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. A Rights-Based Approach to Food Insecurity in the United States
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Explanation & Answer
Attached.
Agric Hum Values (2016) 33:165–177
DOI 10.1007/s10460-015-9625-8
Food justice or food sovereignty? Understanding the rise of urban
food movements in the USA
Jessica Clendenning1 • Wolfram H. Dressler2 • Carol Richards3
Accepted: 30 June 2015 / Published online: 14 July 2015
Springer Science+Business Media Dordrecht 2015
Abstract As world food and fuel prices threaten
expanding urban populations, there is greater need for the
urban poor to have access and claims over how and where
food is produced and distributed. This is especially the case
in marginalized urban settings where high proportions of
the population are food insecure. The global movement for
food sovereignty has been one attempt to reclaim rights and
participation in the food system and challenge corporate
food regimes. However, given its origins from the peasant
farmers’ movement, La Via Campesina, food sovereignty
is often considered a rural issue when increasingly its
demands for fair food systems are urban in nature. Through
interviews with scholars, urban food activists, non-governmental and grassroots organizations in Oakland and
New Orleans in the United States of America, we examine
the extent to which food sovereignty has become embedded as a concept, strategy and practice. We consider food
sovereignty alongside other dominant US social movements such as food justice, and find that while many
organizations do not use the language of food sovereignty
explicitly, the motives behind urban food activism are
& Jessica Clendenning
jessnclen@gmail.com
Wolfram H. Dressler
wolfram.dressler@unimelb.edu.au
similar across movements as local actors draw on elements
of each in practice. Overall, however, because of the different histories, geographic contexts, and relations to state
and capital, food justice and food sovereignty differ as
strategies and approaches. We conclude that the US urban
food sovereignty movement is limited by neoliberal
structural contexts that dampen its approach and radical
framework. Similarly, we see restrictions on urban food
justice movements that are also operating within a broader
framework of market neoliberalism. However, we find that
food justice was reported as an approach more aligned with
the socio-historical context in both cities, due to its origins
in broader class and race struggles.
Keywords Urban agriculture Food sovereignty Food
justice Social movements Food security Food regimes
Abbreviations
CSA
Community supported agriculture
FAO
Food and Agricultural Organization
NGO
Non-governmental organization
NOLA
New Orleans, Louisiana
NOFFN New Orleans Food and Farm Network
USDA
United States Department of Agriculture
USFSA United States Food Sovereignty Alliance
WHO
World Health Organization
Carol Richards
c6.richards@qut.edu.au
1
Bogor, West Java, Indonesia
2
School of Geography, University of Melbourne, Melbourne,
VIC 3010, Australia
3
School of Management, Business School, Queensland
University of Technology, 2 George St, Brisbane, QLD 4000,
Australia
Introduction
New global challenges have arisen in feeding poor people
in rapidly expanding urban areas. Cities currently hold
more than half of the world’s population and in the next
decade an estimated 3.5 billion people (FAO 2010) will
123
166
seek wage labor and income in sprawling cities (Sassen
1990; Bello 2009). Confounding the challenge of food
production for growing urban populations are the mounting
pressures of high oil prices, climate change and greater
competition for land and water. A mix of social, political
and economic marginalization has further complicated the
provision of urban food, making equitable access to food a
challenging local priority. In this context, the challenge has
not been growing enough food per se, but rather producing
and distributing food in ways accessible and affordable for
the growing urban poor (Weis 2007). Millions of poor
people who reside in urban areas remain hungry due to
their inability to pay for and/or access food through other
means due to constraints in society and the modern food
system (Patel 2007).
The 2007/8 and 2011 food price crises have highlighted
the fragility and vulnerability of the food system to pressures such as the global financial crisis, food commodity
speculation, climate change, changing consumption patterns, peak oil and the rise in biofuel production (Martine
et al. 2008; Lagi et al. 2011; Clapp and Helleiner 2012;
McMichael 2012). These factors have merged in a ‘perfect
storm’ resulting in food price hikes and a new wave of
hunger globally. In 2007 alone, the world’s hungry had
increased by a further 75 million people resulting in over
one billion under-nourished people globally (FAO 2008).
