The post Book of the Day: Handbook of Food as a Commons appeared first on P2P Foundation.
]]>By Jose Luis Vivero-Pol (Editor), Tomaso Ferrando (Editor), Olivier De Schutter (Editor), Ugo Mattei (Editor)
From the scientific and industrial revolution to the present day, food – an essential element of life – has been progressively transformed into a private, transnational, mono-dimensional commodity of mass consumption for a global market. But over the last decade there has been an increased recognition that this can be challenged and reconceptualized if food is regarded and enacted as a commons.
This Handbook provides the first comprehensive review and synthesis of knowledge and new thinking on how food and food systems can be thought, interpreted and practiced around the old/new paradigms of commons and commoning. The overall aim is to investigate the multiple constraints that occur within and sustain the dominant food and nutrition regime and to explore how it can change when different elements of the current food systems are explored and re-imagined from a commons perspective. Chapters do not define the notion of commons but engage with different schools of thought:
- the economic approach, based on rivalry and excludability;
- the political approach, recognizing the plurality of social constructions and incorporating epistemologies from the South;
- the legal approach that describes three types of proprietary regimes (private, public and collective) and different layers of entitlement (bundles of rights); and
- the radical-activist approach that considers the commons as the most subversive, coherent and history-rooted alternative to the dominant neoliberal narrative.
These schools have different and rather diverging epistemologies, vocabularies, ideological stances and policy proposals to deal with the construction of food systems, their governance, the distributive implications and the socio-ecological impact on Nature and Society.
The book sparks the debate on food as a commons between and within disciplines, with particular attention to spaces of resistance (food sovereignty, de-growth, open knowledge, transition town, occupations, bottom-up social innovations) and organizational scales (local food, national policies, South–South collaborations, international governance and multi-national agreements). Overall, it shows the consequences of a shift to the alternative paradigm of food as a commons in terms of food, the planet and living beings.
Reviews
“If you want to understand why the commons isn’t tragic, what gastronomy has to do with a democracy or what the practice and theory of a future food system might look like, this wonderful collection of essays is well worth reading.” — Raj Patel, food scholar, communicator and author of Stuffed and Starved, 2013 and A History of the World in Seven Cheap Things, 2018
“The adoption of a holistic and complex vision of gastronomy is the only way to restore the true value of food. It is not only about production and consumption, but also wisdom, memory, knowledge and spirituality, traditional practices and modern technologies combined in an ecological interconnection between people and the planet. This book starts a needed and welcome reflection on the change in paradigm, and traces a possible pathway towards food sovereignty.” — Carlo Petrini, founder and president of the international Slow Food movement and the University of Gastronomic Sciences, Italy
“If we are really to transform the food system, we need bold ideas. Food as commons is one of them. If you are serious about exploring new ways of fixing the food system, read this book.” — Professor Corinna Hawkes, Director, Centre for Food Policy, City, University of London, UK and Co-Chair of the Independent Expert Group of the Global Nutrition Report
“Finally, a rich and rigorous assessment of food as a commons! This landmark collection of essays reveals how much we need to rethink the very language and frameworks by which we understand food and agriculture. The food we eat is not a mere commodity, it is the cherished, complicated outcome of culture, history, vernacular practice, ecological relationships, and identity. Insights on these themes can help us build new food systems that are stable, fair, and enlivening.” — David Bollier, scholar and activist on the commons, author of Think Like a Commoner, 2014 and co-editor of The Wealth of the Commons, 2012
Table of Contents
1. Introduction: the food commons are coming
Jose Luis Vivero-Pol, Tomaso Ferrando, Olivier de Schutter and Ugo Mattei
PART I: REBRANDING FOOD AND ALTERNATIVE NARRATIVES OF TRANSITION
2. The idea of food as a commons: multiple understandings for multiple dimensions of food
