DevISSues, volume 16, number 3, December 2014

FOOD POLITICS IN MOTION: STRUGGLE, SECURITY, AND SOVEREIGNTY

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Also in this issue: • NGOs at ISS

DevISSues DevelopmentISSues

Volume16/Number3/December 2014

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From the Editorial Board Food Politics in Motion: Struggle, Security and Sovereignty Starting in 2006, skyrocketing food prices propelled food security to centre stage in policy debates about the future of food and agriculture. In the wake of the so-called ‘world food crisis’ in 2007 and 2008, roughly 15 percent of humanity was considered hungry or malnourished, especially in the Global South, and particularly among women. The wave of food rebellions that coalesced across the globe at the same time highlighted not only this concurrent spike in hunger, but also the persistence and deepening of widespread food insecurity. Ongoing debates over how best to define the root of the food and hunger problem – and how to solve it – reflect the state of global food politics today. These are food politics in motion, actively contested in policy and practice.

Organizations like the FAO and the World Bank stepped up their food security focus following the 2007-8 crisis. The World Bank, for instance, introduced its ‘agricultural for development’ initiative, which brought new attention to small farmers, proposing them as development subjects who should be incorporated into global value chains dominated by multi- and trans-national agribusiness firms. Rather than addressing the roots of food insecurity and hunger, these initiatives proposed a ‘business as usual’ approach – hunger was seen as the result of ‘inefficient’ small-scale production and lack of market access, which could be overcome through investments, inputs to increase specialty crop production, and intensification of export agriculture. But research has shown that ‘business as usual’ is hardly an option in the context of converging food, energy, climate, water, and financial crises. Today, we need to critically evaluate these initiatives, and beyond that, to more fundamentally question the soundness of an underlying food security paradigm that reinforces a corporatized, and resource-intensive global agrifood system.

To counter the problems of the current food security approach, calls for more localized agroecological production, with closer connections between farm and fork are gaining momentum. Under the banner of ‘food sovereignty’, organizations like La Vía Campesina, the transnational peasant movement and the largest social movement in the world today, advocate a different path.

The Nyéléni food sovereignty declaration of 2007 defined food sovereignty as: ..the right of peoples to healthy and culturally appropriate food produced through ecologically sound and sustainable methods, and their right to define their own food and agriculture systems.

Former UN Special Rapporteur on the Right to Food, Olivier de Schutter (who is currently guest lecturer at the ISS), has advocated this path within the FAO. Food sovereignty has also registered a rise in academic research, with the ISS playing a leading role.

Initiated by Jun Borras, the ISS was deeply involved in the planning and production of the first two international academic conferences on food sovereignty, first at Yale University in 2013, and then in early 2014 at the ISS. This DevISSues contains contributions from ISS staff, PhD and MA students working on issues related to food politics. The articles are a reflection of the growing expertise at the ISS in critical food politics, and the institute’s key role in global food networks and debates, spanning academic, policy, and private sector arenas, and, importantly, social movements. The first article by Mindi Schneider takes a critical look at food security as a concept and a practice, raising questions about relationships between hunger, affluence, and corporate profit. Christina Schiavoni’s piece introduces the food sovereignty movement as a form of ‘food policy for the people’. The article by Oane Visser, Natalia Mamonova, Max Spoor, and Alexander Nikulin goes on to discuss the relevance of food sovereignty in settings with weak social movements, such as post-socialist and (post)authoritarian countries.

Next, this issue presents a ‘Student Spotlight’ section with four cases of food security and food sovereignty in action: a critical analysis of an input provision project for small farmers in Zambia; a contribution on food sovereignty tours in the Basque Country; a piece demonstrating how food sovereignty is being institutionalized at various political scales; and finally, FOOD POLITICS IN MOTION: a contribution on the tensions between the food sovereignty Agrarian, Food & Environmental STRUGGLE, SECURITY, demands of rural dwellers and the conservation demands Studies’, is an original water AND SOVEREIGNTY of state and NGO actors in South-Africa. colour painting by the Filipino painter Boy Dominguez. 2013.

On behalf of DevISSues, we hope you enjoy this issue!

It is the standard image of the AFES Major.

Mindi Schneider and Oane Visser (Guest Editors)

About the cover 1

Corrigendum – The previous DevISSues was incorrectly referenced Vol. 16, no. 2. This should have been Vol. 16, no. 1. This has caused some confusion amongst readers for which our apologies. To avoid further confusion, this issue is referenced Vol. 16, no. 3.

Also in this issue: • NGOs at ISS //Staff and PhD publications

DevISSues DevelopmentISSues

Volume16/Number3/December 2014

ISS is the International Institute of Social Studies of Erasmus University Rotterdam

Contents

Page 4 / Food Security and Feeding Affluence

Mindi Schneider Page 7 / Food Policy for the People Christina Schiavoni Page 9 / Food Sovereignty in Settings without Social Movements Oane Visser et al Page 13 / Student Spotlights: The Political Economy of the Farmer Input Support Programme Lorraine Mukuka Lupupa

Building Food Sovereignty in the Basque Country Zoe Brent

Food Sovereignty Antonio Roman-Alcalรก

Investigating the Incompatibility of Conservation and Agriculture Sithandiwe Yeni Page 19 / NGOs at ISS Page 22 / ISS News Page 23 / Staff and PhD News Page 24 / Working Papers

The views expressed in DevISSues are those of the original authors and do not necessarily reflect those of the Institute.

The online versions of all articles with full bibliography can be found at www.iss.nl/devissues

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Food Security and Feeding Affluence Mindi Schneider ‘Food security’ is on everyone’s lips. Governments are concerned to ensure it, international organizations like the FAO are keen to measure and promote it, researchers are lining up to study it, and agribusiness firms are rushing to supply it. But what, actually, is food security?

The first thing to note is that the term ‘food security’ itself is only 40 years old (Fairbairn 2010). It was first introduced at the 1974 World Food Congress, emerging at a time of rising energy costs, turmoil in global grain markets, and increasing levels of hunger. In this context, and building on priorities to increase food supplies that were set in the 1940s when the FAO and WHO were established, food security was proposed as a national-level measure of food availability. At the height of the Cold War, this macro-focus articulated with the political division of the globe into first, second, and third worlds, based on national and continental food production and supply.

Twenty years later, food security discourse shifted to reflect the neoliberal order. Participants in the 1996 World Food Summit reframed the concept in terms of individual and household food access, supplied through trade and markets, rather than through state-managed production and distribution. The 1996 version continues to be the reigning definition today: Food security exists when all people, at all times, have physical and economic access to sufficient, safe and nutritious food to meet their dietary needs and food preferences for an active and healthy lifestyle.

There is no question that this is a laudable goal. There are questions, however, about the ways in which this broad definition is operationalized and measured: for instance, what does food

security policy address, what does it ignore, and what does it conceal?

Despite a growing focus on food security in development policy and practice, hunger remains a widespread and extraordinarily uneven global problem.

In the immediate aftermath of the 2007-8 world food price crisis, more than one billion people – roughly 15 percent of the human population – were considered hungry. Today, the number of chronically undernourished people has returned to pre-crisis levels, tallying 805 million at last count. Still, the current figure is more than double the reduction to 400 million that authors of the Millennium Development Goals had hoped to achieve by 2015 (FAO 2014).

At the same time that millions of people are hungry, millions more are overfed.

According to the World Health Organization (2014), 35 percent of all adults over the age of 20 were overweight in 2008: that’s 1.4 billion overweight adults, on top of 40 million overweight and obese children under the age of five. Together with hunger, these figures express the stuffed and the starved character of the global agrifood system, to use Raj Patel’s (2008) words. They also suggest the need to complicate the way that food security is conceptualized and measured, including different forms of malnourishment (diets lacking certain essential micro-nutrients) that include over-consumption of calorically dense, yet nutritionally empty foods (typically, processed foods high in calories, saturated fats, and refined sugars).

A distinct challenge is that for decades, food security has been framed as a question of agricultural productivity, food calories, and free trade (Carolan 2013). But as the promise of genuine food security through neoliberal reform has gone unfulfilled, a growing chorus of scholars, civil society organizations, and social movements are critical of food security as a concept and a set of policies (Wittman et al. 2010). They argue that because it says nothing about where food comes from or how and under what conditions it is produced and consumed, food security offers little in the way of alleviating hunger, and even less for addressing the contradictions of hunger and malnourishment in the global agrifood system.

Currently, rather than problematizing food and its distribution, food security policy and planning are dominated by discourses of scarcity. We are running out of arable land, clean water, fossil energy, and time to feed a growing population. We need a 70-100 percent food production increase by 2050 (Tomlinson 2013) in order to avoid catastrophic hunger and suffering.

