Agrarian and Environmental Studies

Although food supply chains are global, and urban populations have ballooned, human beings nonetheless remain inextricably linked to the land by the food they eat. However, the ways in which links between land and human nutrition are articulated and maintained today are complex. This article seeks to explore this complexity, in light of current policy debates, including those related to the Second International Conference on Nutrition.

As food sovereignty spreads to new realms that dramatically diverge from the agrarian context in which it was originally conceived, this raises new challenges, as well as opportunities, for already complex transnational agrarian movements. In the face of such challenges calls for convergence have increasingly been put forward as a strategy for building political power. Looking at the US case, we argue that historically rooted resistance efforts for agrarian justice, food justice and immigrant labour justice across the food system are not only drawing inspiration from food sovereignty, but helping to shape what food sovereignty means in the USA. By digging into the histories of these resistance efforts, we can better understand the divides that exist as well as the potential for and politics of convergence. The US case thus offers important insights, especially into the roles of race and immigration in the politics of convergence that might strengthen the global movement for food sovereignty as it expands to new contexts and seeks to engage with new constituencies.

The article analyzes the scaling up of the Social and Solidarity Economy (SSE) agenda in the regional integration processes of Union of South American Nations (UNASUR) and MERCOSUR. We ask how the SSE is being used in processes of regional policy cooperation and what implications this has for the construction of regional governance frameworks supportive of social development. Our argument is that the regional processes in the contexts of UNASUR and MERCOSUR adopt a narrow concept of SSE that defines it as a social policy instrument to combat poverty. This limits the transformative potential of the SSE agenda, a more expansionist interpretation of which would otherwise herald the strengthening of socio-productive practices as an alternative to extractivist development in the region.

The food and agriculture sector is both a major contributor to climate change and
especially vulnerable to its worst impacts. This means that much is at stake in what is
a complex set of contested political dynamics as new governance agendas are rolled
out. On one hand, there is a strong push for ‘climate-smart agriculture’ (CSA) and
related initiatives in the area of marine resources such as the idea of the blue
economy, as an attempt to bring a range of viewpoints together to address the
interrelationship between these ecological and economic systems. On the other hand,
critics see these strategies as promotion of more of the same kinds of policies that
created stress in the climate–food system in the first place. To unpack these issues,
this special forum brings together a collection of papers that highlight three
overlapping themes that lie at the centre of these debates, yet which have not been
fully acknowledged by those implementing CSA initiatives: the role of power and
interests in shaping governance approaches to climate and food systems; the ways in
which existing approaches, primarily those promoting open markets and technology,
are reinforced in governance initiatives; and the sidelining of questions of inequality.

The rise of China has provoked changes in global geopolitics, deeply
influencing the global economy and trade relations. Of particular
importance for agrarian change is China’s increased demand for (agro)
commodities which has led to new partnerships abroad in order to
secure natural resource access. This paper analyses the increasing
economic and political relations between China and Latin America
and raises questions concerning new trajectories of agrarian change
and resource access, asking whether, how and to what extent a new
consensus has emerged in reaction to the Washington Consensus
which ushered in neoliberal policies to the region from the 1970s
onward.

The current configuration of global land politics – who gets what land,
how, how much, why and with what implications in urban and rural
spaces in the Global South and North – brings disparate social groups,
governments and social movements with different sectoral and
class interests into the issue of natural resource politics. Governance
instruments must be able to capture the ‘political moment’ marked
by the increasing intersection of issues and state and social forces
that mobilise around these. This paper looks at whether and how the
Voluntary Guidelines on Responsible Governance of Tenure of Land,
Fisheries and Forests in the Context of National Food Security (also
known as the TGs) passed in 2012 in the United Nations Committee for
Food Security (CFS) can contribute to democratising resource politics
today. This work puts forward some initial ideas about how systematic
research into the TGs can be done more meaningfully

We argue that the multiple contemporary converging crises have significantly altered the context for and object of political contestations around agrarian, climate, environmental and food justice issues. These shifts affect alliances, collaboration and conflict among and between state and social forces, as well as within and between movements and societies. The actual implications and mechanisms by which these
changes are happening are empirical questions that need careful investigation. The bulk of our discussion is dedicated to the issue of responses to the crises both by capitalist forces and those adversely affected by the crises, and the implications of these for academic research and political activist work. More specifically, we explore four thematic clusters, namely (1) class and intersectionality; (2) sectoral and multisectoral issues and concerns; (3) importance of immediate, tactical and concrete issues of working people; and (4) links between national and global institutional spaces and political processes. We know only a little about the questions we framed here, but it is just enough to give us the confidence to argue that these questions are areas of inquiry that deserve closer attention in terms of both academic research and political debates and actions.