POLITICAL HISTORIES OF FOOD

People waiting for famine relief in Bangalore (1877)

Abstract and Keywords

Although policies are in place to eradicate hunger, basic access to food remains a formidable problem worldwide. Scholars and policy analysts disagree sharply on the extent of hunger and malnutrition as well as their causes and solutions. Recent evidence suggests that foodways offer an important means of creating alternative and more egalitarian systems of food production and distribution. This article reviews the assumptions and ideologies underlying the politics of food over the past few centuries. It examines power relations shaped by shifting capitalist developmental policies and by various state and international institutions. The article first looks at the link between food, capitalism, and colonialism before turning to food shortages, famines, and political legitimacy. It also discusses food policies and nation-states from 1930 to the 1970s, along with corporate globalization and food politics from the 1970s to the 2000s. The article concludes by focusing on struggles for food sovereignty and considering alternatives to corporate food politics.

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Decades of policies ostensibly intended to eradicate hunger, basic access to food remains highly unequal in the new millennium. Skyrocketing food prices between 2006 and 2008 increased the number of undernourished people in the world by 75 million people and drove an estimated 125 million people into extreme poverty, leading to widespread food riots. In the most extreme cases, such as in Haiti, where 80 percent of the population subsist on less than two dollars a day, price increases led to a hunger so torturous that people reportedly called it Clorox hunger since they “felt like their stomachs were being eaten away by bleach or battery acid.

Scholars and policy analysts differ sharply on the extent of hunger and malnutrition and on its causes and solutions. While a billion people remain malnourished, some scholars maintain that increased food production has alleviated bouts of famine over the past few centuries and that there has been a decline in the overall share of the population without access to sufficient food. Others argue that although production has increased, market policies and structural inequalities have hampered efforts to eradicate hunger and have even increased the absolute numbers of the chronically undernourished. Indeed, many analysts contend that homogeneous development policies foster a global food economy dominated by corporate interests that erase traditional ways of knowing and ways of life. Nevertheless, recent scholarly analysis has shown foodways to be an important vehicle for resisting these homogenizing trends and creating alternative and more egalitarian systems for producing and distributing food.

This essay seeks to disentangle these debates and examine the assumptions and ideologies behind the politics of food over the past few centuries. Central to this discussion is an analysis of power relations shaped by shifting capitalist developmental policies and by various state and international institutions. Food policies, based on particular assumptions and worldviews, have sought to create hegemonic visions for societies that shape what food is grown and who grows it, what is exported or imported, who has access to foods. By examining how these factors change over time and drawing from the large bodies of scholarly research on the topic, this chapter hopes to show how producers, consumers, activists, and scholars are challenging the dominant narratives of food and society and articulating a range of alternatives.

Food, Capitalism, and Colonialism

Since the late fifteenth century, European colonial expansion and the development of capitalism sought to reshape world diets and the relationship of humans to the land. Imperial powers introduced sweeping ecological changes in their efforts to capture the wealth of overseas colonies, while at the same time seeking to transform these societies into replicas of Europe. To obtain plantation labor, empires carried out vast population movements, most notably through the Atlantic slave trade. Europeans ultimately created elaborate commodity chains to feed themselves on the agricultural wealth of the entire world. These new systems of provisioning also entailed fundamental changes in the nature of foods, forcing consumers to adapt their tastes as well. Yet despite the efforts of colonial and capitalist powers to shape global diet, workers proved ingenious at adapting their foodways to changing conditions.

In his path-breaking book The Columbian Exchange (1972), Alfred Crosby demonstrated the vast plant and animal exchange that occurred as a result of European colonization of the Americas beginning in 1492. The genocidal death of indigenous peoples, approximately 85 percent within the first hundred years of contact, initiated the process of European domination of land, labor, and culture of the Americas. Europeans began to appropriate and export many food items from the Americas at the same time they introduced foods to the Americas for their own comfort and commerce. The spread of highly productive “new world” maize and potatoes spurred demographic growth and trade around the world. Maize became a staple food for the millions of Africans enslaved between the sixteenth and nineteenth centuries, while in southern Europe and wide stretches of Asia it provided subsistence for the lower classes working marginal land. The Columbian exchange of plants and animals had variable effects on existing social relations. Some scholars argue that new crops such as potatoes in Ireland or maize in the Balkans allowed colonial landlords to monopolize the best fields for commercial production, while others emphasize the revolutionary potential of new rotations for subjugated peasants, who could use subsistence production to break free from oppressive demands, for example, in the mountains of Greece and the floodplains of Venice. Nevertheless, when maize was consumed globally without the local knowledge of Mesoamerican alkaline processing, it became closely associated with the vitamin-deficiency disease pellagra.