We are in a race against the clock and the changing climate to ensure baseline levels of food for all…or so the story – and the framing of development policy – goes.

The trouble with scarcity the way it is operationalized in discourse and policy, is that it tends to obscure the uneven relationships that underlie the persistence and deepening of hunger and malnutrition, past, present, and

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future. This is not to say that resources like fossil energy are infinite, or that the impacts of decades of industrialization are not wreaking havoc on global water supplies, agrobiodiversity, and healthy soil to the detriment of farmers and production. However, from the caloric perspective, supply is not the problem.

While there are more than enough food calories to meet global dietary needs, whether or not those calories end up as food, and what kind of food, are the bigger questions – today billions of food calories are fed to automobiles (biofuels) and livestock (feed) at the same time that hundreds of millions of people are hungry or otherwise food challenged.

What’s more, notions of scarcity blur the political decisions that are made about food production and distribution – including decisions about what to subsidize, how to regulate markets, and to whom to grant land use and access – veiling those decisions behind fears of ‘natural limits’. Put another way, a focus on scarcity as the cause of hunger and malnutrition today, and of food crises in the future, tends to conceal the generalized and ongoing crises of industrial capitalist agriculture and its development model.

Around the same time that world hunger peaked at more than one billion, world meat consumption also reached historically unprecedented levels.

Between 1961 and 2009, meat production quadrupled to almost 300 million tonnes, and average per capita consumption doubled to 42 kg/person/year (FAOSTAT). These trends continue today, as meat consumption is rapidly escalating in places like China and Brazil, and other so-called developing and transition countries. In the BRICS, meat consumption, fuelled by industrial agriculture, rose by 6.3 percent a year between 2003 and 2012, and meat sectors across Asia in particular are expected to grow by 80 percent by 2022 (Chemnitz and Becheva 2014).

Rising hunger and meat consumption converge in the march of energy and capital intensive industrial livestock production across the globe, and over a range of ecosystems, livelihoods, and foodways. For example, feeding China’s growing industrial livestock herd means that vast tracts Cerrado grasslands in Brazil are being converted to soy and maize for feed production. This is only the most recent round of land-use and ecosystem change, with associated dispossession of people for livestock; it is an intensifying process that has been a key part of ‘development’ for decades. The point is that the expansion of industrial meat production on a world-scale – including its voracious appetite for land and water – is also eroding food securities.

Industrial pig production with feed production installation in Iowa, USA/Mindi Schneider

To give a sense of scale, 80 percent of all livestock production is of the industrial variety, in which animals raised in confined animal feeding operations (CAFOs) quickly convert grain and oilseed-based feedstuffs into meat.

Achieving this magnitude requires massive amounts of land, water, and resources. Fully one-third of the world’s cultivated land is used to produce livestock feed directly, an increase of 30 percent over the last 50 years. About 57 percent of global barley, rye, millet, oats, and maize is fed to commercial livestock, and 45 percent of the EU’s wheat harvest goes to the livestock industry. The global land area under maize and soy production has increased by 100 percent and 200 percent respectively since the 1960s, and the share of these two crops diverted for livestock feed rose 100 percent during the same period. As for water, producing 1,000 calories of food-forpeople in the form of industrial meat takes 4 cubic meters of water; by contrast, the same number of calories can be produced in the form of cereals using only ½ cubic meter (Chemnitz and Becheva 2014).

To arguments that this form of intensive production is crucial for achieving food security – that industrial meat is an important food of food security – we must look at its distribution. Despite overall global growth, meat

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consumption is highly uneven. The countries that together account for 12 percent of humanity (United States, Australia and New Zealand, Argentina, Canada, and Western Europe) also account for 34 percent of meat production, 30 percent of meat consumption, and 68 percent of meat trade. On the other hand, regions that are home to half of the world’s population (South and Southeast Asia and Africa) account for only one-sixth of meat production and consumption (Weis 2013b). These poles express what Tony Weis calls the ‘uneven geography of meat’ (2013b, 53) at a global scale, the result of uneven geopolitical relations in capitalist development.

Meat inequalities operate at finer scales as well, typically as issues of class. In China, for example, although meat consumption is increasing across the population, it is most pronounced in urban areas, and for middle and upper class consumers: urbanites currently consume about three times more meat than rural residents (Bai et al. 2013).

Meanwhile, meat consumption is slowing, and sometimes stagnating, in North America and Western Europe in particular (Chemnitz and Becheva 2014).

Even so, meat-related class issues are alive and well. In the United States, low income consumers are confined to cheap, industrial meat (and a host of other industrially produced foods), while those who have physical and economic access can choose ‘organic’, ‘free range’, and otherwise ‘sustainable’ meats and foods.

In general, if there is competition for land and resources to ‘feed the world’, the livestock feed and meat industries are faring very well. Just as transnational agribusiness firms control the lion’s share of the world’s food trade, industrial meat production is the domain of powerful and highly integrated agribusiness firms that control global livestock-feed complexes (Clapp and Fuchs 2009, Weis 2013a). They operate in concert with governments, institutions of global governance, and mainstream development organizations to install models of development that further solidify their powerful positions at the heart of a global, industrial agrifood system (McMichael and Schneider 2011).

Firms are able to corral the resources they need to serve consumer classes,

capital accumulation, and profit, even while the small-scale farmers who produce 70 percent of the world’s food struggle for secure access to – and control over – land, water, and local food systems (see Schiavoni’s article in this issue).

REFERENCES Bai, J., J. Seale Jr., T. Wahl, and B. Lohmar. (2013).

Meat demand analysis in urban China: to include or not to include meat away from home? Paper presented at Agricultural and Applied Economics Association’s AAEA and CAES Joint Annual Meeting, Washington DC, August 4-6. http://ageconsearch.umn.edu/bitstream/150403/2/

As corporate control and concentration grows, so too does the land area being transformed into grain and oilseed monocultures. These crops become livestock feed, highly processed food and industrial products, and biofuel; they do not, however, become ‘safe and nutritious food’ that can ‘meet dietary needs and food preferences’ for the majority of the world’s population to have ‘an active and healthy lifestyle’.

Instead, this is a system that feeds affluence more than it feeds the hungry and malnourished. It further entrenches industrial agriculture as the supply source for global food and food security, even while industrial agriculture degrades land, water, and food; contributes significantly to climate change; and challenges livelihoods and social reproduction for already marginalized groups of people (Schneider 2014).

Missing_Meat_Demand_Junfei.pdf.

Carolan, M. (2013). Reclaiming food security.

New York: Routledge.

Chemnitz, C. and S. Becheva, eds. (2014).

Meat atlas: Facts and figures about the animals we eat. Berlin: Heinrich Böll Stiftung and Friends of the Earth Europe. http://www.foeeurope.org/sites/ default/files/publications/foee_hbf_meatatlas_ jan2014.pdf.

Clapp, J. and D. Fuchs, eds. (2009). Corporate power in global agrifood governance. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.

Fairbairn, M. (2010). Framing resistance: International food regimes and the roots of food sovereignty. In Wittman, H., A. Desmarais, and N. Weibe (eds). Food sovereignty: Reconnecting food, nature and community. Winnipeg: Fernwood Publishing.

Food and Agriculture Organization. (2014).

The state of food insecurity in the world: Strengthening the enabling environment for food security and nutrition. Rome: FAO. GRAIN. (2008). Making a killing from hunger. http://www.grain.org/article/entries/178-making-a-

If scarcity really was the issue, industrial livestock agriculture would be the furthest thing from a solution. If food security really was the goal, then supporting transnational agribusiness firms to increase grain and oilseed monocultures and industrial meat production would be a senseless idea.

And yet, in the same year that skyrocketing food prices brought the number of hungry people in the world to an all-time high, they also translated into record profits for global food traders and processors, and seed and agrochemical companies. Clearly, firms like Cargill, Monsanto, and the Noble Group profit from food insecurity (see GRAIN 2008); and with new agroindustrial campaigns like AGRA (the Alliance for a Green Revolution in Africa) that are dressed up in hunger alleviation and development discourse (HoltGiménez 2008), they profit from food security as well.

killing-from-hunger [Accessed 21 October 2014].

Holt-Giménez, E. (2008). Out of AGRA: The Green Revolution returns to Africa. Development, 51(4), 464-471.

McMichael, P. and M. Schneider. (2011).

Food security politics and the Millennium Development Goals. Third World Quarterly, 32(1), 119-139.

Patel, R. (2008). Stuffed and starved: The hidden battle for the world food system. Brooklyn, NY: Melville House Publishing.

