Food Sovereignty And Community's Valuation Of Common Goods

Food movements world-wide are drawing attention to the limitations of the food security model to guarantee the right to food for all, and they are advocating food sovereignty as the way to radically and democratically redesign food systems. In a broad sense, the food sovereignty framework claims that to achieve the right to food it is not enough to focus on the availability and access to food without touching the question of how food is produced and by whom. While in its original 1996 definition by La Via Campesina (LVC 2003) food sovereignty refers to the right of peoples and countries to define their agricultural and food policies without dumping vis-á-vis third countries, more recently food sovereignty has acquired broader meanings of local, self-dependent, participatory, shared, biodiverse, and culturally appropriate production and consumption. What¿s more, against the transnational commodification of food systems, food sovereignty defends food as a commons. This transformation can be strategic for expanding the basis of consensus, but it is also revealing of alternative orders of worth, and of renewed ways of envisioning the links uniting food and communities. This project investigates and compares the experiences of indigenous, peasant, and afro-descendant communities in Colombia, with the objective of assessing the relevance of the perspective of collectivities for fostering new ways of understanding and accomplishing the right to food. It inquires into models and practices of communality for the promotion of food sovereignty, paying particular attention to the possibilities offered by these perspectives for expanding and renewing current global debates concerning common goods and forms of collective property. The project¿s first hypothesis is that food sovereignty ¿ which has been recognized as a condition for the full realization of the right to food (De Schutter 2014) ¿ closely depends on people¿s right to their commons. The chosen research emphasis on food sovereignty brings into focus the linkages between common goods and fundamental rights. According to jurist Stefano Rodotà (2012) the right of the commons is the right of those goods that are necessary to give effect to the fundamental rights of individuals, and hence cannot be regarded as an object of the market. This definition goes beyond a notion of common goods as shared resources that should be managed by the community of reference ¿mostly put forward by economists¿ to a notion of common goods as a universal right. While the Committee of World Food Security acknowledged the status of food security as a global public good in 2009, the commons counter-narrative moves beyond the private/public divide, challenging some basic tenets of Western modernity. These initiatives permit ¿disarticulating property rights while re-connecting what is legal to what is (illegal but perceived as) legitimate and fair¿ (Marella 2012: 3). In turn, the realization that common goods are inherently linked to human rights requires inquiring into how different cultures translate this idea into reality, and how they build or reaffirm a sense of community in the process. Clearly, the struggles for water, seeds, landscapes, and communal resources in general, are not just struggles over resources. They are also struggles over meanings: the meaning of the relationship between humans and their environments, of democratic participation, of development and well-being. As Esteva pointed out (2012) ¿All these forms, actualizations of ancient traditions or contemporary creations, are beyond the private threshold but cannot be defined as public spaces [¿ Their precise limits (their contours, their perimeters) as well as their internal strings (their straitjackets) are still insufficiently explored territory¿. Interestingly, the stronger advocates of a deeper focus on the phenomenological and cultural underpinnings of `commoning¿ are not anthropologists, but jurists (Marella 2012; Mattei 2011; Rodotá 2012). It is timely, then, to turn the anthropological lens on the culturally-specific frameworks of thought and action that orient people¿s reproduction, managing, and defense of their commons. The project¿s second hypothesis is that the governance of the commons goes beyond problem-solving strategies or the work of social institutions, and that the creation of epistemological and ontological frames of reference must also be taken into account. Accordingly, the project focuses on three interrelated issues: (1) the notions of value, property, and well-being that orient the definition and governance of common goods at a community level, particularly those that concern the defense of water, seeds, and landscapes; (2) the simultaneous building of a sense of community for, and from, the collective protection and management of such goods; (3) the local meanings of ¿sovereignty¿ that are constructed in the exercise of defending and managing common goods.