Lang (2010) argues that food crises are becoming a normal
condition as the twenty-first century productionist food
paradigm loses momentum.
These complex global market forces manifest as social
costs such as diminishing access to food (Sassen 1990).
Whilst food price hikes are felt most abruptly in developing
countries where food equates to a high proportion of
overall living costs, people living in the economic margins
of so-called wealthy nations are also severely affected. In
the USA, the focus of this study, these effects are seen in
urban areas, where a disproportionate number of poor
African-Americans, Hispanics and other ethnic minorities
live in (often) unsubsidized housing and depend on lowwage employment. Urban areas often have high food prices
due to infrastructure and transportation costs, with most
urban poor relying on staples such as rice and wheat, the
very products that soared in cost in 2008 (Martine et al.
2008, p. 6). Whilst the effects of food price increases are
felt most keenly in the Global South, the 2008 food spikes
priced 50 million Americans out of the food market (HoltGiménez and Patel 2009, p. 62). Some suggest that modern
cities in the Global North are ‘food deserts’, places where
junk food is more readily accessible than affordable fresh
food (Holt-Giménez and Patel 2009; Burns 2014). As the
number of urban poor has grown, so too has urban food
insecurity in the US, with 15 % of city dwellers recently
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J. Clendenning et al.
reported to be food insecure (Kirkpatrick and Tarasuk
2011). Where only 2 % of the US population still farm, and
very few farm in cities, income and food security are
highly correlated (Holt-Giménez and Patel 2009).
In response to growing food insecurity, urban food
movements are on the rise, demanding greater access and
equal rights to food in cities (Wittman 2011). These
movements operate from various rights-based ideological
standpoints, including food sovereignty and food justice.
This paper examines urban food movements that are
emerging in the US in response to insecure and limited
access to food among the urban poor. Such movements
tend to tap into alternative networks of food production,
whether through backyard or community gardening, local
markets, or community-supported agriculture (CSAs).
Alternative food movements have different strategies and
practices that aim to change conditions in urban settings,
but share common visions of a more equitable food system
(see Allen et al. 2003; Maye et al. 2007; McClintock 2008,
2014). Two key questions inform this study. First, to what
extent have the pressures and constraints of the current
corporate food system enabled a ‘food sovereignty’
approach to form in cities of the United States? Second,
how does ‘food sovereignty’, given its origins from peasant
farmer movements in the Global South, manifest and adapt
to the context of poor, urban consumers in the Global
North?
In order for the global food sovereignty movement to
progress, the extent, significance and connection to urban
food sovereignty movements, especially in the US, must be
understood in a socio-political context. We do this by
examining how NGOs, activists and urban farmers perceive ‘food sovereignty’ by situating struggles to overcome
constraints in accessing affordable, healthy food. Investigating the extent to which US food movements relate to
global food sovereignty movements is key: it highlights
how politically radical food movements are (or are not)
challenging the current, corporate food regime by exposing
the strategies that work in the ‘in-between spaces’ of
neoliberalism (Peck and Tickell 2002).
This study is based on key informant interviews and
site visits with food system academics, as well as activists and farmers engaged in food movements in Oakland
and New Orleans. We examine how and why US urban
food activism unfolds, and what concepts, strategies and
practices enable contestation of the dominant corporate
food regime. The two cities were chosen because both
share similar economic and social injustices, including
poverty, violence and police brutality. Oakland has a
history of urban food activism, while New Orleans is a
relative newcomer to urban food movements, which were
formed in response to the Hurricane Katrina disaster.
Food justice or food sovereignty? Understanding the rise of urban food movements in the USA
Using purposive, network sampling, thirty-two actors
involved in US urban agriculture were interviewed. This
included ten academic-activists and twenty-two people
who had a high profile in the alternative food sector.1 These
were workers in NGOs, grass-roots activists, urban farmers
and people involved in community organizations. The
informants were selected because of their high level of
involvement in alternative food movements in each city.
