Environmental Engineering Reference
In-Depth Information
knowledges and to ensure that the transnational movement's work
remains grounded in local realities.
What binds the members of La Via Campesina is not just a set of
organizational policies, but a shared opposition to the Green Revolution
technologies and neoliberal policies they believe have created food crises
throughout the global South. Indeed it is this movement that coined the
term
food sovereignty
, and it maintains an ongoing discussion as to its
meaning. Generally, though, the movement's rhetoric contends that
food sovereignty favors small-scale family and collective farms and
peasant agriculture, and prioritizes sustainable production and access to
local markets. International trade is reserved for surpluses remaining
after local populations are fed (Rosset 2003, Rosset and Borque 2001,
Desmarais 2007). Thus La Via Campesina offers a model of a global
agricultural system in direct opposition to the market-led approach
enabled by the Green Revolution and advocated by the IMF and World
Bank. Moreover, La Via Campesina posits land reform as necessary to
food sovereignty, and seeks to support its members' various efforts
to achieve this. Additionally, the movement has been a strong, vocal
opponent of genetically modifi ed foods and of the patenting of seeds.
These technologies, movement leaders argue, represent a continuation of
the Green Revolution, and will produce further ecological degradation
and increase corporate control over global agriculture (Desmarais 2007).
The U.S. food justice movement, as well as the Campesino a Campesino
movement and El Rancho Solidario, offer models of resistance within
global industrial agriculture. But it is La Via Campesina's notion of food
sovereignty, combined with its new structures of collective action and
broad participatory norms, that create direct opposition to industrial
agriculture.
Food Justice and Food Sovereignty
The six examples described in this chapter provide evidence of the diver-
sity of interconnected resistances, oppositions, and alternatives to the
environmental injustices created by Green Revolution technologies and
the neoliberal IMF and World Bank monetary policies in Latin America.
Like the U.S. food justice movement, they highlight how small farmers
and landless peoples have been deprived of the ability to grow food, and
how adequate, appropriate, affordable food is not available for purchase.
Additionally, actors involved in the Latin American projects, policies,
and movements described above share the U.S. food justice movement's