Tomlinson, I. (2011). Doubling food production to feed the 9 billion: A critical perspective on key discourses of food security in the UK. Journal of Rural Studies, XXX, 1-10.

Weis, T. (2013a). The ecological hoofprint: The global burden of industrial livestock. New York: Zed Books.

Weis, T. (2013b). The meat of the global food crisis. Journal of Peasant Studies, 40(1), 65-85.

Wittman, H., A. Desmarais and N. Wiebe, eds.

(2010). Food sovereignty: Reconnecting food, nature and community. Halifax and Oakland: Fernwood Publishing and Food First Books.

World Health Organization. (2014). Overweight:

Mindi Schneider is Assistant Professor of Agrarian,

Situation and trends. Global Health Observatory.

Food and Environmental Studies at ISS. Her

http://www.who.int/gho/ncd/risk_factors/

research is broadly situated in agrarian political

overweight_text/en/. [Accessed 21 October 2014].

ecology, with an emphasis on the intersection of

Food Policy for the People.

food, agrarian, and environmental justice questions.

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Food Policy for the People

Christina Schiavoni

Everyone seems to have an interest in food policy these days, from the Gates Foundation with its ‘Alliance for a Green Revolution in Africa’, to the G8 with its ‘New Alliance for Food Security and Nutrition’, to social movements, civil society networks, and those who simply care about what they eat. Of course, some voices are more powerful than others. It is for this very reason that movements of peasants and other small-scale food providers from around the world decided to amplify their voices by forming the transnational agrarian movement La Via Campesina in 1993. This was in the midst of an onslaught of neoliberal policies such as ‘free trade’ agreements that were, among other things, facilitating the dumping of cheap commodity crops from wealthier countries into poor ones.

Such practices were damaging local economies, hiking up rates of hunger and poverty, decreasing food production capacities across the Global South, and leading to rapid urbanization as people flooded out of the countryside.

Ironically, at the same time that heads of state were supporting such policies, they were meeting periodically to discuss the ongoing challenge of worsening global hunger. There was a glaring omission in these meetings, however. Those who actually made up the vast majority (about three quarters) of the world’s hungry - peasants, rural workers, and others whose livelihoods depended on food production - were absent. Thus, in 1996, members of La Via Campesina took matters into their own hands and showed up in Rome outside of the World Food Summit. There, they famously thrust the concept of ‘food sovereignty’ onto the world stage - today broadly defined as ‘the right of peoples to healthy and culturally appropriate food produced through ecologically sound and sustainable methods, and their right to define their own food and agriculture systems’. Food sovereignty has since served both as an alternative paradigm

to the current global food order and as the basis for a new social movement that now extends well beyond La Via Campesina itself, including diverse movements of fisherfolk, indigenous peoples, workers, consumers, urban activists, environmentalists and others among its ranks.

Now, nearly two decades since the launching of food sovereignty, the global food policy arena has grown increasingly complex in the face of convergent food, financial and climate crises. Unfair trade rules persist, but new pressures have been added to the mix.

These include rampant financial speculation on commodity crops that has led to increased food price volatility; heightened demand of food crops for fuel, fiber, and livestock feed (see Schneider’s piece in this volume); and a global rush on farmland manifested through widespread ‘land grabbing’.

Despite these mounting challenges, some hard-fought gains have been won by the food sovereignty movement.

Some of the very same social movement leaders who fought for years in the streets outside of the United Nations Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO) - including members of La Via Campesina, the World Forum of Fisher Peoples, and the International Union of Food Workers, among many others now find themselves on the inside through the recent reform of the UN Committee on World Food Security. At the national level, food sovereignty is part of the constitution and/or national legislation of at least seven countries, and up for consideration in a number of others. At the local level, food sovereignty-inspired initiatives are increasingly making their way into local policy. The town of Sedgwick, Maine, is a key example, as the first municipality in the United States to adopt a ‘local food sovereignty ordinance’. This ordinance, which removes some of the barriers that small-scale farmers had faced in the direct marketing of their products in the

face of prohibitive restrictions favouring large agribusinesses, was followed soon after by similar ordinances in more than half a dozen nearby towns.

Just as food sovereignty is gradually moving beyond the fringes into policymaking spaces, it is increasingly drawing interest in academia, breathing fresh life into long-standing debates, while generating new areas of debate and inquiry. This increased academic interest is evidenced by a surge in academic events and publications on food sovereignty, of which ISS has been at the cutting edge. These include two critical dialogues on food sovereignty, one held at Yale University in September of 2013 and another at ISS in January 2014. These events attracted hundreds of researchers and practitioners and generated nearly 100 new papers on food sovereignty. Building upon this momentum, there are now at least three special issues on food sovereignty under development for The Journal of Peasant Studies, Globalizations, and Third World Quarterly, which will be released in the coming months.

Part of what makes food sovereignty so powerful and appealing to many is that the concept as it is known today was conceived not in the halls of power, but out of struggle and resistance. As academic interest in food sovereignty continues to grow, it will be important to maintain an ongoing dialogue with the movements that originally put the concept forward, and that continue to be on the front lines of the struggle.

Similarly, it is crucial that theoretical discussions on food sovereignty be informed by what is happening on the ground, that is, the actual efforts to implement food sovereignty happening in many diverse contexts.

Fortunately, there is ample experience to draw from. For instance, through my work on food issues over the past decade, my attention was captivated by

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ISS staff and students preparing plants for sale during the International Peasants Day at ISS/ Christina Schiavoni

the case of Venezuela, which is one of the first - or by some accounts the first countries in the world to adopt food sovereignty into national policy. In 1999, its newly reformed constitution guaranteed its citizens the right to food through a secure national food supply based on sustainable agriculture as a strategic framework for rural development, to be carried out through a series of laws, institutes, and programmes under the banner of ‘food sovereignty’. This move could be seen as a leap of faith for a country that had largely abandoned agriculture as it built its economy around its petroleum industry from the 1930s onwards. Indeed, successfully implementing such a policy would essentially entail a 180° turn for what is one of the most urbanized countries in Latin America, as well as the first Latin American country to become a net importer of food. And yet, against these odds, the country has moved forward in its efforts to build food sovereignty, and it is now possible to look back on and learn from 15 years of experience.

Recognizing the ‘Venezuelan Food Sovereignty Experiment’ as a rich source of empirical material that had been surprisingly under examined, I decided to make it the focus of my MA research paper at ISS. I used it to examine the ‘multiple and competing sovereignties’ of food sovereignty, which other scholars had cited as a gap in the literature.

I explored both the tensions and synergies that have emerged as social movements, community-based organizations, and government institutions try to work on food sovereignty at the same time, often with divergent interests and approaches. I found that the Venezuelan experience has much to offer in terms of furthering both theoretical and practical

pursuits of food sovereignty. For instance, new forms of social institutions known as comunas serve as dynamic spaces of interaction between communities and the government in attempts to implement food sovereignty at both the local and national levels, albeit not without tensions. Another interesting effort is social movements working together to bridge the urbanrural divide through changing not only their relationships to one another, but also their relationship to food and to the processes of food production, distribution, and consumption.

It is my hope that more scholars interested in food sovereignty will look at Venezuela and other countries that have adopted food sovereignty into state policy, in order to examine how these efforts are playing out in practice.

Similarly, there is much to examine at the international level. This is particularly the case regarding the inroads that the global food sovereignty movement has made into the UN Committee on World Food Security, where social movements are increasingly setting the global food policy agenda side-by-side with government representatives. This process, of course, has its tensions and power imbalances, but is promising nonetheless and well worth following. No less important are the myriad efforts toward food sovereignty happening at the local level, in both rural and urban contexts and in the global South and North.

This is where some of the most cutting edge efforts are to be found, even in politically hostile environments (see the piece by Visser et al. in this volume).

food issues and sustainability all the time at ISS, but do we have any idea where the food in our canteen comes from? Two years ago on International Peasants Day (April 17), a group of students tried to bring some attention to this matter by working with the canteen staff to provide a sustainably and locally-sourced meal. This special meal was accompanied by an afternoon of activities such as a local food fair, panel discussion, performance, and interactive sessions. The meal and activities attracted great interest from the ISS community, though actually changing the food sourcing practices of ISS would require a much more sustained, strategic campaign. Another positive development happened a year later when students planted the first seeds of what would become the ‘ISS garden’. While it might not look like much just yet, the tomatoes and pumpkins that were growing outside the student residence this past summer are a clear signal that ISS students are hungry to connect theory and practice and engage in food issues in a much more tangible way.

