Environmental Engineering Reference
In-Depth Information
Finally, in their focus on the U.S. policies that have certainly contrib-
uted to inequalities within the food system, food justice scholars and
movement intellectuals largely ignore the role of neoliberal globalization
and its tendency to increase environmental injustices. The U.S. food
justice movement's analysis largely overlooks the Green Revolution,
which has allowed increasingly small numbers of corporate farmers to
produce increasingly large yields of a few commodity crops. Additionally,
the movement tends not to name the neoliberal trend away from entitle-
ment programs--such as welfare or food stamps--as a source of unequal
food access. Indeed, many in the U.S. food justice movement have
adopted the right-wing interpretation of such programs as promoting
dependency and complacency, and posit entrepreneurial approaches as
a more empowering alternative.
The U.S. sustainable agriculture movement (sometimes called the food
movement), on the other hand, does recognize globalization as a key
creator of an ecologically destructive food system. Supporters of this
movement have been one of developed countries' key constituencies in
protests against the World Bank and IMF, and have rallied against
present-day Green Revolution technologies such as genetically modifi ed
seeds. Yet, the primary response of the sustainable agriculture movement
has been to encourage their mainly wealthy supporters to attempt to
“opt out” of the global food system and support local, organic, small-
scale family farmers instead. U.S. policies and neoliberal trade agree-
ments, as well as economies of scale, tend to ensure that such food is
more expensive than that produced by corporations embracing Green
Revolution technologies. The sustainable agriculture movement tends
to prioritize support for farmers over increasing food access, and thus
fails to link its analysis of globalization to the environmental injustices
it produces. Moreover, while supporting local food systems has many
positive effects for communities that can afford to do so, the movement's
emphasis on “the local” is complicit with globalization in that it tends
to weaken the state by undermining support for the federal entitlement
programs on which many food-insecure people depend (Swyngedouw
2004). Such an approach prevents U.S. food movements from envision-
ing the kinds of state support seen in Belo Horizonte and Cuba,
which may make food justice and food sovereignty widely available
realities.
Environmental injustices may be overcome if the U.S. food justice
movement connects to transnational efforts to create food sovereignty in
the global South. The Via Campesina is able to link peasant movements