To identify potential informants, key organizations active
within Oakland and New Orleans’ food movement programs were asked to name the key agents involved in the
food movement in their city. In many instances the same
names were repeated, highlighting a core group of people
heavily engaged in urban agriculture and alternative food
economies. The interviewees were asked about the
motives, ideologies and practices underpinning their work.
The interviews were recorded and transcribed, and key
words and phrases were grouped to examine and compare
relationships and understandings of food justice and food
sovereignty. The sections below expand upon the political
economy of global food systems, situating the Oakland and
New Orleans cases within an integrated, global food
economy, and highlight the context within which food
sovereignty movements have arisen.
Food regimes and capitalist agriculture
Despite on-going investments in technological fixes for big
agriculture, global statistics show that a significant proportion of the world’s poor are not adequately fed, with the
number of people in hunger expected to pass one billion
(FAO 2010). Friedmann and McMichael (1989) suggest the
inadequacies of the global food system have emerged
through successive ‘food regimes’. They illustrate how
growing capital and international trade has undercut
developing economies, ‘‘reconstructing consumption relations as part of the process of capital accumulation—with
particular consequences for agricultural production’’
(Friedmann and McMichael 1989, p. 95). They argue that
three distinct food regimes are identifiable. From 1870 to
1914, the first food regime organized and specialized trade
among European countries and ‘settler’ states across the
hemispheres, where primary and processed resources (e.g.,
wheat and meat) were exported from the latter to the former. In return, settler states imported valuable manufactured goods, labor and capital from Europe, often
1
The original names of academics interviewed on the concept of
food sovereignty in the US have been kept upon permission.
Pseudonyms have been given to all other respondents in the Oakland
and New Orleans areas.
167
facilitating resource extraction and agricultural production
(Friedmann and McMichael 1989, p. 96).
The second food regime formed thirty years later, from
the 1950s to the 1970s. The US became the main trade
actor between post-colonial states, redirecting the flow of
food from the South to North, with the transfer of agricultural surplus to developing countries (initially as food
aid) (Holt-Giménez and Shattuck 2011). Post-colonial
states saw their agricultural exports become more specialized and manufactured, destined for distant markets, while
their imports were surplus wheat from (subsidized) US
overproduction. The intensification of mono-cropped
wheat production and specialization through trade marked
the shift to agro-industrialization and intense meat production (Friedmann and McMichael 1989; McMichael
2009). This period signaled a widening rift between land
and people as well as nations and cultural crops, intensifying the commodification of land and labor. Rather than
producing for domestic populations, nations were now
producing high-yielding cash crops for global markets,
squeezing farmers and farmland for surplus accumulation.
Peasant lands were consolidated to facilitate transnational food production, just as plots on marginal lands were
subdivided to quell resistance and unrest (McMichael
2009). Over time, as land and people became urbanized,
more food was bought instead of grown.
Now, many academics argue that we are in a third
(corporate) food regime. From the 1980s onwards, there
has been a marked shift towards intensive global and
national deregulation of food production (Burch and
Lawrence 2009; Campbell 2009; Campbell and Dixon
2009; Friedmann 2009). In developing countries, the dismantling of tariffs, price guarantees, and extension systems
(as part of structural adjustment and free trade) led to
dramatic reductions in domestic food surplus (Holt-Giménez and Shattuck 2011). Northern governments, corporations and institutions have provided uneven subsidies and
trade policies to prop up massive cereal and grain production for export as feed and food aid, disabling local
market structures and undermining livelihoods. The Global
North continues to import a range of fruits, vegetables and
meat, forcing Southern countries to restructure their agricultural sectors for export (McMichael 2009). In the Global
South and North, the third food regime has involved the
accumulation of large tracts of land and capital for intensive, mechanized mass-produced food, fuel and feed for
domestic and international production and consumption
(McMichael 2009). Concurrently, the expansion of the
agro-food trade and monopoly of agro-food corporations
led to the super-marketization of countries such as the US
and soon after, parts of Brazil, India and China (McMichael 2005, 2009). Each successive food regime enabled
the US and Britain to gain political and economic power to
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168
‘‘[…] determine not only what will be produced and where
it will go, but also who will profit from agriculture and who
will be vulnerable to food crises’’ (Winders 2009, p. 316).