So this is an invitation and a challenge to the ISS community to keep this momentum going, and make it even stronger. Let’s keep the garden growing and get more students (and faculty and staff) involved. Let’s ask questions about the food we are eating and see what steps we can take towards food that is more sustainable and just. Let’s continue to be one of the leading academic institutions on food sovereignty, and also have that be reflected in our local surroundings. And to the broader ISS community that is here with us in spirit but scattered across the globe, plant a seed wherever you are - literally and/or figuratively - and we will be united in our efforts, together with the countless other people around the world who believe that another food system is possible and who are working to manifest it.

Christina Schiavoni is a scholar and activist at ISS working toward a PhD focused on food sovereignty, having completed her MA at ISS in 2013. Prior to that, she was Director of the Global Movements Program at WhyHunger based in New York City, where she worked with diverse networks to grow

Furthermore, there is no better way to learn about food sovereignty than to engage with it in practice. We talk about

and unify movements for food, land and water in the US and globally. She can be reached at schiavoni@iss.nl.

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Food Sovereignty in Settings without Social Movements Oane Visser, Natalia Mamonova, Max Spoor and Alexander Nikulin The food security debate is mainly led by governments, international development agencies and scientists, and increasingly influenced by agribusiness multinationals. The voice of the peasants and the social movements that represent them has long been marginal. Food sovereignty, on the contrary, puts in the spotlight the producers (as well as the food consumers), by making a plea for more democratic control over the global food system by farmers and consumers.

Food sovereignty goes beyond seeing food issues predominantly in terms of nutrition security measured by calorie intake. Great attention to the social and environmental dimensions of food constitutes an important element.

The issues of how to change the food system in order to enhance rural livelihoods, and maintain cultural knowledge of seeds, farming and ecology are key foci of food sovereignty.

The Nyéléni (2007) international food sovereignty declaration, defines food sovereignty as: ..the right of peoples to healthy and culturally appropriate food produced through ecologically sound and sustainable methods, and their right to define their own food and agriculture systems.

FOOD SOVEREIGNTY AND SOCIAL MOVEMENTS The emergence of food sovereignty within the global policy platforms is

driven by farmers themselves, and strongly connected to the rise of La Via Campesina (The Peasant’s Way) as a transnational social movement, and the growing visibility of various other peasant and farmer networks and associations (such as members of the International Planning Committee (IPC) on Food Sovereignty) (Schiavoni 2014, this issue). Via Campesina was founded in 1993 as a small movement of farmers to promote sustainable family farming.

It started with representatives from four continents, and expanded into a transnational movement with over 160 member organizations in 73 countries in Asia, Africa, the Americas and Western-Europe. Currently, it is probably the largest social movement in the world.

The study of food sovereignty, aside from being (among others) a response to the limitations of mainstream ‘food security’ policies and studies, has been very much a branch of social movement

studies. Most of the rural social movements that have pushed forward the food sovereignty debate, are based in Latin America (from where La Via Campesina originates), the West, and South-East Asia. Subsequently, most studies on food sovereignty have targeted these regions, in particular the first two areas. It should be noted that more recently, rural social movements from Africa have become actively involved, and the first international forum on food sovereignty, the Nyéléni forum in 2007, took place in Mali.

What these regions share (in particularly Latin America and the West) is that social movements are rather widespread, although of course with substantial variations between countries.

In other parts of the world, however, rural social movements are weak or non-existent, due to, for instance, historical legacies or authoritarian regimes, and as a result these regions have been virtually invisible in the global

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debate on food sovereignty. Studies on food sovereignty have until now focused on the Global South and the West but have left Eurasia’s (post)-socialist states – such as Russia, Ukraine, the CentralAsian states, and China, accounting for a large share of the world’s countryside and population – out of the picture.

This article addresses the question what shape food sovereignty takes in settings where rural social movements are weak or virtually non-existent, such as in countries with (semi)-authoritarian and post-socialist regimes. It will do so by drawing in particular on the case of post-socialist Russia, as the country with the world’s largest countryside (in terms of hectares), but which has remained invisible in the food sovereignty (and to some extent also food security) debate.

For a more elaborate article dealing

with the question discussed here, we refer to the article by the authors, entitled ‘”Quiet food sovereignty” as food sovereignty without a movement?

Insights from post-socialist Russia’, forthcoming in a special issue on food sovereignty in the journal Globalizations.

Food sovereignty is generally seen as being closely connected to social movements, which are able to formulate a food sovereignty discourse and subsequently mobilize people. Recently, some studies have started to investigate food sovereignty beyond the sphere of social movements. Particularly relevant here are the studies that have gone beyond the ‘global summitry’ of large social movements (and other global/ international actors), by researching localized forms of resistance against the

A mother and daughter work a field in rural Ukraine/ Natalia Mamonova

global corporate food system (Ayres and Bosia 2011). But to date, the localism of such local encounters ‘is still overshadowed by protest summitry and large-scale mobilizations’ (ibid: 1). Even with the rising attention for other actors working on food sovereignty, such as governments with state food sovereignty policies in Latin-American and Africa, US municipalities with food sovereignty ordinances, and international agencies like FAO, the social movements still continue to be the touchstone of analyses.

FOOD SOVEREIGNTY IN COUNTRIES WITHOUT MOVEMENTS: THE CASE OF RUSSIA Russia and most of the former Soviet countries constitute an area where the discourse on, and practices of, food

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sovereignty diverge markedly from the global understandings of it as defined by the Nyéléni forum and Via Campesina.

The term food sovereignty hardly figures in government policy and media in Russia, and when it is used, it is mostly as a synonym for ‘national food security’.

The government focuses on national food security through enhancing the expansion of the large-scale farming sector. Although the term food sovereignty is rarely present in Russia in its literal translation, the concept does have relevance.

We argue that a variant of food sovereignty does exist in Russia, but in a less pronounced form – as it thrives without any movements that could formulate outspoken discourses or generate sustained collective action.

Rural social movements are very weak or virtually non-existent in the Russian regions (Mamonova and Visser 2013).

The movements lack popularity among the population which is not accustomed to grassroots mobilization, and lack power due to the increasingly strict regulation of civil society by the state (ibid.). Clearly then we cannot speak of genuine food sovereignty movements in Russia currently. However, despite the lack of social movements and an ignorance of smallholders in agrarian policy, some of the actions and implicit ideas related to food sovereignty are widespread among the population and have clearly emerged bottom-up.

THE PRODUCTIVE AND ECOLOGICAL VALUE OF SMALLHOLDINGS IN COMPARISON WITH CORPORATE FARMS Many states across the globe continue (or reinforce) agrarian policies which favour large-scale farms (and downplay the relevance of smallholders), despite evidence of the contradictions and social and environmental risks of large-scale, industrial farming (see Schneider 2014, this issue). This tendency is especially pronounced in Russia, with its long Soviet history of large-scale (yet collective and state) farming. A major environmental risk of the current mode of large-scale corporate farming in Russia is soil degradation due to mono-cropping.

In Russia, as in numerous countries, state and agribusiness tend to depict the smallholdings negatively with labels

like ‘relic of the past’, ‘inefficient’ or ‘without a future’. Yet although smallholders are construed as inefficient and backward, they produce 93 percent of the country’s potatoes, 80 percent of the vegetables, and 54 and 51 percent of the milk and meat respectively. The importance of Russian smallholdings – which produce more potatoes than all the commercial farms in the UK and US put together (Ries, 2009) – is grossly overlooked by the government.

…’quiet food sovereignty’…

Food self-provisioning is resourceefficient (in terms of material inputs) and not far removed from the productivity (in terms of yields) of large farm enterprises. For instance, yields for potatoes were respectively 12.63 tons per hectare in 2012 (and 10.86 in 2001) for smallholders, compared to 16.64 (9.95) for large farm enterprises.

For vegetables these figures were 19.90 (15.40) for smallholders compared to 21.44 (13.58) for large farms enterprises (Rosstat 2013). These are remarkable figures when one takes into account that the yields of large farm enterprises are achieved through state support, use of pesticides, chemical fertilizers and machinery, whereas smallholders operate with essentially no direct support from the state, and with largely traditional methods.

The traditional methods result in largely environmentally friendly and localized agriculture, with short food chains. As a rule, organic fertilizers are used instead of agrochemicals, and fuel input is minimal as tractors are only occasionally used for plowing. These environmentally friendly practices do not arise from wider concerns about contributing to an ecologically sound or localized farming system. They emerge mostly from the desire to grow healthy food, the inability to purchase expensive agrochemicals, and self-interest in cultivating the small plots in a way that maintains longerterm fertility.

