Discourses of food sovereignty from somewhere

All knowledge is situated. It matters where knowledge is constructed and who the agents are that interact (and intersect) with that knowledge construction. I had the pleasure of studying with Lucy Jarosz as an MA and then PhD student at the University of Washington. A fantastic teacher, her discourse analysis exemplifies her art for weaving stories together, drawing on history and contemporary politics to unravel the complications of the global economy, food production, and food consumption.

Throughout my time in Seattle, I was surrounded by an incredible academic community in which graduate students, faculty, visiting scholars, activists, and food entrepreneurs had ample opportunities to engage with each other on a variety of local and global issues related to our food supply. As a graduate student and lecturer in Seattle, my students were already embracing a version of their own food politics and often enthusiastic to learn, think and engage in politics beyond the university (Galt et al., 2013; Lewis, 2009). In 2009, I conducted a brief survey of classes at the University of Washington and learned that at least six undergraduate classes had an explicit focus on food politics. Across North America, it is now fairly common to see courses on offer that include a variety of ways to study the politics, cultures, and economics of food systems within geography, sociology, anthropology, business, psychology, and environmental studies. Institutions such as the University of Vermont have recently established trans-disciplinary initiatives to study food systems; universities (and student led initiatives) are establishing their own gardens to learn how to grow and compost food; and Association of American Geographers annual meetings host dozens of food-related sessions with people participating from within and beyond the discipline.

I currently live and work in Auckland, New Zealand, where the North American context of knowledge production that I just alluded to above is troubled; I am confronted with a different set of realities that are both comforting and destabilizing as I develop my research program on investigating the web of assemblages that constitute food politics in this country. ¹ Heavily reliant on agricultural exports, issues of food politics on one hand seem to surface daily and in mundane ways, while on the other hand, my preliminary research suggests that New Zealand food politics are more fractured, fragmented, and less firmly embedded in wider political discourses than they are up north. As I read Jarosz’s paper in tandem with the explosion of provocative literature problematizing food sovereignty recently (e.g. Agarwal, 2014; Desmarais and Wittman, 2014; Larder et al., 2014; the papers presented at the 2013 Yale conference on Food Sovereignty: A Critical Dialogue and mostly forthcoming in The Journal of Peasant Studies; Wittman, 2011), I am questioning the assumptions of the transferability of categories such as food sovereignty, food security, peasants, family farmers, and global food (c.f. Bernstein, 2014). It is from this perspective that I wish to add my commentary.

In her paper, Jarosz (2014) neatly outlines how the discourses of food security and food sovereignty originated, how they bump up against each other, and ultimately, the potential of their influence on each other in our current times. As many of us live in the minority world and some of us study in the majority world, Jarosz reminds us that, “where and when these discourses develop and emerge is central to understanding their oppositions and convergences” (p. 168). This is the entry point that Jarosz gives us all to investigate our geographies of food sovereignty and food security: different contexts set the stage for these discourses to come into existence. Researchers are beginning to look at these discourses’ “oppositions and convergences” in grounded research projects and suggest that such context is a necessary and important inclusion to the conversation if the goal is to understand how to achieve a truly transformational food system (Desmarais and Wittman, 2014; Anderson, 2013; Ballamingie and Walker, 2013; Alkon and Mares, 2012; Block et al., 2012; Boyer, 2010; Morgan, 2009).

For me, building a research program in Auckland leads me to reflect that not only is the discourse of food sovereignty nearly absent (or hidden) from policy, but public conversations about concepts such as food justice, food movements, alternative food initiatives, food hubs, corporate agriculture, and others are less frequent, more fringe, and on a smaller scale than in Seattle. Coming from such a hotbed of academic and public enthusiasm for studying and resisting global food, I am desperately curious as to what makes New Zealand such a different case.

New Zealand shares many attributes with the global north. ² It is a relatively wealthy English-speaking western democratic member of the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development and a party to multiple more or less formal economic and political relations with Europe, the United States, Australia, and its more proximate ‘Asia-Pacific’ neighbors. It is of the north but located in the Antipodes. In contrast from the burgeoning food movements that are present in so many cities in the north, my research in Auckland is uncovering pockets of individuals engaging in a variety of political projects around food and eating but also a relative lack of public engagement or widespread effort at overt movement building; perhaps Auckland is in its “initial stages” of developing a food sovereignty agenda (c.f. Desmarais and Wittman, 2014). For example, there are nascent alternative food initiatives including a variety of markets that cater to the prolonged growing season and ethnic diversity of the region, upscale restaurants featuring ‘local’ and ‘seasonal’ foods on the menu, and boutique grocery stores featuring ‘artisanal producers’ and celebrity cooking classes. Less market-driven alternatives in the city include community gardens, opportunities to connect with local urban growers through home-delivery food box schemes, programs promoting trading/bartering home grown food, guerilla gardening projects, and seed savers groups. Such efforts may signal a public interest in larger issues rooted in the discourse of food sovereignty discussed by Jarosz including a concern for culturally appropriate, ecologically/socially sustainable consumption and are potentially laying the foundation for political organizing efforts to transform the food system (see also Ayres and Bosia, 2011; Galt et al., 2014). Such efforts are also rooted in discourses around resiliency and the financial and health benefits of eating local, fresh, and seasonal foods, which may be more closely aligned with the discourses of consumer-citizenship and food security (e.g. Desmarais and Wittman, 2014).