The movement of peoples, as well as plants and animals, were essential for the development of colonial and capitalist food systems. Sidney Mintz’s classic analysis of the development of the world sugar market illustrates the ways that more than ten million Africans were forcibly incorporated into a global capitalist economy dedicated to the production of food for European consumers. Mintz challenges views of slavery as a premodern labor system antithetical to capitalism by noting that the tight organization of slave tasks anticipated European factory systems and also set patterns for the control of contemporary migrant farm labor. Yet even under the dehumanizing oppression of the Atlantic plantation system, slaves maintained a measure of autonomy and control over their own foodways. The notable work of Judith Carney has emphasized how African traditional knowledge and plants traveled with women and men during the slave trade and have had significant impact in preserving and transforming African foodways in the Americas.

Over time, global commodity chains institutionalized the inequalities of a capitalist, colonial food system, in the process transforming what constitutes food. Mintz was one of the first to examine how a particular food, sugar, was tied into networks of production, consumption, and power, and his methodological approach utilized the emerging world systems analysis as a way to explore the macroscopic impact of Western imperialist expansion on communities and cultures across the globe. Recent scholarship has expanded on this theme, showing how local societies have increasingly been absorbed into a world economy dominated by larger capitalist powers and global corporate interests that have had the power to transform and define food. During the nineteenth century, for example, large milling and transporting firms such as Archer Daniels Midland and Cargill used horizontal and vertical integration strategies to achieve oligopolistic domination of grain markets around the world. Moreover, Harriet Friedmann and Philip McMichael argue that growing power of capital in Europe and the United States created a close relationship between the agricultural and industrial sectors. Steven Topik and Allen Wells have called this process the “second conquest of Latin America.”

The resulting transformation of traditional agrarian regimes often violently disturbed local communities and ecologies. Independently, Mike Davis and Richard Tucker have demonstrated the ecological impact on capitalist expansion during this period. Davis boldly argues that the growth of capitalist markets can be linked to massive famines beginning in the late nineteenth century in colonial societies ranging from India to Brazil. Transnational companies worked with imperial powers and local elites to enclose community lands, topple nationalist governments that opposed them, wage war against drive massive outmigration, all for their own profits and to supply cheap food to consumers in Europe and North America.

The boom in world markets also required the transformation of consumer tastes in the global north. The United Fruit Company created consumer demand in the United States for bananas, which had only been introduced in the late nineteenth century as an exotic fruit. By the early 1920s, through intensive marketing aimed at housewives, tropical fruits became a staple of many households. Images of backward yet exotic lands were constructed for the imperial imaginary. As Gary Okihiro has argued, Dole and other pineapple producers created an advertising campaign capitalizing upon Hawai’i’s carefully crafted image of a lush, tropical paradise,” while at the same time obscuring the working and laboring conditions on the plantations. The difficult struggles of life on these plantations, called a “green prison” by one novelist, have been amply documented. Nevertheless, scholars have begun to demonstrate how workers also transformed the social and cultural landscape. For example, according to Patricia Vega Jiménez, UFCO imported rice and beans for its West Indian workers, thereby transplanting Jamaican rice and beans as a Costa Rican national dish, gallo pinto (“spotted rooster”).

The rise of industrial food processing in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries sparked battles between reformers, workers, capitalists, and government modernizers, particularly in the case of meatpacking. Scholars have examined these struggles from a number of perspectives; business histories have tended to focus on the rise of oligopolies in the industry, while labor historians have emphasized the struggle over the transformation of labor conditions from artisanal to industrial labor. Recent studies have addressed issues of public health and consumer taste to provide a more integrated understanding of the process of culinary modernization. These scholars, influenced by cultural approaches to history, have entered into the discussion and in the process have demonstrated “how market culture is grounded in social processes that shape and are shaped by particular claims of healthfulness, necessity, and what is just, if not democratic. Market culture highlights how consumer expectations vary depending on particular goods and services.”