The ‘financialization of agriculture’ represents an extension of such accumulation, with new market actors pushing
up food prices through excessive speculation on food
commodity markets (Burch and Lawrence 2009; Clapp and
Helleiner 2012).2 These factors have increased the price
and amount of food available in the global food supply
chain, driving record profits for food corporations, but
pricing out marginalized people and small-scale farmers
(Martine et al. 2008).
Debates continue about how food production is organized within large-scale, corporatized agriculture and
capitalism, and whether this indeed constitutes a new or
third ‘food regime’ (see Goodman and Watts 1995, 1997).
However, regardless of the ‘label’ attached to the current
food system, it has resulted in the rapid redistribution and
concentration of ownership of land, seeds, and agricultural
inputs. The global economic integration of the food systems means that the results of a corporatized food regime
have similar impacts across diverse geographies. Likewise,
resistance to the third, or corporate food regime, is also
present across varied geographies and manifests in many
ways. For instance, disconnections of people and food have
stoked global food riots among landed and landless peasants, demanding equitable access to and use of food
(Magdoff and Tokar 2010). Other forms of resistance have
been to empower local communities and re-invent the food
system through social networks and food-ways, from the
ground up (Campbell and Dixon 2009).
Capitalist agriculture also impacts the places from where
it originates. Similar to peasant farmers in the Global
South, small and medium-sized US farmers have been
unable to make profits and compete with heavily subsidized corporate farms. Small-scale farming in the US is
increasingly difficult amidst growing support for agro-industrialism, economies of scale and associated transport
and production infrastructure. By 1999, farms larger than
500 hectares constituted 79 % of all US farmland, with the
remaining small-scale family farmers subject to precipitous
decline (Patel 2007; Holt-Giménez and Shattuck 2011). At
the same time, agricultural lands have been subject to
urban encroachment, justified by low rent, cheap housing
and specialized industrial zones that cater to mass food
production and distribution (York and Munroe 2010). As
cities expand, capital and wealth is often spatially concentrated in inner city areas, causing increases in ground
rents and living costs (Smith 2008). Most often the poor in
2
Similarly, corporate investors are acquiring vast tracts of land in the
Global South, particularly in Africa, for timber plantations, food and
biofuels production (Lyons et al. 2014).
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J. Clendenning et al.
or near inner city areas are forced to move to lower cost,
peripheral areas subject to ghettoization. Here the poor
contend with limited employment opportunities, few social
welfare provisions, social ostracisation and poor health.
The consequences for food security are most pronounced.
Kirkpatrick and Tarasuk (2011) note, for example, that
inner city ‘high poverty’ households whose rental costs
were subject to mounting market pressures (e.g., property
values, inflation) had less ‘after-shelter’ income available
to purchase sufficient levels of quality food. They found
that families with housing costs that consumed more than
30 % of their income were at greater risk of food insecurity
(Kirkpatrick and Tarasuk 2011, p. 284). As the inner city
poor are squeezed into marginal living areas, they remain
at significant risk of food insecurity, poor health and illness, rendering close to 15 % of US households food
insecure in 2008 (Kirkpatrick and Tarasuk 2011, p. 284).