THE ‘QUIET’ DIMENSION OF SMALLHOLDER FARMING There is a remarkable paradox that smallholdings in Russia are so important, both economically and ecologically, whereas the smallholders themselves are rather silent about these facts, and see them simply as a household coping strategy, without much wider relevance. With the silencing of the smallholdings’ role, the term ‘quiet food sovereignty’ – building on the ‘quiet sustainability’ concept (Smith & Jehlicˇ ka, 2013) – is probably the best way to characterise this muted variant of food sovereignty.

As for the overlooked benefits of the smallholdings for the environment (partly due to lack of income to buy fertilizers, herbicides etc.), the concept of ‘quiet sustainability’ itself, as described by Smith and Jehlicˇ ka seems apt. The concept emerged from studies in post-socialist Poland and the Czech Republic. Smith and Jehlicˇ ka (2013: p.148) describe it in their article ‘Quiet sustainability: Fertile lessons from Europe’s productive gardeners’ in the Journal of Rural Studies as follows: This novel concept summarises widespread practices that result in beneficial environmental or social outcomes and that do not relate directly or indirectly to market transactions, but are not represented by their practitioners as relating directly to environmental or sustainability goals.

The concept ‘quiet food sovereignty’ is analytically more encompassing than ‘quiet sustainability’ in that, beyond an implicit ecological contribution, it also refers to the quiet form of localized production, as well as (the potential for) resistance to the large-scale, corporate farming model, whether this is hidden or open resistance. Economically, the quiet dimension of ‘quiet food sovereignty’ is reflected in the particularity that an aspiration for an independent mode of farming, or a peasant identity, is absent.

Instead, it is characterized by an orientation towards coping with insecurity (also featuring a subsidiary function, as we will show below).

Essentially, smallholders see their holdings as a means of survival when their salaries or pensions are insufficient, or when they suddenly become

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unemployed – hence, responding to insecurity.

scope and inclusiveness of the food sovereignty movement globally.

Globally, food sovereignty is often framed in terms of rights or struggle.

In Russia open rural resistance by smallholders against the large-scale corporate food system is rare.

The virtual absence of rural social movements impedes broad-based social mobilization. Further, many of the rural dwellers operate their smallholdings in tandem with their formal job, as farm workers on largescale farms. A long-standing symbiosis exists between the large-scale farms (which offer employment, and sometimes support such as ploughing smallholder plots) and the smallholders (which, with their self-provisioning, enable the former to pay low wages and stay afloat). Only when this symbiosis is threatened – which we expect to happen increasingly with the growing financialization of agriculture – might it trigger sudden rural mobilization. An illustrated of this were the widespread protests by smallholders in 2013 when some Russian governors decided to slaughter all livestock held by smallholders in their regions, after (limited) outbreaks of pig flu.

The finding that ‘quiet food sovereignty’ has not (yet) turned into a solid social movement should not narrowly be interpreted as a shortcoming.

In countries where regimes restrict social mobilization, a more or less institutionalized food sovereignty movement would likely be short-lived.

In (semi) authoritarian countries with limited open spaces for contention, the implicit/quiet practices and narratives, the orientation at co-existence with large corporate farms, and the hidden or ad-hoc resistance of ‘quiet food sovereignty’ might be more effective than full-blown social movements.

the world, http://www.naturalnews.com/037366_ russia_home_gardens_food_production.html Nyéléni (2007). Declaration of Nyéléni, 27 February,

CONCLUSIONS Food sovereignty in a setting with weak or non-existent movements is a more implicit, but nevertheless very widespread phenomenon we termed ‘quiet food sovereignty’. Quiet food sovereignty does not challenge the corporate food system directly through its practices or claims, but focuses on economic benefits at the household level and ecological production for personal health.

We contend that the case of Russia, and post-socialist countries in general, is relevant for the wider food sovereignty movement and debate. Some foreign media sources even celebrated Russian smallholdings as demonstrating a model that might be the key to feeding the globe (NaturalNews.com 2010). Our findings suggest that food sovereignty as an everyday discourse and practice is more widespread in post-socialist and semi-authoritarian settings than one would suspect by using more or less consolidated food sovereignty movements as the yardstick.

Acknowledging this would enhance the

Selingué Mali. http://www.nyeleni.org/spip. php?article290.

Ries, Nancy (2009). Potato ontology. Surviving postsocialism in Russia, Cultural Anthropology, 24(2), 181-212.

Rosstat (2013) Russian Federal Statistical Service. http://www.gks.ru/wps/wcm/connect/rosstat_main/ rosstat/ru/statistics/ enterprise/economy/.

Smith, J. and P. Jehlicka ˇ (2013). Quiet sustainability: Fertile lessons from Europe’s productive gardeners. Journal of Rural Studies, 32, 148-157.

Visser, O., N. Mamonova, M. Spoor and A. Nikulin (forthcoming) ‘Quiet food sovereignty’ as food sovereignty without a movement? Insights from post-socialist Russia, Globalizations.

REFERENCES:

Oane Visser, Natalia Mamonova and Max Spoor

Ayres, J. and M. J. Bosia (2011) Beyond global

are assistant professor, PhD student and full

summitry; Food sovereignty as localized resistance

professor at the ISS respectively. Alexander Nikulin

to Globalizations, Globalizations, 8: 1, 47-63.

is professor and director of the Center for Agrarian

Mamonova, N. and O. Visser (2014). State

Studies of the Russian Presidential Academy of

marionettes, phantom organisations or genuine

National Economy and Public Administration in

movements? The paradoxical emergence of rural

Moscow. Research themes which they, jointly or

social movements in post-Soviet Russia. Journal of

individually, address include land deals, rural social

Peasant Studies, doi: 10.180/03066150.2014.918958.

movements, peasantry, food, and rural inequality in

Natural News.com (2012). Russia’s small-scale

Russia and other post-socialist countries.

organic agriculture model may hold the key to feeding

Contact: visser@iss.nl

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Student Spotlights

The Political Economy of the Farmer Input Support Programme: Analysis of the Maize-Centric Approach to Food Security in Zambia Lorraine Mukuka Lupupa For more than five decades, Zambia has depended on increased maize production for national food security and food self-sufficiency. But this dependence on maize as a staple crop, and as the singular focus of food security policy, has resulted in maize monocropping in every region of the country, thereby limiting the options for small-scale farmers to diversify into other food crops with similar or even higher nutritional value, and increasing their dependence on subsidized inputs. Rather than food security, the country seems more concerned with maize security.

An uncontested maize-centric approach to food security is supported by the Farmer Input Support Programme (FISP) – a governmental poverty-reduction and food-security campaign – designed to upscale agricultural productivity

Stocks of Maize at FRA Silos/Courtesy of FRA

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Stocks of Maize at FRA Silos/Courtesy of FRA

amongst smallholder farmers through subsidized maize seed and fertilizer packs. Although the primary objective of FISP is to increase productivity to ensure national food security and eliminate poverty, the policy is more oriented towards a productivist paradigm that supports cyclical, monocultural maize production, coupled with the expansion of a maize market that precludes a more diverse agrifood system and competitiveness of small-scale farmers. Zambia’s government designates the largest share of its agricultural budget to FISP because of the importance attached to maize as a national staple crop. FISP is upheld in the country’s National Agricultural Policy, as a policy that can and should substantially reduce poverty and increase food self-sufficiency.

In some ways the programme works.

Currently, the Food Reserve Agency (FRA) boasts 500,000 metric tons of maize in the country’s strategic food reserves produced from the two bumper

harvests of 2011 and 2012 – a direct result of FISP activities. Based on food production trends, consumption patterns and the framing of food security in food policies, it is therefore possible to conclude that Zambia is food secure or ‘maize secure’. However, there are critical issues that need to be addressed regarding FISP’s implementation related to its objective of enhancing food security and eliminating poverty.

companies but not small scale farmers in the rural areas’ (Sitko, 2014).

In Zambia, smallholder farmers account for more than 70 percent of the total food production for urban and rural populations, yet even with government support through FISP, poverty remains high and unabated amongst rural households.

A central part of the problem is that FISP is a maize and fertilizer strategy, rather than a poverty reduction strategy that supports asset building and provision of social services. Another problem is that FISP ‘is a highly politicized project and a form of rent seeking which supports bigger farmers and agro input

the Agrarian, Food and Environmental Studies

With its uneven targeting of beneficiaries and its singular focus on increased maize production, FISP has inhibited the capacity of farmers to diversify and grow competitively in order to achieve food security and increased income, both of which are essential for poverty reduction.