Recent scholarship has underscored the role of scientific approaches to food and nutrition. Scholars of gender have demonstrated the ways that the rise of nutritional science and advertising has played an important role in transforming diets and mechanizing food production. Wilbur Atwater’s 1896 discovery of a process for measuring food intake and labor output in units of thermal energy (calories) set in motion a new way for thinking about food and the body. Nutritional sciences was often used in the Global South as a reason to eliminate traditional diets, as Jeffrey Pilcher has shown in the case of Mexico. Along with this conceptual revolution of nutrition came new economic understandings of food markets that sought to rationalize distribution but at the expense of food security.

Food Shortages, Famines, and Political Legitimacy

Since the rise of the archaic state, political legitimacy has depended in large measure on the ability of rulers to ensure that their subjects were fed. This belief underlay the “Mandate of Heaven” in China and the massive imports of grain from Egypt to Imperial Rome. In Medieval Europe, merchants had a religious obligation to sell food for a “just price” during times of shortage. As E. P. Thompson famously showed, with the rise of capitalism in the eighteenth century, this “moral economy” was replaced by a “political economy” in which prices were believed to move according to natural laws and government interference was condemned as counterproductive. Only recently have economists begun to put the politics back into political economy by shifting their focus from production to distribution and showing how access to food is inherently political.

In an important new synthesis, economic historian Cormac Ó Gráda describes the magnitude of major documented famines ranging from 1.5 million deaths during a French famine of 1693–1694 to a series of droughts in China in 1877, 1927, and 1959 that left millions dead, and several more recent and smaller-scale famines in various parts of Africa during the twentieth century. He observes that major famines entail “rising prices, food riots, an increase in crimes against property, a significant number of actual or imminent deaths from starvation, a rise in temporary migration, and frequently the fear and emergence of famine-induced infectious diseases.”

Among the first major treatises on famine and by far the most influential was Thomas Malthus’s 1798 treatise An Essay on the Principle of Population. Malthus’s study built on several earlier attempts to chronicle major famines in the context of population growth. However, he alerted people to the importance of demography and argued that population grew in geometrical proportions whereas food production grew at a much slower rate. For Malthus, famines and mass hunger were deemed to be ultimate checks on population growth and were part of a natural cycle. While Malthus had many critics, his analysis dominated discussion of famines for centuries and is still often accepted as conventional wisdom. As a result, the British government failed to act decisively during the Great Famine in Ireland, allowing food exports from the island to continue even as half a million starved to death. The narrative of inevitable hunger has continued to be influential among neo-Malthusians.

A major shift in the scholarly analysis of famines and policy came with the work of the Nobel laureate economist Amartya Sen. In his now classic Poverty and Famines: An Essay on Entitlement Deprivation (1981), Sen used the cases of the Bengal famine of 1942–1944, Ethiopian famines of 1973–1975, famines in the Sahel region of African in the 1970s, and the Bangladesh famine of 1974 to substantially revise our understanding of the causes and consequences of famine. For Sen, starvation “is not the characteristic of there being not enough food to eat,” but instead has more to do with access to resources that can provide food. Thus, Sen works to decouple population and food supply because “the mesmerizing simplicity of focusing on the ratio of food to population has persistently played an obscuring role over centuries, and continues to plague policy discussions today much as it has deranged anti-famine policies in the past.” Instead, Sen proposes an entitlements approach to understanding the relationship between food distribution and the legal structures of a society, including access to land, social security, and job opportunities. By exploring these larger relationships, Sen demonstrates how democratic nations such as post-Independence India succeeded in ending starvation even without dramatic rises in food supply.

Sen’s analysis has been corroborated and bolstered by subsequent interdisciplinary studies that take seriously the role of the peasantry within the larger political economy. Recently, Thomas Bassett and Alex Winter-Nelson have demonstrated that traditional measures of food availability are misleading, since in many countries malnutrition and food abundance exist side by side. To better understand the inequalities of food distribution within societies, they have constructed a Hunger Vulnerability Index using measures of food supply, household income, and individual nutrition indicators. This index allows more precise measurement of the vulnerability to hunger within countries.

Food and Nation-States, 1930–1970s

The Great Depression of the 1930s brought the capitalist system and free markets to their knees and redirected the role of the state in capitalist countries. Many governments sought to control the vagaries of the market by actively intervening in the marketplace. Whether under capitalism, communism, or fascism, market regulations attempted to balance the interests of diverse sectors of the population. James Scott’s concept of high modernism is useful for understanding the ways that states seek to create order and manage natural resources efficiently, regardless of political ideology. Scott sees high modernism as “a muscle bound version of the self-confidence about scientific and technical progress, the expansion of production, the growing satisfaction of human needs, the mastery of nature, and above all the rational design of social order commensurate with the scientific understanding of natural laws.” Such an approach influenced a range of governments in their efforts to consolidate their power in the state-building process.