Challenging the third food regime
Growing networks of people are responding to the injustices of the current, corporate food regime. Disgruntled by
the lack of access to affordable, good food, people are
creating their own pathways to food. The rise of urban
agriculture in the US may well represent small attempts at
social change to ‘‘build’’ and ‘‘re-embed food systems’’
(Friedmann and McNair 2008, p. 257; McClintock 2014),
and are of sufficient gravity to be considered a social
movement; that is, a sustained, organized public effort of
making collective claims concerning redress toward targeted injustices and authority over time and space (Tilly
2004). Two major food movements, food sovereignty and
food justice, are popular in the Global South and the urban
US, respectively. They offer resistance to the inequalities
of corporate food regimes and present a new ‘fair food’
paradigm. We examine these two movements historically,
and in the current context of US urban food movements, to
understand the similarities and differences between
expressions of food sovereignty and food justice. Below,
we examine the extent to which US urban food movements
are underpinned by food sovereignty and/or food justice
ideologies and practices. The literature and insights from
food academic-activists are drawn upon to make sense of
food sovereignty and food justice concepts as they are reinterpreted and applied to contemporary, community-driven alternatives. The value in this approach lies in understanding the historical underpinnings and trajectories in
resisting the corporate food regime and identifying workable pathways toward equitable, community-owned, food
systems. Following this, the case studies of Oakland and
New Orleans highlight how expressions of food sovereignty and/or food justice have relevance at the community
level.
Food justice or food sovereignty? Understanding the rise of urban food movements in the USA
Concepts of food sovereignty and food justice:
insights from academic activists
Food sovereignty
Food sovereignty refers to rights to food and production
systems, and is an emerging concept that is constantly
being defined, re-defined and negotiated according to different actors and contexts. In this section, food sovereignty
is considered by drawing upon academic literature, grey
literature and the voices of those interviewed for this
paper—thereby offering unique insights (from US urban
perspectives) into the deployment of the term both in the
literature and as empirically grounded in this study.
Originating in South and Central America, the concept
of food sovereignty gradually reached the global level
through the organized peasant farmer movement, La Via
Campesina. Today the concept of food sovereignty has
become part of international fora, where it was described at
the 2007 Nyéléni International Forum on Food Sovereignty
as:
… the right of peoples to healthy and culturally
appropriate food produced through ecologically
sound and culturally appropriate methods, and their
right to define their own food and agricultural systems. It puts the aspirations and needs of those who
produce, distribute and consume food at the heart of
food systems and policies rather than the demands of
markets and corporations… (Nyéléni Declaration on
Food Sovereignty 2007, pp. 673–674).
The discourse of food sovereignty has become globally
recognized amongst food system scholars, NGOs and food
activists—adapting to changing social contexts and political-economic conditions, and as one academic-activist
describes, ‘‘taking bigger picture politics and placing it in
local action.3’’
Another food systems academic and author describes
‘food sovereignty’ as a term ‘‘…born out of peasant
struggle [that]…comes from a particular trajectory of being
something food security is not.4’’ In the process of sustained dispossession, production and devaluation, peasant
farmer groups organized politically, and in 1993 La Via
Campesina (The Peasant’s Way) was born. In introducing
the concept of ‘food sovereignty’, La Via Campesina
challenged whether ‘food security’ could be achieved as it
failed to address the political economy of state trade
policies and the global food system. In response to the
inadequacies of the food security concept and its neoliberal
leanings, food sovereignty took root in the 1990s as rural
169
farmers in the Global South felt the pressures of producing
for world agriculture. The movement successfully highlighted the inherent power relationships in the food system,
and in particular, control, ownership and self-determination
in food systems. Through trade schemes like the WTO’s
Agreement on Agriculture, southern markets were subjected to global demands, destabilizing countries’ sovereign abilities to produce for their own people (McMichael
2005). Since the mid-1990s, the food sovereignty concept
has spread as a global movement where today, La Via
Campesina ‘‘comprises about 150 local and national
organizations in 70 countries from Africa, Asia, Europe
and the Americas. Altogether, it represents about 200
million farmers…5’’ Other international groups have also
joined the movement including the People’s Food Sovereignty Network and the International Planning Committee
for Food Sovereignty (Wittman et al. 2010). International
forums, such as the 2007 International Forum on Food
Sovereignty in Nyeleni, Mali, and most recently, the 20th
anniversary La Via Campesina conference in Jakarta,
Indonesia, demonstrate the movement’s growing influence
over the past twenty years.