Jose Luis Vivero-Pol
3. The food system as a commons
Giacomo Pettenati, Alessia Toldo and Tomaso Ferrando
4. Growing a care-based commons food regime
Marina Chang
5. New roles for citizens, markets and the state towards an open-source agricultural revolution
Alex Pazaitis and Michel Bauwens
6. Food security as a global public good
Cristian Timmermann
PART II: EXPLORING THE MULTIPLE DIMENSIONS OF FOOD
7. Food, needs and commons
John O´Neill
8. Community-based commons and rights systems
George Kent
9. Food as cultural core: human milk, cultural commons and commodification
Penny Van Esterik
10. Food as a commodity
Noah Zerbe
PART III: FOOD-RELATED ELEMENTS CONSIDERED AS COMMONS
11. Traditional agricultural knowledge as a commons
Victoria Reyes-García, Petra Benyei and Laura Calvet-Mir
12. Scientific knowledge of food and agriculture in public institutions: movement from public to private goods
Molly D. Anderson
13. Western gastronomy, inherited commons and market logic: cooking up a crisis
Christian Barrère
14. Genetic resources for food and agriculture as commons
Christine Frison and Brendan Coolsaet
15. Water, food and climate commoning in South African cities: contradictions and prospects
Patrick Bond and Mary Galvin
PART IV: COMMONING FROM BELOW: CURRENT EXAMPLES OF COMMONS-BASED FOOD SYSTEMS
16. The ‘campesino a campesino’ agroecology movement in Cuba: food sovereignty and food as a commons
Peter M. Rosset and Valentín Val
17. The commoning of food governance in Canada: pathways towards a national food policy?
Hugo Martorell and Peter Andrée
18. Food surplus as charitable provision: obstacles to re-introducing food as a commons
Tara Kenny and Colin Sage
19. Community-building through food self-provisioning in Central and Eastern Europe: an analysis through the food commons framework
Bálint Balázs
PART V: DIALOGUE OF ALTERNATIVE NARRATIVES OF TRANSITION
20. Can food as a commons advance food sovereignty?
Eric Holt-Giménezand Ilja van Lammeren
21. Land as a commons: examples from United Kingdom and Italy
Chris Maughan and Tomaso Ferrando
22. The centrality of food for social emancipation: civic food networks as real utopias projects
Maria Fonte and Ivan Cucco
23. Climate change, the food commons and human health
Cristina Tirado-von der Pahlen
24. Food as commons: towards a new relationship between the public, the civic and the private
Olivier de Schutter, Ugo Mattei, Jose Luis Vivero-Pol and Tomaso Ferrando,
Text sourced from Routledge.com
The post Book of the Day: Handbook of Food as a Commons appeared first on P2P Foundation.
]]>The post Commons and ‘Commoning’: A ‘New’ Old Narrative to Enrich the Food Sovereignty and Right to Food Claims appeared first on P2P Foundation.
]]>“How did we get to accept that food, one of the three essentials for life, along with air and water, can be produced, distributed, appropriated and even destroyed on the basis of pure economic considerations?”
From the Introduction
Tomaso Ferrando and Jose Luis Vivero-Pol: Over the last ten years, Watch readers have become familiar with the consequences of the capitalist economic model: from the depletion of natural resources to climate change, and from the concentration of wealth to the corporate capture of our food system. Despite a decade of mobilizations and struggles, we continue to witness the effects of capitalism’s appropriation and transformation of nature: the enclosure of land, the rapid disappearance of small-scale farming, the privatization of customary fishing rights, the misappropriation of seeds, deforestation to cultivate cash crops for industrial long food chains, the gradual extinction of biodiversity, human-induced pollution, meal impoverishment, nutrient-poor ultraprocessed foods, and widespread famines, to name but a few.
Policy makers, social movements, grassroots groups and engaged scholars have discussed legal initiatives, policy options and examples of how bottom-up organizations and new forms of governance can facilitate, redress and prevent some of the malfunctions and harmful effects of global capitalism. However, they
often stop at the symptoms; or their attempts to introduce a new vision of what a new food system could look like are thwarted. In this respect, we invite readers to re-interpret the relationships between humans, animals, nature and food, and present a value-based paradigm shift that goes to the root of a failed economic system. Rather than perceiving natural resources and food as commodities, this article shows that a paradigm shift towards valuing, governing and stewarding nature, labor and food as commons can enrich the claims for food sovereignty and the human right to adequate food and nutrition.
