Environmental Engineering Reference
In-Depth Information
9
Resisting Environmental Injustice through
Sustainable Agriculture: Examples from
Latin America and Their Implications for
U.S. Food Politics
Alison Hope Alkon
Food is at the heart of projects, policies, and movements resisting envi-
ronmental injustice across the global South. Such activism often aims to
resist the globalization of industrial models of agriculture. More specifi -
cally, activists argue that the technological advances of the Green Revolu-
tion established a capital-intensive agricultural system. To procure these
technologies, governments across the global South borrowed heavily
from the World Bank and International Monetary Fund (IMF). However,
these institutions' lending policies demanded the privatization of many
services, preventing national governments from making such advances
available to small farmers or to those who do not have secure rights to
the land they cultivate. This trajectory, activists argue, has led to the
increased consolidation of land ownership while undermining the abili-
ties of agrarian peoples to produce food.
Activists envision an alternative to these environmental injustices
in the concept of food sovereignty, the right of people to control their
own food and agriculture systems (Via Campesina 2002). Actions in
pursuit of food sovereignty have taken a wide variety of forms, including
programs promoting small-scale, environmentally sustainable farming,
local and national policies designed to increase food access, and national
and transnational social movements calling for an alternative agricultural
system that benefi ts small farmers and landless peoples. These multiple
strategies call into being a variety of participatory norms—methods of
involvement in a social setting and resulting social roles. Those seeking
food sovereignty participate as producers and consumers of foods grown
outside of the transnational industrial food system, as citizens of cities
and states whose policies promote food access and local control, and as
protesters executing direct actions challenging the transnational indus-
trial agricultural system.
