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
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]]>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.
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]]>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.
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