This paradigm change is neither a proposal for a quick fix, nor a short-term solution to the converging crises, but rather a long-term, ecological and bottom-up
alternative to the dominant economic model. Our notion of the commons goes beyond an economic understanding of commons as rival but hardly excludable natural resources shared by a community. We advocate for an understanding of the commons that reflects a combination of material and immaterial common resources (e.g. fish stocks and cooking recipes). The commons also encompasses the shared social practices that have been institutionalized by societies to govern resources (referred to as ‘commoning’), and collective management with a sense of common purpose (i.e. to guarantee access to food to all members of the community). Thus, commons are not only resources but also practices where each member of the collectivity is thinking, learning and acting as a ‘commoner’. It is through commoning’ that resources become part of the commons, and not the other way around.
The commons-based approach to humans and the planet informs a transition from nature as a resource that serves human needs, to nature as a co-constructed
and co-inhabited web—a life enabler that also sets limits to human activities. This paradigm shift is rooted in historical and customary practices (e.g. indigenous groups producing food in rural areas, transhumant pastoralists in grassland steppes) as well as in innovative contemporary urban actions (e.g.
young dwellers consuming organic food produced in urban gardens or sharing meal initiatives via Internet apps). Therefore, it is both a new and an old paradigm that clearly confronts the dominant neoliberal narrative that is marked by profit oriented market hegemony and individualism. We begin with a critique of the idea of the ‘tragedy of the commons’ and we then discuss the role that commons and ‘commoning’ can have in decommodifying nature. In the last section, we introduce the idea of food as ‘new’ old commons in opposition to food as a pure commodity, and discuss how this narrative and praxis may enrich other transformational civil society claims.
Download the full report here.
The post Commons and ‘Commoning’: A ‘New’ Old Narrative to Enrich the Food Sovereignty and Right to Food Claims appeared first on P2P Foundation.
]]>The post Let’s talk about the right to food appeared first on P2P Foundation.
]]>Recently, the media was abuzz with news of plans by the Scottish Equalities Secretary to legislate the right to food within Scottish law. This would be a step towards tackling food poverty in Scotland. This potential legislation will be historic, as Scotland will be the first country in the European Union (EU) to expressly recognize the right to food.
Despite rising numbers of food insecure households and a rise in the use of food banks all over Europe (see here and here), the right to food is completely absent from the fundamental EU treaties, the European Convention on Human Rights, and from the jurisprudence of national and regional courts. In other words, the right to food does not exist in the European laws, except for the recent regional law in Lombardia, Italy and the yet-to-be approved draft bill on the right to food in Belgium.
As one of us (JLV-P) discussed in a recent BMJ Global Health article, the stance of EU authorities and member states in the defence of human rights has not included the right to food as a fully-fledged right domestically. Europe is lagging behind Latin America in the protection of the right to food. The EU often fails to advocate for its inclusion in internationally-negotiated agreements such as the SDGs, where the right to food was deliberately removed at the very end of the negotiating process.
There are almost no EU funds to support advocacy, law- and policy-making process and implementation of this right domestically or internationally. Although Spain, Germany, Switzerland, and Norway have traditionally provided financial support to the UN’s Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO) for projects on the right to food, they have recently been replaced by Brazil and Mexico as actors in the promotion of the right to food.
In the EU and elsewhere, the right to food should be one of the pillars of public food policy, from food production to food waste. Protecting, defending, and fulfilling this right depends on recognising the dignity of hungry people, their legitimacy to claim the right to food, identifying spaces of collective participation where those most affected by food insecurity can contribute as citizens to public policy design, and coherence of all policies and legislations that may affect the right to food.
To fill the political gap left by the EU and launch a debate on the right to food, a group of academics, practitioners and activists are inviting blogs to be featured on the BMJ Global Health blog. We are looking to feature a transdisciplinary approach—on understanding how political actors perceive the right to food, the role of grassroots mobilisations and the differences between the right to food, the right to nutrition, the right to food security and the right to food sovereignty.
However it is defined, achieving this right requires education, awareness, and the production of new legal and political knowledge that will result from debate and dialogue. Please join the discussion on Twitter using #RightToFood and pitch your ideas for blogs to the BMJ Global Health Blog Editor at [email protected].