Lorraine Mukuka Lupupa is an ISS MA student in Major. She is a specialized journalist managing and coordinating the provincial agricultural communication department in the Ministry of Agriculture and Livestock in Zambia, responsible for collection and dissemination of agricultural information on government policies. She is interested in the political economy of input subsidy programmes and their relationship with food security policies aimed at increasing food production and eliminating poverty among small-scale farmers. Her Research Paper is supervised by Mindi Schneider. Lorraine can be reached at lomukuka@yahoo.co.uk.

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Building Food Sovereignty in the Basque Country Zoe Brent Food Sovereignty Tours is a Food First initiative that began in 2010. It is an educational programme focused on helping activists, researchers and concerned citizens to understand an increasingly complex global food system.

Upon their return home we encourage participants to engage in informed activism, while also magnifying the voices of those struggling to carve out alternative, people-centred food systems around the world. This is a commentary about a tour that I coordinated and led in the Basque Country, in March, 2014.

The tour participants and I arrived at the offices of EHNE Bizkaia – the Basque farmers’ union – for the last meeting of our food sovereignty tour, full with the experiences and flavours of six days spent in exquisite Euskal Herría (Basque Country). On this third tour organized by Food First to the region, we travelled through the countryside, visiting numerous farms and speaking with local people about what food sovereignty means to them. As we witnessed food sovereignty in practice in the Basque Country, the concept deepened and came alive.

had decided to become a farmer. Along with her partner Alex, she sold produce in the nearby market as part of a local consumers’ group. To supplement their income, they also engaged in agritourism, sharing rural Basque life with visitors such as ourselves. Her words wove together an insightful analysis of Basque agriculture with local recipes. She even shared some precious Guernika pepper seeds for us to take home to our gardens. Through this simple exchange of stories and seeds, we participated in an act of resistance in defence of life and food – in defence of a way of life threatened by corporations that seek to control the genetic foundations of our food system.

After a friendly debate with Basque farmers and members of the global movement La Vía Campesina (literally, the peasant way), Cathy proudly proclaimed, Then I am a peasant, too!

In this simple declaration, I felt the power of reclaiming words and revaluing peasant identity as part of a shared struggle.

This trip also taught us about the power of words. In a discussion with EHNEBizkaia, Cathy, a tour participant and Canadian farmer, expressed unease at the Basques’ use of the word ‘peasant’ because she felt it carried negative connotations (as it does in English).

coordinates the Land and Sovereignty in the

After these days of eating and travelling together, I also came to understand that social movements are rooted first and foremost in relationships, and that to build food sovereignty, we must transform our words, our practices, and ultimately ourselves.

Zoe Brent is a Food First Fellow where she Americas Collective and leads educational delegations to the Basque Country. Her PhD research at ISS is about land access and social movements in California and the Basque Country, supervised by Max Spoor and Jun Borras. Zoe can be reached at brent@iss.nl.

Throughout our trip, participants, including farmers, students, activists and chefs, learned how the Basque peasantry had survived for centuries, even as factories offered the pull of higher wages and large-scale agribusiness squeezed smallholders out of farming. We saw how Basque peasants have struggled and resisted these transformations, fiercely defending their way of life.

On our first day, we sat in the kitchen of a rural farmhouse in Ajangiz, enjoying a breakfast of homemade bread and kiwi jam, chatting with our hostess, Ainoah.

She told us her life story and how she

Tour group and hosts from EHNE Bizkaia after their final lunch together/ David Gabriner

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Food Sovereignty: A Solution to Problems of Environment, Rural Livelihoods, and Food Security Antonio Roman-Alcalá Food sovereignty offers an alternative to the false choice between conserving environmental resources, improving rural livelihoods, and achieving food security. By developing democratic spaces at local, national, regional, and global levels to craft and implement collaborative solutions that benefit both consumers and producers, policymakers can utilize the wisdom and practice of food movements to develop workable solutions to many food systems issues.

New institutions, projects, and collaborations between actors in government and civil society show that, if driven by the groups most affected by food system dysfunction and given proper support by government, solutions for environment-livelihoodfood security are available to deploy immediately.

National-level adoption of food sovereignty and agroecology is one such example of a working solution.

Governments in Nicaragua, Bolivia, Ecuador, Mali, Venezuela, Cuba, and Nepal among others have begun to incorporate food sovereignty ideas into their rhetoric, policies, and even their constitutions – including solutions pioneered by movements themselves.

Agroecology – the application of ecological principles to the development of sustainable agricultural techniques – is such a solution, with much potential to bolster food

sovereignty. With research built upon traditional ecological knowledge in farmer and indigenous communities, and extension services deployed through farmer-to-farmer exchanges (like those pioneered in Cuba and across Central America), agroecology can improve incomes, enhance food security, and regenerate environmental resources.

Latin America is a current hotbed of food sovereignty policy innovation.

For example, Brazil’s ‘Fome Zero’ programme enables food assistance to poor communities by purchasing products from local, family, and agroecological farms for its institutions, including schools and hospitals. Venezuela’s state-supported agroecological producer collectives have improved that country’s food production capacity while increasing the incomes and selforganization of farmer communities.

Decentralized Natural Resource Management (DNRM) is another example.

Research on DNRM in various contexts has shown that rural communities promote better environmental and social outcomes when given rights to manage their local resources, compared with state-based management.

Of course, such DNRM policies must ensure that locally powerful actors do not unduly control such processes, and that gender, generational, and other internal community inequalities do not become compounded. However, with

authentic decentralization, institutional support, and effective oversight, governments can use DNRM to bolster local food security and preserve resources.

In industrialized countries, too, integrated environment-livelihood-food security solutions exist. Food Policy Councils (FPCs) are bringing together diverse constituencies to determine how local policy can be leveraged to achieve positive food system change. These local groups identify problems as a community, and then seek to solve them through processes of consensus-building and influencing local governments. FPCs have worked on issues like institutional food procurement, the use of urban open space for agriculture, nutrition education and funding for food banks.

There are also groups developing policy from the grassroots, but for implementation at the national level, as in the USA’s National Family Farming Coalition. Similar movement organizations, focusing on a variety of levels of government and different constituents with a stake in the food system, exist in developing countries as well. Different state-social contexts require different efforts by governments and citizens to develop policies in concert with farmers and eaters.

Many recent studies (including some by ISS students and faculty) indicate that an

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important lesson for policy is that, for food sovereignty to work, power must be truly shared between governments and citizens, including those involved in food sovereignty movements. Local communities must have their legitimacy as decision-makers and capacity as programme implementers meaningfully bolstered by national policies, and this includes devolution of crucial decisionmaking and implementation discretion

to those communities. At the same time, this does not have to mean a lessening of nation-state sovereignty, if such devolutions of power bolster national ‘food security’ and the commitment of citizens to their political system.

State-society co-responsibility for creating resilient food systems, now and in the future, is the key to food sovereignty, and thus to reaching food security for all people.

Antonio Roman-Alcalá is an MA student in Agrarian, Food and Environmental Studies. He has worked for the past 10 years on food, sustainability, and social justice issues in the United States, helped found multiple urban farms and grassroots policy alliances, and produced a documentary film.

He is particularly interested in the politics of food sovereignty mobilization in both global North and South. His Research Paper is supervised

by Jun Borras. Antonio can be reached at antidogmatist@gmail.com.

Investigating the Incompatibility of Conservation and Agriculture: The Case of Nuweberg Settlement, Western Cape, South Africa Sithandiwe Yeni Both mainstream conservationists and policy makers in the field of small-scale agricultural development tend to view conservation and agriculture as separate issues that should never be integrated.

For conservationists, agriculture entails extensive use of artificial fertilizers, pesticides and ‘improved’ seeds, which policy makers want to use to help small-scale farmers increase productivity in order to integrate into markets. From this point of view agriculture is a threat

to conservation, which is about protecting biodiversity as a foundation for a sustainable economy, though seen as necessary by policy makers for rural development. Meanwhile, for smallscale farmers, and for activists who work on food and environmental issues and farm workers’ rights, there is a clear link between conservation and agriculture, a link which should be actively encouraged. From this perspective, farming means practicing agroecology,

a model that rejects industrialized agriculture and supports methods that reinforce biodiversity and interaction among plants by recycling nutrients and energy on the farm without external pesticides or fertilizers (Altieri and Toledo 2011).

My research examines these conflicts and issues in Nuweberg, a settlement located within a nature reserve in South Africa where inhabitants have been

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Nature reserve in Western Cape showing the Nuweberg Settlement/ Sithadiwe Yeni

prohibited from accessing land to carry out agroecological farming and harvest natural resources in order to increase their household food security. The research seeks to understand why and how agriculture and conservation have been separated in this case, taking into account that the inhabitants of the settlement are part of a network of small-scale agroecological farmers operating under the banner of food sovereignty. Through agroecology, farmers and activists aim to increase autonomy by giving small-scale farmers more control over their food production system (Rosset and Martinez-Torres 2012).

conservation and sees small-scale farming as a threat. Current conservation practices do not accommodate any land-based livelihood needs of the inhabitants.

