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

The concept of food sovereignty has been enshrined in the constitutions of a number of countries around the world without any clear consensus around what state-sponsored ‘food sovereignty’ might entail. At the forefront of this movement are the countries of the so-called ‘pink tide’ of Latin America...

Full description

Saved in:
Bibliographic Details
Published in:The Journal of peasant studies 2014-11, Vol.41 (6), p.1175-1200
Main Authors: McKay, Ben, Nehring, Ryan, Walsh-Dilley, Marygold
Format: Article
Language:English
Subjects:
Bolivia
Class Struggle
Consensus
Constitutions
Ecuador
Elites
Food
food sovereignty
Food supply
Latin America
Political Elites
Politics
Power
Project evaluation
Sovereignty
State Society Relationship
State-society relations
the state
Venezuela
Citations: Items that this one cites
Items that cite this one
Online Access:Get full text
Tags: Add Tag
No Tags, Be the first to tag this record!
Description
Summary:The concept of food sovereignty has been enshrined in the constitutions of a number of countries around the world without any clear consensus around what state-sponsored ‘food sovereignty’ might entail. At the forefront of this movement are the countries of the so-called ‘pink tide’ of Latin America – chiefly Venezuela, Ecuador and Bolivia. This paper examines how state commitments to food sovereignty have been put into practice in these three countries, asking if and how efforts by the state contribute to significant transformation or if they simply serve the political purposes of elites. Understanding the state as a complex arena of class struggle, we suggest that state efforts around food sovereignty open up new political spaces in an ongoing struggle around control over food systems at different scales. Embedded in food sovereignty is a contradictory notion of sovereignty, requiring simultaneously a strong developmentalist state and the redistribution of power to facilitate direct control over food systems in ways that may threaten the state. State-society relations, particularly across scales, are therefore a central problematic of food sovereignty projects.
ISSN:1743-9361
0306-6150
1743-9361
DOI:10.1080/03066150.2014.964217