in these relatively labor-intensive types of production presents a number of advantages. Women are considered more docile than men, and more reliable. The nature of the tasks in the emerging export sectors � fruits and vegetables in particular � are generally physically less demanding and do not require the use of heavy machinery, and are therefore suitable for them. The wages of women are generally lower than those of men, which employers sometimes justify by the consideration that they are not, typically, the main wage-earners within the family; for the same reason, women are considered a highly flexible workforce, which can be hired on a weekly or seasonal basis.

There occurs what might be called an “internal segmentation” in most high-value agriculture. On these farms, one relatively stable and qualified segment of the workforce coexists with another segment, made of unskilled workers, often recruited at certain points of the year only, and often as casual workers, without a formal contract of employment. The pressure to maintain such a dualized system even as technological advances have made production less dependent on seasonality, can be explained as the result of globalization and the need to “rationalize” (i.e., make more profitable) the management of workforce. That also explains why the jobs in the “periphery” part of the workforce are classified as seasonal or temporary, even in cases where they may be in fact continuous. Typically, women are disproportionately over-represented in this “periphery” segment, rather than in the “core” segment of permanently employed workers.

Women’s rights must be given central place to the agrarian transition if it is to be reconciled with rural development and the reduction of rural poverty. As independent, small-scale producers on family farms, women must be recognized access to land and other productive inputs ; they must be supported by extension services which provide gender-aware advice, and in the personnel of which women must be better represented ; and they must be encouraged to organize themselves into cooperatives that shall allow them not only to produce better by achieving certain economies of scale, but also to have access to group insurance mechanisms and financial services, and to have a political voice.

As waged agricultural workers, women on farms must be protected from the various forms of discrimination they currently are subjected to. Such discrimination takes a variety of forms, including an over-representation of women under temporary contracts of employment or hired without any formal contract of employment; a failure to provide women with protective gear against pesticides; a refusal by employers to hire women who are pregnant, leading seasonal pregnant workers to sometimes hide their pregnancy in order to maintain their access to incomes; and an exposure of women to domestic violence because of their impossibility to move away from the plantation. Where wages are set on a piece-work basis (by the volume or by the surface), this generally disfavours women, since the pay is calculated on the basis of male productivity standards. And one consequence of this system is that it encourages women, to have their children work with them as “helpers”, in order to perform the task faster: this is one of the reasons why so many children are employed in agriculture.

However, the feminization of agriculture raises questions that go beyond the discrete forms of discrimination they are subjected to, and that human rights must guard against. The fundamental question is how the increased role of women in agriculture shall be reconciled with their role in the “care” economy � for the minding and education of children, or for the care of the elderly and the sick �, as well as with the household chores for which, in all regions, they remain chiefly responsible � the purchasing and preparation of food, laundry, or the fetching of fuelwood or water. This is work that is essential not only to the health and nutrition of the family members, but also to the maintenance of the agricultural workforce. Yet it is work that is unremunerated, unrecognized, and largely invisible, because it is work done by women. It is important to invest in services and infrastructure that reduce the burden this represents for women � for example, by childcare services in rural areas or by water pipes linking villages to water sources. It is important that, as we think of how to support rural development, we recognize the importance of this “care” economy as a vital adjuvant to the “market” economy � and that, for instance, we adapt how extension workers provide advice or how employment on farms is organized, to the responsibilities women assume within the household. But reduction of household chores and recognition are not sufficient. We also require a redistribution of roles within the household : we need to ensure that men, too, contribute their part to the “care” economy, and that the gendered division of roles is destabilized and transformed. The feminization of agriculture shall only be viable if it is combined with such a redefinition of responsibilities: the recivilizing of men by women.

September 14�15, 2013 Yale University