To move forward in Nuweberg, as elsewhere, the work of Ivette Perfect, John Vandermeer, and Angus Wright (2009) is useful for bridging the agriculture-conservation divide: they propose a paradigm shift in the way that conservation and agriculture are constructed, such that issues of biodiversity loss, food crises and political unrest in rural areas are understood, and managed, as interrelated phenomena.

resource management. Her Research Paper is supervised by Bram Buscher. She can be reached at sthayeni@gmail.com.

REFERENCES Altieri, Miguel A., and Victor Manuel Toledo (2011) “The agroecological revolution in Latin America: rescuing nature, ensuring food sovereignty and empowering peasants.” Journal of Peasant Studies 38.3: 587-612.

Brockington, Dan, and Rosaleen Duffy. (2010) “Capitalism and conservation: the production and reproduction of biodiversity conservation.”

Antipode 42.3 : 469-484.

Perfecto, Ivette, John Vandermeer, and Angus Wright (2010) ‘Nature’s Matrix: Linking Agriculture, Conservation and Food Sovereignty’. London:

The key finding is that the inhabitants of Nuweberg are prohibited from practicing agroecology because Cape Nature, a public institution with the constitutional responsibility for biodiversity conservation in the Western Cape, is only interested in mainstream

Sithandiwe Yeni is an ISS MA student in Agrarian,

Earthscan.

Food and Environmental Studies Major. She worked

Rosset, Peter M., and Maria Elena Martínez-Torres.

for several years with an NGO in South Africa

(2012) “Rural social movements and agroecology:

supporting small-scale farmers in their struggles for

context, theory, and process.” Ecology and society

access to land and agricultural development

17.3 : 17.

resources. She is interested in the political economy/ecology of food systems and natural

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NGOs at ISS Soci et y fo r I n t e r n ationa l De velop me n t Ne t h e rlands Ch apt er a t I SS After several months in our new and lovely office, the honeymoon phase of our move into ISS is officially at its end. We want to thank everyone at ISS for making us feel so welcome.

We are still delighted to be surrounded by experts in development cooperation. Now we feel it is time to provide a more in-depth introduction of who we are and what we do at the Society for International Development Netherlands Chapter (SID NL).

FIRST OF ALL, WHAT EXACTLY IS SID NL?

SOUNDS GREAT, DO YOU ORGANIZE ANY OTHER PUBLIC ACTIVITIES?

makers to improve policies and projects where possible.

SID NL is a society for everyone who is interested in international relations and development cooperation. We provide a platform for civil society, NGOs, students, academics, private partners, government officials, politicians, media and interested citizens to debate and affect the course of development. By bringing a mix of stakeholders together, we are at the forefront in shaping the discussion on the way development is done and influencing decision-makers.

Yes, we do. At Humanity House in The Hague we present the monthly Bread&Brains series during which we host a discussion with a speaker alongside a delicious lunch. Previous speakers at these lunchtime meetings include Volker T端rk, Director of International Protection UNHCR and Mark Singleton, Director of the International Centre for CounterTerrorism. The next meeting is with Phon van den Biesen, who will speak about the lawsuit by the Marshall Islands against nine nuclear nations for failing to disarm.

WHY IS SID NL IMPORTANT FOR ISS?

OK, SO WHAT DOES SID NL DO? Our main activity is to organize lectures, debates and conferences on international relations and development. The kick-off for the SID discussion series was with development researcher Ben Ramalingam.

This paved the way for our series of fascinating lectures on development themes with an amazing line-up of speakers. Our second lecture on 21 October was with Siemon T. Wezeman who spoke about the link between international relations, conflict and the weapon industry. On Thursday 25 November the renowned human rights activist and first Iranian Nobel Peace Prize Laureate Shirin Ebadi will discuss the role of women in the Middle East peace process. To influence policy and decision-makers at a higher level we also set up meetings for our guest speakers with NGOs, the Dutch government and the media.

WHY DOES SID NL DO WHAT IT DOES? We believe it is of crucial importance to identify the successes and pitfalls of development cooperation and facilitate new insights to keep the debate going.

Moreover we want to foster relations in this sector and influence decision-

ISS students and staff naturally benefit from the opportunity to attend interesting lectures so nearby. We connect students to our expansive network in the development sector. We bridge the gap between academics and civil society by providing a platform to keep the discussion on development cooperation relevant.

WHERE CAN I FIND OUT MORE ABOUT SID NL? SID NL is the Netherlands chapter of an international society with many local chapters and organizations around the world. Anyone interested in getting more involved can become a SID member or SID student ambassador to support our activities and we welcome everyone to come to our events. You can find information about SID NL at www.sidnl.org.

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Ins titut e for War and Peace Repor ting (IWPR) When covering conflict, journalists can either do spectacular good, or spectacular harm.

Their impact can be determined by two things: accuracy and ethics. When covering situations where international humanitarian law has been violated and large numbers of victims are seeking justice, it can become a huge challenge for a journalist to circumvent prejudices and report in a fair and balanced way. IWPR provides support to these journalists when covering conflict and sensitive issues.

From the Balkans to Iraq, IWPR has strengthened the role of local media through capacity building initiatives – from media management training to establishing local radio and news agencies. IWPR is especially known for intensive, one-on-one, apprentice-style training from basic journalism to specialist human rights and international justice reporting. In the Hague, we closely follow developments at the International Criminal Court and the International Tribunal for the former Yugoslavia in The Hague and we provide extensive multimedia coverage of (post-) conflict justice processes in places like Bosnia, northern Uganda,

Kenya and the eastern Democratic Republic of Congo.

Much of our work in carried out with local and international media and non-media partners. In fact, we have worked together with the ISS on a number of occasions, e.g. a training for Kenyan journalists in The Hague and in Nairobi, and we have hosted several ISS students as interns. Other ISS students used our efforts in access to justice in Africa as part of their research.

Now that we are in the ISS building, we are certainly interested in looking at new ways to collaborate in projects around the world or in developing

media literacy capacities within ISS as way to maximize any knowledge that is being produced.

We know that the exponential growth of data and information, the constant introduction of new ICTs, and the exposure to media and its content, is imposing a number of structural and behavioural changes on people.

In particular, it alters the ways people access, evaluate, and use information to produce knowledge and communicate with each other. Access to information and production of knowledge in different forms and formats is no longer the exclusive domain of specialized institutions or professional communities.

People are increasingly becoming not only information or media content consumers, but also producers and evaluators, through the use of various tools and media.

In short, information and content can now be easily produced, accessed and shared by many. Our media literacy approach assists people gain a critical understanding of the media as well as to develop the ability to decode, understand, communicate and create their own media and information products. For ISS, this approach may be useful to package research evidence in a manner that is both comprehensible and appealing to different target audiences which then can increase its capacity to engage on policymaking.

Contact IWPR at marcel@iwpr.net

Fighting between two Mai Mai militias in eastern DRC earlier this year led to 6,300 people fleeing from Mutengo to the village of Kibua. IWPR reporter, Marie NoĂŤllard Muhindo, set off on a United Nationsfacilitated trip to the village in the North Kivu territory of Walikale, to report on the situation for the IWPR radio programme Face Ă la Justice. They found dire conditions of distress and poverty; and Marie discovered that members of her own family were among the displaced.

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Pax Ludens Pax Ludens provides meaningful ways for people and organizations to better grasp complex environments. We achieve this by developing training programmes (both simulations and workshops), conducting research, and providing advice and support in process management.

Our services are tailor-made to fit our clients’ needs because we understand that every company and case is unique.

The concepts of ‘play’ and ‘experiential learning’ are at the heart of our programmes. Our activities create new insights, develop skills, and inspire behavioural change. We always work with clearly defined (learning) objectives and measurable results.

At the heart of the work of Pax Ludens lie our simulation workshops. In these simulations we recreate reality in such a way that the problems, and often their solutions, facing us today become clearer. For example, we hold a yearly Greater Middle East simulation at University College Utrecht. Connected with this simulation is a semester long course in which the students are familiarized with the Greater Middle East. During the simulation, they fulfil the role of a country or organization leader and their second or third in command. This means they have to research the way the person they are during the simulation would act and

Group exercise during a Pax Ludens workshop

think, and they have to act accordingly during the simulation. They have to enter into negotiations with each other, in order to try and solve, or come closer to a resolution of, today’s problems.

During this simulation, students realise how difficult it is to resolve the issues facing this region, but also develop their negotiation skills, and learn to perform in a stress environment.

