Agriculture Reference
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movement Via Campesina as a movement contesting the neo-liberal conceptualisation of
food as a commodity with their arguments for food to be re-localised through arguments for
'food sovereignty'. Whilst this argument prioritises those who are exploited and
marginalised in the global South, considerable opportunity is identified for these
movements to act in co-ordination with Northern social movements.
3. The organic food and farming movement
With its origins in the colonial encounter of Western agriculture with its Asian counterpart,
and a separate hermeneutic tradition from German speaking Europe, organic agriculture
started in the 1920s (Conford 2001, Reed 2010, Vogt 2007). By the 1930s it had networks of
discussion and a few experimental farms across Germany and the British Empire. It was
only in the post-war period that organic farming began to spread more widely, partly as a
response to the green revolution and partly through the emerging organic movement.
Configured, as I have argued elsewhere, as a cultural movement the organic movement
lacked for many years the confrontational tactics of many other social movements but
worked on exemplars of alternative agricultural practice and increasingly on providing
organic products (Reed 2010). During the late 1960s and the early 1970s the Soil Association,
the main organisation of the British organic movement, saw a range of radical
environmental thinkers and activists clustered around it, ranging from the eco-socialist
Barry Commoner, through the conservative Edward Goldsmith by way of its President E F
Schumacher (Reed 2004, Reed 2010).
The adoption of EU organic production standards saw these goods move from health food
stores and farm shops towards the major retailers, with subsequent rapid growth for those
elements of the movement involved in farming (Buck
et al.
1997). At this point the organic
movement found itself at the forefront of a direct contest with its opponents for the first
time, as it became a mover within, and tribune for, the protests against Genetically
Modified/Engineered plants. These protests demonstrated the global spread of the organic
movement until this point and locked it into what Campbell has described as a 'binarism'
with GM agriculture (Campbell 2004).
Just as these protests saw these technologies largely removed from Europe and fiercely
contested elsewhere, many scholars and activists were positing that organic farming no
longer offered any resistance to the dominant forms of agriculture (Guthman 2004b,
Lilliston & Cummins 1998, Rigby & Young 2001). Tovey had argued that in the Irish
example the appearance of production standards had seen the institutionalisation of the
movement and this was confirmed by Moore who demonstrated that many organic growers
were moving to a 'post-organic' status to find new cultural space (Moore 2005, Tovey 1997).
In part these differences can be explained by the local trajectories of different national
organic movements. Although the protest actions in the UK that provided elements of a
repertoire of protest that was widely emulated, suggesting divergent flows within and
between national movements (della Porta & Tarrow 2005, Reed 2010). Guthman's
prescription for subsidies for organic production, stronger regulations and more technical
support appear very similar to initiatives common in Europe, yet the message of the
'conventionalisation thesis' has been broadly applied without these caveats (Formartz 2006,
Patel 2007, Pollan 2006). There has also been much sport in what Johnston and Szabo have
described as “scholarly cynicism about affluent food consumers and their selfish
motivations” (Johnston & Szabo 2010:14)
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