In capitalist countries, the growth of state intervention and cooperation with business often bolstered the capitalist state and specific sectors of the capitalist classes. In the United States, New Deal agricultural price supports and production controls became key elements of food supply management policies beginning in the 1930s. According to Bill Winders, regional farm coalitions secured such favorable policies despite the lobbying of other sectors that pointed out that they contradicted free market rhetoric. In addition, as the work of Tracey Deutsch shows, grassroots consumer activism began to be undermined as “officials grew skeptical of democratic controls on consumption and moved toward tighter alliances with large, centrally controlled stores that could better administer government policy.” Thus, government support for emerging supermarket chains came at the expense of smaller stores and consumer cooperatives, partly owing to a distrust of women’s organizations.

Similar efforts to manage supply in other nations led to aggressive marketing policies using many of the same tools as the United States, with twists depending on different historical contexts. For example, the fascist regime of Benito Mussolini sought to achieve self-sufficiency in food supplies, although its campaign to increase basic grain production actually undermined the quality and diversity of the Italian diet. The Mexican government maintained a rhetoric of land reform, but gave priority to urbanization and ndustrialization, a contradictory attitude that led to policies favoring large producers and subsidized urban supplies at the expense of the incomes and subsistence of small farmers. In Argentina, beef supplies to urban workers provided an important bulwark of the populist government of Juan Perón. Playing on the masculine associations of beef in Argentine popular culture, the regime created an entitlement to beef for working-class constituents, known as descamisados (shirtless ones), although the populist policies backfired when droughts devastated the livestock industry around 1950. Many African governments held a similar urban bias in the post-Independence era, thereby benefiting powerful political interests at the expense of the agricultural sector and producers. Yet in Tanzania, rural communities found ways of taking advantage of these policies, at least for a time.

Socialist economies asserted even harsher controls over the countryside in order to speed the transition from the market production to socialist collectivization. The Soviet Union shared with capitalist countries a push to industrialization and discourses of rationality that denigrated peasant agriculture and ways of life as backward. Rapid collectivization of rural lands under Stalin, beginning in 1929, led to the expulsion of hundreds of thousands of better-off peasants and an effort to create large-scale state farms to take advantage of economies of scale and support Soviet industrialization. Millions died in the famines that accompanied collectivization, particularly in the Ukraine and other rich farming regions. Unlike Lenin and Stalin, the Chinese Revolution led by Mao Zedong embraced the peasant as a revolutionary force within society. Nevertheless, the utopian idealism of the Great Leap Forward and the distrust of technical experts produced widespread ecological devastation and famines that surpassed those of Russia. The revolutionary governments of Cuba and Nicaragua learned from these previous mistakes and sought to ensure adequate nutrition while struggling to strike a balance between the countryside and the city.

The so-called Green Revolution marks a high-water point in the high modernist project whereby capitalist powers and multilateral agencies, working under the guise of modernization theory, encouraged developing nations to boost agricultural output by adopting modern technology and capitalist investment. Developed in the early 1940s by scientists from the Rockefeller Foundation, the U.S. Department of Agriculture, and the Mexican government, this project sought to boost yields of basic crops through plant breeding, chemical fertilizers, and pesticides. Crop yields in large private agriculture increased, at the expense of smaller peasant farmers, and the project was quickly exported to crucial Cold War allies around the world, including Turkey, India, and the Philippines. Nevertheless, as Nick Cullather has recently shown, the supposed productivity gains of the Green Revolution were largely a myth, built on earlier plant breeding programs and intended more to change peasant mentalities than to increase agricultural yields.

Corporate Globalization and Food Politics, 1970s–2000s

With the rise of neoliberal policies, beginning in the late 1960s and early 1970s, there has been a sharp transformation of the global food system. While many economists and pundits argued that the liberalization of agricultural markets offered a rational, scientific approach toward economic development, the political ramifications of radical market-oriented policies have clear winners and losers, dropping all pretenses of social welfare in food policy. Liberal markets have increased production in some areas but at the expense of exacerbated inequality. In this social transformation, producers and consumers in many areas have struggled to find spaces to articulate alternative and more inclusive production models.