In my initial efforts to map these food initiatives, I have yet to come across a coherent critique of the political, economic, or social structures as obstacles to more profound control over the food system. I am seeking to unpack what this relative ambivalence can tell us about food sovereignty within this particular Antipodian urban center, the value of thinking of food politics within discursive categories, and how the insights of Jarosz’s paper can help think through these queries. In a partial answer that is now framing my own research into the political potential of food sovereignty, questions around urban food in Auckland, political agency, and resource management in New Zealand, I point to five crucial points of oppositions and convergences that signal a divergence from the North American context of which I am familiar.

First, New Zealand is a country dominated by its agricultural export economy, particularly its dairy industry, which accounts for nearly 25% of all exports (Statistics New Zealand). While apples, kiwifruit, and wine are often seen in international markets indicating their country of origin as New Zealand, dairy exports are a primary contributor to the gross domestic product. Second, Fonterra Co-operative Group Limited owns the vast majority of dairy production in New Zealand, which makes it a significant financial player in the country. Fonterra’s dairy products (in the variety of value added and value subtracted assemblages, mostly in the form of milk powder) make their way into the mouths of most Kiwi residents, but also those in China, Chile, Singapore, the United States, Holland, and 135 other international locations on a daily basis. Promoted as a cooperative of family farmers, Fonterra is a global business that has a far and wide reach across the global dairy industry.

Third, Tourism New Zealand’s clever “100% Pure” brand developed in 1999 to promote international tourism continues to have an impressive hold on people’s imaginations. The successful brand advertises New Zealand as predominantly rural, where travelers are invited to spend time relaxing in the “clean green” pastoral hills or for the more adventurous, bungee jumping off cliffs or surfing the waves. While more critical Kiwis are skeptical of a country’s claim to rural purity, particularly in regard to the environmental degradation resulting from the dairy industry (Haggerty et al., 2009), “the environment” remains an important factor that influences migration especially among the ‘Asian’ migrants which are the fastest growing demographic group of migrants (Ministry of Business, Innovation, and Employment). Despite the criticism, the “clean green” discourse is regularly referred to on government Web sites, blog posts, newspaper articles, New Zealand product advertising campaigns, and fittingly, by Fonterra’s marketing strategists.

Fourth, claims to purity are not only critiqued from an environmental perspective, but as a nation of migrants, Auckland’s multiculturalism is anything but ‘pure’. The original colonial categorizations of Maori (indigenous New Zealanders) and Pakeha (people of European descent) are challenged today with the growth of Chinese, Indian, and Pasifika migrants. As ‘ethnic’ foods are prolific in the city, broader cultural understandings of the relationalities of food within and between the diverse cultures that exist and are expanding throughout the country remain hidden (Johnston and Longhurst, 2012).

Finally, within the context of multiculturalism, sovereignty, as a topic on its own, is contentious and debated at a national level from a variety of perspectives such as within the context of Maori claims to land under the Treaty of Waitangi and also within the context of sovereignty from Britain and the Commonwealth. At the urban scale, questions of political sovereignty exist between the most populous region in the country (Auckland) and the capital (Wellington), especially since 2010 when the city of Auckland became an amalgamation of seven cities and regional councils. Academic and public debates frequently discuss these contentions, although including concerns about food in these debates is rare. Attention to thinking of food politically and in relation to sovereignty allows for a focus on New Zealand’s export agricultural economy, decline of ‘family’ farmers, increase in (urban) population, and the alternative food initiatives in Auckland based on the sovereign eating body. More generally, questions of sovereignty encourage an exploration of the web of assemblages that comprise the political projects of outward focused government policies and the inward focused mundane politics of eating (see also Desmarais and Wittman, 2014; Trauger, 2013).

These five points highlight the situated knowledge construction of food politics. It matters where we learn about the discourses that are encapsulated in our knowledge of food politics. It matters who the agents are in creating those discourses, who intersects with these discourses, and how their political capacities and political projects are manifested in these or other discourses. It is possible that the people involved in these nascent alternative food initiatives in Auckland are influenced by a variety of discourses that do not closely align with the discursive categories of which we are familiar (e.g. McClintock, 2014; Alkon and Mares, 2012); in fact, as I investigate possibilities for a food sovereign Auckland, “food sovereignty” may not at all be the point of entry (nor “food justice”, nor “food security”, for that matter). Rather than throw the baby out with the bathwater, I agree with Jarosz (and others such as Wittman and Desmarais) that these discourses are relational and effort is needed to understand the assemblages that are at play in the creation of these discourses in specific places and over time. In my own research, understanding these complicated assemblages that are both of the north and also of the Antipodes is essential in unraveling how food politics plays out in people’s everyday lives, their consumption practices, and the political landscape of resource management, corporate control, export trade, and environmental sustainability. The ensuing discourses create a politics somewhere.