Jose Luis Vivero-Pol is a Research Fellow at the Center for the Philosophy of Law (CPDR) and Earth and Life Institute (ELI), Universite catholique de Louvain. Jose Luis has been directly involved in food law making and policy implementation in Latin America and the academic analysis of processes and outputs.
Tomaso Ferrando is an Assistant Professor, Warwick University School of Law. Tomaso also acts as scientific director of the Master on Food Law and Finance of the International University College of Turin and has been involved in the discussions and preparatory work that anticipated the Regional Law on the Right to Food in Lombardia.
The post Let’s talk about the right to food appeared first on P2P Foundation.
]]>The post 10 Policy Ideas to Make Food a Shared Resource in Europe appeared first on P2P Foundation.
]]>Cat Johnson: The commons are generally thought of as shared resources — these include everything from the public spaces we share to the air we breathe. A new movement hopes to redefine food as a commons.
As agricultural engineer Jose Luis Vivero-Pol explains in a new proposal to create a food commons in Europe, food should be considered a commons based on its “essentialness for human survival and the commoning practices that different peoples maintain to produce food for all.” He points out that the ethos surrounding the commons is different from those surrounding for-profit capitalistic ventures, and that food should not be treated as the latter.
The proposal notes that “the theory of the commons has barely touched upon food.” Vivero-Pol recommends a number of policy options for food to be valued and governed as a commons in Europe — here are 10 from a list of 15 ideas published by the P2P Foundation:
1. Declare food as a commons
A Declaration of the European Parliament to consider food no longer as a commodity but a commons, public good and human right to be included in national legal frames and public policies.
2. Create food commons initiatives
European Citizen Initiative to consider food as a human right, a public good and a commons in European policy and legal frameworks. Policy priorities should be geared towards safeguarding farmer’s livelihood and eater’s rights to adequate and healthy food.
3. Get healthy food into schools
Local, organic, freshly-made school meals as universal entitlements, governed by parents and school staff.
4. Support food councils
Promote Food Policy Councils at all levels through participatory democracies, financial seed capital and enabling laws. Once enough numbers are achieved, an EU Food Policy Council could be established to monitor the reform yet-to-be Commons Food Policy.
5. Reframe the role of food producers
Food producers to be employed by the state to provide food regularly to satisfy the state’s needs (i.e. for hospitals, schools, army, ministries, etc).
6. Ensure that everyone is fed
Guaranteed daily bread for all. Establishing public bakeries where every citizen can get access to a bread loaf every day (if needed or willing to).
7. Reduce food waste
Stricter and innovative rules to avoid food waste (binding regulations).
8. Keep public research in the commons All agricultural research funded with public funds to be in the public domain.
9. Support civic actions
Food-related subsidies to support innovative civic actions for food such as Territories of Commons, community-supported agriculture, food buying groups, open agricultural knowledge, etc.
10. Food banks as a right
European Parliament to elaborate a communication to call for an E.U. food bank network that is universal, accountable, compulsory and not voluntary, random and targeted, shifting from charitable food to food as a right.
The post 10 Policy Ideas to Make Food a Shared Resource in Europe appeared first on P2P Foundation.
]]>The post How “open source” seed producers from the US to India are changing global food production appeared first on P2P Foundation.
]]>This article reports on a number of important new initiatives that have the potential to integrate the various projects and movements working against the enclosure of living material and for the seed commons. An important read for saving the endangered food supply of humanity now and in the future. Penned by Rachel Cernansky, it was originally published in Ensia.com.
Rachel Cernansky: Frank Morton has been breeding lettuce since the 1980s. His company offers 114 varieties, among them Outredgeous, which last year became the first plant that NASA astronauts grew and ate in space. For nearly 20 years, Morton’s work was limited only by his imagination and by how many different kinds of lettuce he could get his hands on. But in the early 2000s, he started noticing more and more lettuces were patented, meaning he would not be able to use them for breeding. The patents weren’t just for different types of lettuce, but specific traits such as resistance to a disease, a particular shade of red or green, or curliness of the leaf. Such patents have increased in the years since, and are encroaching on a growing range of crops, from corn to carrots — a trend that has plant breeders, environmentalists and food security experts concerned about the future of the food production.