Food movement actors have found the concept of ‘food
sovereignty’ to have considerably more rights-based
leverage than its relative concept, ‘food security’. Food
movement scholar, Hannah Wittman, noted that the concept of food sovereignty is difficult in practice because
there is no guidebook and that actors, from activists to
governments, frame it differently. In practice, food sovereignty requires localized action plans and government
support, however, some governments feel the concept is
too radical [especially compared to food security], which
can limit collaboration.6 International actors advocating for
food security development measures (e.g., FAO) recognized that the provision of ‘food security’ required much
more work than governments and markets could offer in
reallocating food supplies (Holt-Giménez and Shattuck
2011). Consequently, in 1996, the FAO revised food
security’s meaning to encompass the physical and economic needs of citizens, communities and states. In doing
so, however, the FAO ‘‘…avoided discussing the social
control of the food system’’ (Patel 2009, p. 665). As a
result, the global ‘food security’ discourse persists in line
with neoliberal doctrine, emphasizing market and trade
orientation over the rights to self-determine food systems.
Despite its success in consolidating a food movement
amongst peasant farms in the Global South, the food
sovereignty concept has been slow to spread within US
5
3
4
Interview with Madeleine Fairbairn, New York City, 25 July 2011.
Interview with Raj Patel, San Francisco, 26 July 2011.
La Via Campesina’s website: http://viacampesina.org/en/index.php?op
tion=com_content&view=category&layout=blog&id=27&Itemid=44.
6
Key informant interview with H. Wittman, 26 July 2011.
123
170
food activism. As an activist and food policy scholar notes,
food sovereignty ‘‘…tended to be a white concept that
underserved communities didn’t hear about…We have the
US Food Sovereignty Alliance…[but] they aren’t from the
neighborhoods, they are white, so there are a lot of barriers
to cross.7’’ Another food movement scholar further
describes how ‘‘Food sovereignty puts the emphasis back
on production which fits urban agriculture, while not
farmers markets. It takes the focus away from poor communities of color in the cities which food justice come out
of and put it on the romanticization of poor peasants in the
global south…It’s sort of a depoliticizing move.8’’ While
Northern organizations like the US Food Sovereignty
Alliance (USFSA) reflect similar goals as global partners
like La Via Campesina, the food sovereignty approach has
yet to gain widespread momentum. Yet, with eighty percent of the US population living in urban areas (WHO
2011), it is curious that food sovereignty has gained so
little traction in the US.
Food justice
Like the ‘environmental justice’ movement that burgeoned
in the US in 1960s and 1970s in response to environmental
inequalities faced by ‘people of color’ (Bullard 2000), the
‘food justice’ movement seeks to address injustices that
disproportionately impact upon people based on race and
class (Gottlieb and Joshi 2010; Mares and Alkon 2012).
Perhaps the best-known expression of the food justice
movement is the Black Panther Party’s ‘Free Breakfast for
School Children Program’, which began in Oakland in
1969 and spread throughout the US (Holt-Giménez and
Wang 2011). Decades on, food justice remains high on the
community agenda and ‘‘… [is] possibly the largest and
fastest growing grassroots expression of the food movement’’ (Holt-Giménez and Shattuck 2011, p. 124). A food
movement scholar explains further as to why food justice
[rather than food sovereignty] has spread in the US,
‘‘…food justice because they expect the state to give them
that. I think this is the fundamental ideological piece of
why food sovereignty doesn’t resonate in the US.’’ He
elaborated that ‘‘…people from the Global South understand capital and they have always had to protect themselves from capital…9’’.
Inequality and injustices paralleling race and class lines
are still the key catalysts for US food justice movements.
African-Americans and Hispanics populate many low-income areas of US cities that can be described as food
7
Key informant interview with food policy scholar, Oakland, 28 July
2011.
8
Interview with Alison Alkon, Oakland, 1 August 2011.