Neoliberal economic policies, advocated for radical deregulation of markets and deep cuts in social spending, accelerated the transformation of the countryside and relations of production. Such policies were pursued by governments in a number of countries, ranging from General Augusto Pinochet in Chile to Ronald Reagan in the United States, Margaret Thatcher in the United Kingdom and Deng Xiaopeng in China. Debt crises and oil shocks in the early 1980s spread these policies through much of the Third World as the International Monetary Fund (IMF) conditioned loans on neoliberal “structural adjustment policies.” The World Trade Organization meanwhile implemented a system of trade liberalization, spurring a radical restructuring and demise of national regulatory systems in the latter half of the twentieth century. For example, in Japan and South Korea, where postwar democratic governments sought to protect small farmers, a liberalization of rice prices has undermined the social bases of the countryside. In general, there has been decline in basic food production in many areas of the world as staple grains were increasingly produced in a few countries in the Global North. At the same time, food crops in the Global South have often been substituted by animal feed, thereby shifting production away from human subsistence to meat and dairy production for consumers in affluent regions.

The recent transformation in food economies has led to further concentration of agricultural markets by a few large companies on a global scale. University of Missouri rural sociologists William Heffernan and Mary Hendrickson have analyzed the rapidity with which oligopolistic firms have gained control of agricultural markets in the United States since the 1970s. Meanwhile, Selma Tonzalini has demonstrated the growing market power of the world’s largest multinational food processing firms. Supermarkets have likewise been part of the multinational consolidation process, as Thomas Reardon and Peter Timmer have documented. Such chains achieved very high densities in relatively affluent parts of South America and East Asia in the 1990s, moved on to the middle-class regions of countries such as Mexico, Bulgaria, and Indonesia, and achieved slight penetration in a few areas of Africa, as well as Nicaragua and Peru. Much of Africa, however, has yet to see the growth of supermarkets. The rise of global supermarkets has been dominated by just a few firms based in the Global North, most notably Wal-Mart, which has nearly four times the sales of its nearest rival, the French giant Carrefour. Wal-Mart led the discounting revolution, spurring globalization and demanding low-cost labor at all stages of production. The vertical integration and global reach of multinational supermarkets has thus transformed the global food chain and restructured relationships with producers.

Consumers have also been drawn into the global food chain through the development of sophisticated marketing techniques. Marion Nestle has demonstrated how the political power of the U.S. food industry has been used to subvert scientific nutritional research and advice, thus weakening government oversight. Other research has demonstrated how this occurs in the current global food industry, since “the products most frequently promoted tend to be the highly processed food introduced through FDI [foreign direct investment]. The evidence shows that such advertising influences dietary habits among children.”

The neoliberal transformation of global food systems has resulted not only from the market power of large firms but also from the political governance of new technologies. For decades, international property law has ensured that seed companies can profit from the germplasm of commercial varieties but has treated peasant landraces as a natural resource with no economic value, although patentable varieties depend on access to the biodiversity created by the knowledge and labor of peasant farmers and indigenous peoples. Together with the Bayh-Dole Act of 1980, which helped extend U.S. patent protection to living organisms, these legal regimes became the basis for the industrial production of genetically modified organisms (GMOs). By the 1990s, research foundations and scientists heralded a Second Green Revolution of biotechnological innovations and genetic engineering in the name of solving world hunger and malnutrition.

The use of GM foods has met with widespread suspicion and often vociferous opposition by large numbers of both consumers and producers. Particularly in Europe, consumers have successfully organized to block the sale of GMO foods, arguing that the potential risks to health and the environment have not been adequately studied. Meanwhile, many rural analysts and advocates argue that the problem of world hunger is not about supply but is primarily about distribution and land and income inequality, therefore emphasis on increasing output is misplaced and not really about the eradication of hunger and malnutrition. Others point to how a handful of companies have come to control the food supply and in the process have further disadvantaged small-scale producers by allowing Monsanto, Aventis, and a few other seed companies and other middlemen to reap the benefit. Although farmers are supposedly the beneficiaries of new technologies, they must purchase new seeds each year because of restrictions on replanting, including both contractual obligations and so-called “terminator technologies” that prevent seeds from germinating. In a recent volume on the impact of the biotechnology revolution in Latin American, the contributors demonstrate how the biotechnology transformations coincide with the sharp neoliberal restructuring to increase the power of a handful of powerful corporations while doing little to address the unequal distribution and malnutrition. In fact, several scholars underscore the ethnocentric attitudes in assuming U.S. and European approaches are “not only superior but also universally applicable,” essentially ignoring the social, cultural, economic, and political contexts of individual societies.

