Crowdfeeding the world with meaningful food: Crowdsourcing the transition with collective actions JOSE LUIS VIVERO POL1 This article is an abridged version of a working paper that can be downloaded at http://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=2548928 Our human society has a troublesome relationship with food. Although we produce enough food to adequately feed all, both obesity and under-nutrition affect an estimated 2.3 billion people globally causing 6 million deaths annually. Many eat poorly to enable others to eat badly and cheaply, and food production has become a major driving force in pushing the environment beyond the planetary boundaries. This situation will only worsen as growing water and food needs due to population growth, climate change, consumption shift towards meat-based diets and biofuel development exacerbate the already critical challenges to planet boundaries. If we extrapolate current food consumption and production trends, humanity will need three Earths by 2050 to meet demand. The systemic fault lines of the industrial food system The collateral effects of food production can be attributed to the industrial food system (also called the corporate food regime) that deals with food as a pure commodity and depletes the renewable natural resources that enable us to get food. The industrial food system has been spurred by the mechanisation of the food-producing systems and the oil-based inputs, substituting diversity by homogeneity, taste by appearance, resilience by dependence, collaboration by concurrence, individualism by collectivism and commons by commodities. The industrialisation and commodification of food has brought humanity some positive outcomes in the form of increased food production and food access for millions but it has also yielded many negative externalities, namely inequality, inefficiency and unsustainability within the planetary boundaries, with the mono-dimensional valuation of food as a commodity as the fourth one. The transnational corporations that dominate the conventional industrialised food system are major drivers of malnutrition and environmental degradation (including climate change and biodiversity loss) by operating to accumulate and under-price calorie-based food resources (ultra-processed food and drink) and maximise the profit of food enterprises instead of maximising the nutrition and health benefits of food to all. The industrial food system is heavily subsidised and amply favoured by tax exemptions whereas its nemesis, the alternative organic system, is more productive, both agronomically and economically, more energy efficient and have a lower year-to-year variability, depending less on government payments for their profitability. Food has evolved into a private, transnational, mono-dimensional commodity in a global market of mass consumption. The mechanisms of enclosure, or restriction and privatisation of common resources through legislation, excessive pricing and patents, have obviously played a major role in limiting access to food as a commons, while the social construct of food as a commodity denies its non-economic attributes in favour of its tradable features, namely durability, external beauty and the standardisation of naturally-diverse food products, leading to a neglect of nutrition-related properties of food, alongside an emphasis on cheap calories. Governed by self-interest, private markets will not provide an adequate quantity of public goods, such as health, nutrition and hunger eradication, which have enormous benefits to human beings but are non-monetised, as the positive externalities cannot be captured by private actors. And, rather crucially, these fault lines will not be reversed or corrected by simply 1
Anti-hunger, Social Rights Activist and PhD candidate on food governance, BIOGOV Unit, Centre for Philosophy of Law, UniversitĂŠ catholique de Louvain, Belgium. http://biogov.uclouvain.be Email: Jose-luis.viveropol@uclouvain.be
1
applying a sustainable intensification lip service that mostly addresses the technological challenges and obscures the social and power imbalances. Food commodification crowds out the non-market values of food The development of food as a pure commodity radically opposes the other dimensions, rather important for our survival, self-identity and community life: food as a basic human need to keep its vital functions; food as a pillar of every national culture; food as a fundamental human right that should be guaranteed to every citizen and food as a part of a wider ecological context involving sustainable production. All those dimensions enrich the consideration of food as a commons. Instead, these multiple dimensions are combined with and superseded by its tradable features, thus conflating value and price (understanding the former in terms of the latter). Under capitalism, the value in use (a biological necessity) is highly dissociated from its value in exchange (price in the market), giving primacy to the latter over the former. Food as a pure commodity can be speculated in by investors, modified genetically and patented by corporations, or diverted from human consumption just to maximise profit. The corporate (neoliberal) food regime defines a set of rules institutionalising corporate power in the world food system deepening the commodification of food by radically undermining its non-monetary dimensions. Market rules not only put prices to foodstuff but in doing so markets corrupt their original nature. This reduction of the food dimensions to one of a commodity explains the roots of the failure of the global food system and therefore the most revolutionary and structural mind shift is to re-value the multiple dimensions of food for human beings, beyond its artificially low price in the market. The re-commonification of food: innovative approaches to historical developments The re-commonification of food implies a shift in the economic and political narratives around food production, consumption and ethical considerations. Excludability and rivalry, the features used by the economic school to define private/public/common goods, are not ontological properties of goods (absolute) but social constructs created by human beings. In fact, goods often become private or public as a result of deliberate policy choices. The degree of excludability and rivalry depends upon variables related to the nature of the good, the consumption/utilisation rate, technological developments and the definition and enforcement of property rights defined by entitlements, regulations and sanctions. Both properties are attributes that human society assigns to different types of good, largely based on a dominant ideology, particular economic thinking and historical considerations; consequently, they can be modified. Although none of the major analyses produced in the last decades on the fault