A determined fellow dedicated to the millennia-old tradition of plant breeding, Morton still breeds lettuce — it just takes longer, because more restrictions make it harder for him to do his work.
“It’s just a rock in the river and I’m floating around it. That’s basically what we have to do, but it breaks the breeding tradition,” he says. “I think these lettuce patents are overreaching and if they [were to hold up in court], nobody can breed a new lettuce anymore because all the traits have been claimed.” He continues to work with what is available, breeding for traits he desires while being extra careful to avoid any material restricted by intellectual property rights. He has also joined a movement that is growing in the U.S. and around the world: “open source” breeding.
Astronauts on the International Space Station grew and ate Outredgeous red romaine lettuce in the station’s “Veggie” system, a test kitchen for growing plants in space. Photo by NASA
If the term sounds like it belongs in the tech world more than in plant breeding, that’s no accident. The Open Source Seed Initiative, inspired by “the free and open source software movement that has provided alternatives to proprietary software,” was created to ensure that some plant varieties and genes will remain free from intellectual property rights and available for plant breeders in perpetuity. As part of the initiative, commonly known as OSSI, U.S. breeders can take a pledge that commits the seeds they produce to remain available for others to use for breeding in the future.
That doesn’t mean they can’t build a business with or sell them. What the pledge does is allow farmers who buy seeds from an open-source breeder to cross them with other material to breed their own varieties and save them for future seasons — two things many crop patents forbid. Dozens of breeders and seed companies have committed to OSSI since the initiative’s launch in 2014.
Compromised Future
For University of Wisconsin–Madison professor emeritus and OSSI board member Jack Kloppenburg, control of seeds and the ability to breed new crops are matters of both food security and environmental protection. Seeds play a role in larger issues like biodiversity, farmers’ rights, control of the food system and use of agricultural chemicals, which many independent breeders try to avoid or reduce by breeding natural resistance into crops themselves.
Kloppenburg emphasizes that the open-source movement is not about genetically modified organisms; patents can affect all crops, vegetable or grain, GMO or conventional, organic or not. “Control over the seed is what’s at the core of all environmental sustainability that we’re working toward,” he says, pointing to the increased consolidation in the global agriculture industry, most recently with the mergers announced between ChemChina and Syngenta in August 2016, and Monsanto and Bayer in September. “If you go to the farmer’s market and you’re interested in buying good, local, sustainably produced vegetables, you also need to understand that most vegetables are coming out of a breeding process that is itself endangered. We will not have food sovereignty until we have seed sovereignty.”
The Open Source Seed Initiative, where U.S. breeders take a pledge committing their seeds to remain available for others to use for breeding in the future, is in contrast to the practice of patenting seeds and crop traits. Photo by Jack Kloppenburg
OSSI supporters argue that as planting material becomes more restricted through intellectual property rights, the future of the food supply is compromised because the gene pool is continually shrinking. OSSI executive director Claire Luby, whose Ph.D. thesis focused on genetic variation and availability within carrots, found that about one-third of all carrot material has been protected by intellectual property rights, rendering it unavailable or difficult for plant breeders to use. Similar estimates do not yet exist for other crops, but experts such as Luby are confident that big commodity crops such as corn are even more heavily impacted than crops such as lettuce and carrots.
A Matter of Perspective
Growers breed plants to selectively express desirable traits — from those that will improve a crop’s taste or color, to those that help crops thrive in certain environments and resist threats such as pests or disease. Opponents of crop-trait patents say the increase in patents is shrinking the catalog of plant material available to breeders at a time when the need for genetic diversity is greater than ever, thanks to the less-predictable conditions brought on by climate change.
In an email, Monsanto spokesperson Carly Scaduto recognized the importance of genetic diversity, saying it’s crucial for the company’s operations and Monsanto works to preserve diversity through its four gene banks and by collaborating with institutions around the world, including the U.S. Department of Agriculture. But she disagreed with the notion that intellectual property suppresses other breeding efforts. “Patents and [plant variety protection] inspire innovation,” she wrote. “Basically, the patent creates a map to allow anyone else to do the same once the patent expires. Oftentimes those ‘how to’ instructions enable others to accomplish the same result by finding another method to get there. So rather than hindering innovation, such protection facilitates it by placing more material and know-how in the public domain.”