Debates about the value of agricultural modernization cut across the contemporary North-South political divide. Many intellectuals and policy-makers denounce critiques of biotechnology as a luxury of wealthy consumers in the North. For example Professor Jennifer Thomson of the University of Cape Town, South Africa, argues: “From the perspectives of many developing and newly industrialized countries, agriculture biotechology’s benefits are very real and urgently needed today and indispensible tomorrow. The developing world cannot afford to let Europe’s homemade problems negatively impact the future growth in our countries.” Proponents of neoliberal and biotechnology revolution argue that such policies are aimed to expand markets, circumvent bureaucratic and cultural obstacles to production, and improve the lot of small farmers and poor consumers. Critics counter that agrarian transformation has undermined traditional producers and national food sovereignty, squeezing some of the poorest populations on earth, transforming communities, spurring migration, and leaving once-productive lands fallow or cultivated by export crops. Miguel Teubal has suggested that Argentina in the course of a few years has gone from “breadbasket of the world to the soybeans republic.” Nobel Peace Prize winner Wangari Maathai argues that “biotechnology and patenting of life forms is now the new frontier for conquest, and Africa ought to be wary because a history of colonialism and exploitation is repeating itself.”

Low-paid migrant farm workers and service employees have also become essential for transnational commodity chains. Globalized production divides workers in bordercrossing industries and leads to a general deskilling of agricultural and agro-industrial jobs. Displaced rural populations in the Global South have been actively recruited to work as low-wage seasonal hands on large-scale farms and in agro-industrial enterprises such as meatpacking and cannery plants. Employers have fomented divisions of race, class, gender, and region to divide workers and to alienate producers from consumers. For example, Deborah Barndt and her colleagues have studied women, work, and globalization in the North American “tomato trail,” a commodity chain linking women who work as migratory field hands in Mexico and as supermarket and fast food restaurant clerks in Canada. They have found that although “flexible” labor systems have impoverished both groups of women, there are limits on the ability to organize workers across national, cultural, and class lines.

Just as the “enlightened” market reforms of the eighteenth century led to a wave of food riots, contemporary neoliberal policies have inspired food riots and austerity protests throughout the world. For the years 1976 to 1992 alone, John Walton and David Seddon have documented at least 146 austerity protests, large-scale collective actions against structural adjustment policies imposed by the IMF. These authors observe that “the food riot as a means of popular protest is a common, perhaps even universal, feature of market societies—less a vestige of political-industrial evolution than a strategy of empowerment in which poor and dispossessed groups assert their claims to social justice.” Indeed, the orderly nature and theatrical quality of many contemporary food riots illustrates a widespread popular understanding of Amartya Sen’s dictum that hunger results not from food shortages but rather from unequal distribution policies that leave particular social groups vulnerable.

Struggles for Food Sovereignty: Alternatives to Corporate Food Politics

While rural producers and communities have been struggling for survival for centuries, in the last few decades growing movements valorizing local production, local ways of production, and local control over decision making have emerged. Given that many of these global movements started from local struggles and have evolved with local conditions on principles of sovereignty and sometimes autonomy, this is a varied movement that shares some basic principles but has numerous permutations and organizing strategies. In general, these strategies have sought to create food sovereignty for communities by using available resources to produce food for local consumption while respecting nature and community values and traditions. The common struggle against the top-down globalization of corporations, neoliberal governments,  and multilateral organizations such as the WTO and IMF has united diverse groups  of farmers, peasants, consumers, and activists to forge a bottom-up globalization of resistance.

One of the opening salvos in this war came on January 1, 1994, when an uprising of indigenous peoples under the banner of the Zapatista Army of National Liberation (EZLN) brought into public view the long-hidden struggles of  rural populations marginalized by the world economic system. Timed to coincide  with the implementation of the North American Free Trade Agreement, the EZLN’s cry of Basta! (Enough!) was directly aimed at the juggernaut of global capital and its march to destroy what was left of indigenous communities. Scholars have subsequently confirmed the EZLN prediction that NAFTA would be a death blow to small maize farmers unable to compete against subsidized maize from the United States. The Zapatista uprising directly challenged the view that food crops are just another interchangeable commodity  and instead made the case that maize was a way of life and central to the identity of millions of people. They called for an end to the totalizing worldview of globalization from above and demanded a “world where all worlds fit.” Their aggressive use of the Internet to publicize their struggle and to forge solidarity with peoples in resistance throughout the globe gained global attention.