The key tool that we use during these simulations is the InterACT© software.

This software provides the closed environment necessary for the simulation to work, and is the medium through which the players can interact with each other. This software also allows us to monitor the player’s progress, and to add to the problems facing the players in the game.

Other examples of simulations that we have held recently is an East Asia simulation for students of Leiden

University College, a Rare Earth Minerals simulation at Leiden University and a simulation with The Hague local health authority. Currently we are developing a simulation for The Hague city council in relation to the decentralization of health care in the Netherlands.

Other Pax Ludens activities include visualization workshops, which help our clients understand their problems in order to find the right solution, and scenario building, which helps our clients to think of possible future events and ways to respond. Pax Ludens is happy to have moved to the ISS building in August. We find ISS to be a very creative and inspiring environment. It is very nice to be in the middle of such a diverse intellectual community. We have already met many students and professors from the global south and north. Our door is always open to whoever wants to know more about what we do.

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ISS and Alumni News Research award for ISS alumna Kanchana Wickramasinghe ISS alumna Kanchana Wickramasinghe from Sri Lanka (USS, 2007) won the first prize of the Japanese Award for Outstanding Research on Development of the Global Development Network for her research proposal entitled: ‘Demand for Climate Insurance by Dry Zone Farmers in Sri Lanka’.

Alumnus Jose Ugaz new Chair of Transparency International Mr Jose Ugaz Sanchez-Moreno was elected as the new Chair of Transparency International.

Jose Ugaz participated in the Development Law and Social Justice programme in 1991.

ISS and RUB sign partnership agreement for a joint PhD programme On 16 October 2014 Professor Leo de Haan (Rector of ISS) and Professor Wilhem Loewenstein (Managing Director of the Institute of Development Research and Development Policy at the RUB) signed a Partnership Agreement establishing a joint PhD programme.

‘Social Insurance and Labour Market Outcomes in Ethiopia’ The Institute for the Study of Labor and the UK’s Department for International Development has awarded a grant for a three-year project to a research consortium composed of ISS, the University of Gothenburg, Addis Ababa University and the College of William and Mary.

The grant of Euro 350,755 is for the project ‘Social Insurance and Labour Market Outcomes in Ethiopia’.

Tailor-made training links young Pakistani researchers to stakeholders of labour-related research Young researchers at the Pakistan Institute of Labour Education and Research (PILER) attended the fourth part of a series of ISS trainings on ‘Understanding Work, Employment and Globalisation: Concepts and Methods’ that has been conceptualized and provided by ISS in collaboration with PILER. The series has been supported financially by The Netherlands Organisation for Cooperation in Higher Organisation (Nuffic).

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Official opening of the MA programme 2014-2015 On 5 September, Arabist Petra Stienen gave the keynote speech during the opening of the new academic year. She spoke on ‘How do we manage diversity in our societies in the 21st century’.

165 students will start the MA programme this year, including the 9 who start the Joint MUINDUS MA in Public Policy. Among the 165 students, there are 97 women, and 68 men from 48 different countries.

The largest group comes from Indonesia, with 43 students.

Colombia, India and Uganda have 10 students each.

ISS and THIGJ sign MoU On 10 October 2014 the Rector of ISS, Professor Leo de Haan, and the President of THIGJ, Dr. Abiodun Williams, signed a Memorandum of Understanding, confirming their cooperation.

62nd Dies Natalis On 9 October 2014, ISS held its annual Dies Natalis celebration.

The guest lecture was this year given by Professor Kees Schuyt (Emeritus Professor from Universiteit van Amsterdam) who spoke on ‘Teaching Research Ethics or Learning in Practice: Preventing Fraud in Science’.

In Memoriam MAHSA SHEKARLOO It is with great sadness that we share the news that our alumna Mahsa Shekarloo passed away on 4 September 2014 in the US. Mahsa was in the MA programme Children and Youth Studies in 2010/2011.

Masha was Iranian/American and lived in both countries.

Mahsa was an outstanding student at ISS, who thought deeply and independently. One of her coursework essays appeared in the annual collection of best essays, selected by students of her batch 2010/11 and of the following batch 2011/12, 'American Women’s Movement in Turmoil: An Analysis of ‘American Electra’ by Susan Faludi'.

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Staff and PhD News Karin Arts one of the speakers at The HagueTalks in the Peace Palace On 19 September 2014 Karin Arts participated in the HagueTalks a meeting place for creative minds, peace inventors and game changers in the field of peace and justice. She talked on the UN Convention on the Rights of the Child and on the KidsrightsIndex.

Three South African PhD researchers join ISS as part of the Erasmus Mundus Action 2 project Three new researchers – Emile Smidt, Zuleika Sheik, Elizabeth Swartz – recently arrived in The Hague to take up their PhD research. They join ISS as part of the Erasmus Mundus Action 2 project entitled ‘Capacity Building in Higher Education for an improved co-operation between the EU and SA in the field of Development Studies’.

Jeff Handmaker appointed to the Advisory Council of the Public Interest Litigation Project (PILP) Jeff Handmaker, senior lecturer in law, human rights and development at ISS, has been appointed to the Advisory Council of the Public Interest Litigation Project (PILP), a new initiative launched by the Dutch Section of the International Commission of Jurists and funded by the Open Society Foundations.

Two top researchers join the Economics of Development and Emerging Markets research programme The Economics of Development and Emerging Markets research programme welcomes two new researchers to ISS: Dr. Elissaios Papyrakis is a development macroeconomist, whose main research interests lie in the intersection of economic growth and environmental issues. His work involves both theoretical and empirical analysis.

Dr. Matthias Rieger is a microdevelopment economist with interests in experimental economics and applied econometrics. He joins ISS as Assistant Professor in Development Economics.

Two more successful ISS PhD defences On 17 September, Hannington Odame held the Public Defence of his thesis on ‘Innovation Dynamics and Agricultural Biotechnology in Kenya’.

Two days later, on 19 September, Ricardo de Sousa graduated after successfully defending his thesis entitled ‘External Interventions and Conflicts in Africa after the End of the Cold War’.

Dr. Sergio Sauer joins Political Economy of Resources, Environment and Population (PER) Research Programme Welcome to Dr. Sauer who joins ISS for one year as visiting professor. He will be working directly with Jun Borras and other academic staff and PhD candidates in the PER Research Programme thanks to a scholarship granted by CAPES, a foundation affiliated with the Ministry of Education of Brazil.

In Memoriam GEERTJE LYCKLAMA À NIJEHOLT We share the very sad news that following an illness of several months, professor Geertje Lycklama à Nijeholt died in the early hours 18 November. Professor Lycklama served as Rector of ISS from 1990 to 1995. Her commitment to women and gender equality was reflected in her professional career, through which she made a major contribution to women, gender and development in the fields of women’s work, feminist organizations, gender policies and the institutional strengthening of research and teaching in women and gender studies. If you would like to share your memories of Geertje, you may do so on our Virtual Memorial Wall at www.iss.nl/memorial_wall.

Our thoughts and wishes are with her family and close friends.

Working Papers The ISS Working Paper series provides a forum for work in progress which seeks to elicit comments and generate discussion.

The series includes academic research by staff, PhD participants and visiting fellows, and award-winning research papers by graduate students.

The impact of Ethiopia’s pilot community based health insurance scheme on healthcare utilization and cost of care Mebratie, A.D. (Anagaw), Sparrow, R.A. (Robert), Debebe, Z.Y. (Zelalem), Abebaw Ejigie, D. (Degnet), Alemu, G. (Getnet) and Bedi, A.S. (Arjun Singh) October 2014 Channels of impoverishment due to ill-health in rural Ethiopia Debebe, Z.Y. (Zelalem), Mebratie, A.D. (Anagaw), Sparrow, R.A. (Robert), Dekker, M. (Marleen), Alemu, G. (Getnet) and Bedi, A.S. (Arjun Singh) September 2014 Dropping out of Ethiopia’s Community Based Health Insurance scheme Mebratie, A.D. (Anagaw), Sparrow, R.A. (Robert), Debebe, Z.Y. (Zelalem), Alemu, G. (Getnet) and Bedi, A.S. (Arjun Singh) September 2014 How age matters. Exploring contemporary Dutch debates on age and sex work Coumans, S.V. (Sara Vida) May 2014 Sickness and death Khan, F.U. (Farid U.), Arjun S. Bedi and Sparrow, R.A. (Robert) May 2014 Voluntary initiatives in global value chains Siegmann, K.A. (Karin Astrid), Merk, J. (Jeroen) and Knorringa, P. (Peter) May 2014

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