9
Key informant interview with food policy scholar, 28 July 2011.
123
J. Clendenning et al.
deserts. Gottlieb and Joshi (2010, 43) note a pervasive
trend of limited access to fresh food that relates directly to
‘‘health related disparities based on race, ethnicity and
income’’ in communities across the US. In a country of
‘abundance’, fifteen percent can be described as food
insecure, with African-American and Hispanic populations
bearing much of this burden (Patel 2009; Bishaw 2012).
Many civil society organizations currently work across
the US to address issues of food insecurity in urban spaces.
The strategies of such organizations include rural–urban
food buying groups and co-operatives, community supported agriculture, urban agriculture and farmers’ markets.
These strategies are based on localized food systems with
short supply chains, and have become increasingly popular
across the US. Of these, farmers markets represent a
growing success story. From 2010 to 2011, the number of
US farmers’ markets rose 17 % to reach 7175, and by 2014
more than a 1000 more markets were registered, reaching a
total of 8268 (USDA 2011, 2014). While these local
strategies are positive for linking farmers to urban communities and shortening supply chains, how they address
‘justice’ and bigger political issues requires further exploration. In particular, food system scholars have questioned
whether such market-based strategies re-create similar, less
accessible food options (Alkon and Mares 2012) and are
geared more toward middle-class consumers (DuPuis and
Goodman 2005); or conversely, that they ‘‘…ignore the
ways that racial and economic privileges pervade both
conventional and alternative food systems’’ (Alkon and
Mares 2012, p. 4).
How then, does food sovereignty relate to food justice in
the broader context of US urban food movements? In
practice, US food movements mobilize communities to
solve local problems, which Holt-Giménez and Shattuck
(2011) characterize as both its strength and weakness.
While localized, market-based strategies may bring about
positive changes regarding access to fresh food with
reduced food miles, they fail to address the bigger, structural and political issues that define who has the power over
access to food, with control remaining with the privileged
who can afford niche products (Alkon and McCullen
2010). The overall weakness of market-based approaches
to food inequalities is reflected in how locally-based
strategies do not engage with the bigger politics of the
corporate food regime that governs urban access to
affordable, healthy food choices (Holt-Giménez and Shattuck 2011). Instead, food justice strategies ‘work around’
the larger food system in small ways to provide communities food access. Similarly, Alkon and Mares (2012) find
that food justice projects in Oakland and Seattle do not
engage—and in many cases are not aware of the overarching neoliberal constraints—as a food sovereignty
approach demands.
Food justice or food sovereignty? Understanding the rise of urban food movements in the USA
Given its historical roots, the food sovereignty approach
is much more political, directly challenging the corporate
food regime and embedded power relationships, seeking
structural change in international (and national) food systems. In contrast to the food justice approach described
above, the food sovereignty movement has spread across
countries in a ‘boomerang pattern’ (Keck and Sikkink
1998; Friedmann and McNair 2008). We explore below the
context, conditions and constraints of food sovereignty
finding broader traction in US urban food movements.
Food movement case studies: Oakland and New
Orleans
The cities of Oakland, California and New Orleans,
Louisiana were selected as case studies in order to examine
the characteristics, motivations, strategies and practices of
US urban food activism. Oakland was selected because of
its long history in activism around the environment,
structural racism, and food production; and New Orleans
because of its recent surge of urban food movements in the
years following Hurricane Katrina, which devastated much
of the city. In both cities, grass-roots actors and local urban
communities are gaining new awareness of how their food
is produced and distributed.
Locating concepts, strategies and practices
in Oakland and New Orleans
Oakland is a city marked by lines of inequality, where
neighborhoods like West Oakland have ‘‘… 30,000 residents, thirty-six convenience and liquor stores and a single
supermarket’’ (Patel 2007, 250). Not surprisingly, the same
‘food desert’ neighborhoods of Oakland that gave rise to
the historic Black Panthers movement in the 1960s, are
now home to many ghost towns, which si...