Morton, however, argues waiting the 20 years for a patent to expire is no way to encourage innovation, and waiting that long to breed crops that can adapt to changing conditions is a losing battle. Even that misses the main point for Morton, though: genetic resources have always belonged to the commons, and should continue to be a public good, he says. “[Independent plant breeders] have neither the time nor money for such formalities, and monetary incentives are not what move us. We want to improve farming for farmers. That’s a different motivator, not promoted by stifling the free use of the best and newest genetic resources.”
Independent plant breeder Frank Morton selects lettuce seed in his breeding nursery. Photo by Karen Morton
Furthermore, Morton takes issue with the very concept of patenting a plant trait. “You didn’t actually create it,” he says. “The plant created it, and the plant breeder has no idea how the plant created that trait. It is just nature at work.”
For Carol Deppe, an Oregon plant breeder and OSSI board member, there’s another component to breeding that’s important. “When you breed a variety, you breed your own values right into the variety,” she says. “If you believe in huge agribusiness farms with monocultures that are managed with massive doses of herbicides, then you breed your concept of what agriculture should be like into that variety. I do exactly the opposite.”
While a handful of medium-sized companies (those with international markets but smaller than, say, Monsanto) hold patents, most smaller seed companies are able to survive without patenting — they either are opposed to the practice, have decided the process is too costly to be worthwhile, or both.
Morton argues that avoiding intellectual property protection also encourages more active breeding. “Seems to me that my incentive to crank out new stuff is stronger than [companies that patent]. I need new stuff constantly to feed my catalog with new material, knowing that my competitors will be selling my varieties within a few years,” he says. “A patent creates a 20-year insulation against competitive intrusion, which seems pretty cushy from my perspective.”
Global Response
While the U.S. seems to be leading the open-source charge, the concept is rapidly spreading around the world. In India, the Centre for Sustainable Agriculture, which describes itself as a professional resource organization, runs an open-source seed program, working with farmers to preserve seeds for traditional food varieties and to involve them in breeding new varieties that meet specific needs. The organization also helps farmers access and market open-source seeds. German organization Agrecol is in the process of launching an open source “license,” essentially a more formal, legally binding version of the OSSI pledge for breeders in the European Union. (Regulations governing breeding differ from country to country, so the OSSI pledge cannot simply be adopted as-is in Europe or elsewhere.) In early November the European Commission, the EU’s executive body, declared that conventionally bred plants should be nonpatentable, marking a shift from the European Patent Office’s current stance, which permits patents for conventionally bred crops. The statement is not law, however; it will now be up to European governments to push the patent office to implement the commission’s statement.
In October 2016, the Dutch organization Hivos hosted a conference on open-source seed systems in Ethiopia, attracting farmers, community seed bank operators, and representatives of governments, non-governmental organizations and seed companies from around East Africa to learn about the open-source seed movement and the global shift toward patenting seeds.
Willy Douma, who runs Hivos’ open-source seed systems program, says the organization is in the process of building a global alliance on open-source seed systems that it hopes to launch formally next year. A coalition of environmental and development groups (including Hivos, international development nonprofit USC Canada and the Action Group on Erosion, Technology and Concentration) has compiled a database of seeds and biodiversity around the world to publish the Seed Map Project. And in a report published in September, the Global Alliance for the Future of Food — a collaboration of philanthropic foundations, including the WK Kellogg Foundation, the McKnight Foundation and more — said that to ensure a resilient food supply, farmers need to be able to access, exchange and improve seeds, and have a voice in shaping seed policies. The report also emphasized the role that diverse, local seed supplies play in sustainable food systems — a connection that Luby of OSSI hopes more people start to make soon.
“The food movement has focused on where is it grown and how is it grown, and the seed systems haven’t been as much a part of those conversations,” she says. “We’re trying to connect with people to say, ‘Hey, there’s an even deeper layer to your food.’”
The post How “open source” seed producers from the US to India are changing global food production appeared first on P2P Foundation.
]]>