Another rural movement that challenged traditional agrarian relations and confronted neoliberal visions for the countryside has been Brazil’s Landless Workers Movement (Movimento Sem Terra, MST). Established in 1984, the MST uses direct action to challenge Brazil’s highly unequal land holding patterns and blistering social inequality. Workers organize collectively and plan their own strategy for occupying lands and building communities. Under the banner of “occupy, resist, and produce,” participants democratically construct their own lives to grow their own food, establish their own schools, and govern their own communities. During the first twenty years of its existence, the MST has occupied and settled 350,000 families on 10 million hectares of land throughout Brazil.

In 1993, diverse nation-based rural social movements united to form an international organization, Vía Campesina, to resist neoliberal policies against the peasantry and to advance global justice and democracy. A decade after its founding, Vía Campesina comprised 149 organizations from 56 countries. Central to its organizing principles is the articulation of food sovereignty: “the right of the peoples to define their own food and agriculture; to protect and regulate domestic agricultural production and trade in order to achieve sustainable development objectives; to determine the extent to which they want to be self-reliant.” While not inherently opposed to trade, this approach allows producers to determine their methods of farming and ways of life, explicitly democratizing daily life and putting trade and technology at the service of communities.

The growing agroecology movement seeks to achieve a sustainable agriculture by using indigenous knowledge of farmers such as those in the Vía  Campesina network together with scientific advances of ecology. Drawing from thousands of years of agricultural history, the science of agroecology takes a holistic and thus more environmentally and socially sensitive approach to ensure the health of food, land, and community. As one of its leading proponents has argued, “new agroecological approaches and technologies spearheaded by farmers, NGOs, and some local governments around the world are already making a sufficient contribution to food security at the household, national, and regional levels.” Indian physicist Vandana Shiva has called for viewing “the planet as a commons,” instead of seeing it as “private property.” In contrast to shortsighted globalization, she argues, “communities are resolutely defending and evolving living communities that protect life on earth and promote creativity.”

In seeking to create humane and inclusive societies without hierarchies, food sovereignty or earth democracy approaches have sought to directly place women at the heart of the food sovereignty movement. Women in Vía Campesina have demanded from its inception, “the right to produce our own food in our own territory.”

While food sovereignty movements have emerged in the Global South, they also have firm roots in Europe and the United States. French famer and activist José Bové burst onto the international scene through his high-profile destruction of a McDonald’s restaurant in southwest France in 1999 to protest U.S. trade barriers on Roquefort cheese. European consumers have been in the forefront of the anti-GMO movement and have led boycotts that have pressured European governments to ban GMO products. Guerrilla gardening efforts have taken off in European and North American cities as local food begins to gain ground. The Fair Trade Movement is meanwhile struggling to break down the walls between consumers and producers that have been carefully erected by years of capitalist policies. These various movements are fostering a greater awareness on the true costs of inexpensive foodstuffs and their economic and cultural impacts.

Conclusion

Foodways have been historically and continue to be a hotly contested subject today. Although the development of capitalist relations of production in the food and agriculture sectors increased production, it also sharply transformed what food is and who has access to it. Moreover, the use of statecraft to rationalize food systems, often a product of class and regional struggles, has tended to yield unequal benefits to urban populations, often consciously at the expense of rural producers and traditional ways of life. Currently famine seems to have been significantly reduced in most areas of the world, but chronic hunger and malnutrition still abound. Nevertheless, resistance and popular movements have succeeded at forging spaces to adapt to changing situations in ways that have led traditional foodways to persist in new forms. Globalization from below and the formation of transnational networks of producers and consumers, such as Vía Campesina and the anti-GMO movement, have heightened awareness of the social and cultural impact of development policies driven by corporate interests and multilateral institutions of the global north. This struggle has underscored the wide range of alternative forms of production and foodways that have survived and thrive even in the face of daunting political and economic constraints.

By Enrique C. Ochoa in "The Oxford Handbook of Food History" Edited by Jeffrey M. Pilcher, print publication date: October 2012, online publication date: November,2012, DOI: 10.1093/oxfordhb/9780199729937.013.0002. Adapted and illustrated to be posted by Leopoldo Costa.

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