lines of the global food system and the very existence of hunger has ever questioned this nature of food as a private good, we recommend the economic consideration of food as a private good to be revisited, and more impure or fluid categories to be developed. Actually, food has not always been regarded as a pure commodity devoid of other important dimensions and food commons are not new. Many societies have considered, and still consider, food as a commons, as well as the land and water and its forests and fisheries; and the consideration different civilisations have assigned to food-producing commons is rather diverse and certainly evolving. Welldocumented examples of live and functional food-producing commons can be found at both ends of the developmental scale. The agricultural and related utility of commons to human societies has enabled them to survive up to the present day, despite the waves of enclosure, misappropriations and legal privatisations. Crowdsourcing the transition to food as a commons: food sovereignty movements and alternative food networks Over the last 20 years, there have been two streams of civic collective actions for food running in parallel: the food sovereignty movement and the Alternative Food Networks (AFN) exploding in urban and peri-urban areas. These transition paths have been growing in a disconnected way, divided by 2
geographical and sociological boundaries. But the maturity of their technical and political proposals and reconstruction of rururban connections have paved the way for a convergence of interests, goals and struggles. Currently, the corporate food regime is coming under increasing scrutiny by those two innovative counter-hegemonic streams as the major fault lines of inequality, inefficiency, unsustainability and commodification become ever more evident. Although the food sovereignty movement has not yet fine-tuned with legitimate concerns for healthy and local food, return to nature and less-polluting forms of food consumption by urban consumers, it is now becoming appreciative of their strategic importance. This is important, since the predominantly rural social movement of food producers from the Global South and the predominantly urban alternative food networks from the North do need to combine, beyond individual organisations, if some sort of grand coalition of the counter-hegemonic movement is to be netted capable of confronting the industrial food system for the common good. Food is a powerful weapon for social transformation and the convergence of these two movements is expected to mark a great tectonic movement in the global and national food system governance in the years to come as they are organisational drivers of change in the transition towards what could be more appropriately termed a food commons regime The emerging food commons regime The food commons regime, as the name implies, would fundamentally rest on the idea of food as a commons, which means revalorising the different food dimensions that are relevant to human beings (value-in use) and thus, of course, reducing the tradable dimension (value-in exchange) that has rendered it a mere commodity. In fact, the consideration of food as a commons is already in play and increasing, with food-related elements being considered as global or national commons, and an evolving governance of the food system being constructed from bottom-up grassroots urban and rural initiatives. Amongst the food-related elements being considered as global or national commons, we can mention: (a) material and non-material food-related elements already considered as commons, (b) edible plants and animals produced by nature, (c) genetic resources for food and agriculture, (d) traditional agricultural knowledge, (e) modern, science-based agricultural knowledge produced by public institutions, (f) cuisine, recipes and national gastronomy, (g) food safety, (h) nutrition, including hunger and obesity imbalances, and (i) food price stability. The food commons regime would inform an essentially democratic food system based on sustainable agricultural practices (agro-ecology) and open-source knowledge (creative commons licenses) through the assumption of relevant knowledge (cuisine recipes, agrarian practices, public research, etc.), material items (seeds, fish stocks, etc.) and abstract entities (transboundary food safety regulations, public nutrition, etc.) as global commons. Departing from our current regime, this transition entails a move from a state-private sector duopoly to a collective, polycentric and reflexive governance of food, where the third pillar would be the self-regulated, civic, collective actions for food that are emerging all over the world. In short, a food commons regime would be governed in a polycentric manner by food citizen that develop food democracies which value the different dimensions of food. The tricentric governance of the food commons transition Shifting the dominant discourse on food and food system governance from the private sphere to the commons arena would open up a whole new world of economic, political and societal innovations. Food shall be kept out of trade agreements dealing with pure private goods, paving the way for more binding legal frameworks to fight hunger and guarantee the right to food for all. National schemes for universal food coverage can be brokered, guaranteeing a daily minimum amount of food for all citizens via a basic food entitlements or by equalling the minimum wage to the food basket. There will be legal and ethical grounds to ban futures trading in agricultural commodities and to prioritise the use of food for human consumption, and thus limit non-consumption uses. Additionally, it will serve to backstop the narrative to reverse the excessive patenting of life, helping to apply the principles of free software to the food and 3
nutrition security domain. The governance of food as a commons will however rest on three premises: (a) the bonds and multi-dimensional value systems of the food-producing communities, (b) the tricentric governance mechanisms (civic collective actions for food, partner states and social private enterprises), and (c) the sustainability of the food producing systems to maintain food footprints within ecological boundaries and to produce good food economically and efficiently. The botton up transition will be triggered by self-organised groups that enable access and promote food in all its dimensions through a multiplicity of open structures and peer-to-peer practices aimed at sharing and co-producing food-related knowledge and foodstuff. The state-market duopoly in food provision will have to re-accommodate this mounting force of citizen actions to reclaim food as a commons. Food can and must be shared, given for free, guaranteed by the state, cultivated by many and also traded in the market. We all need to be involved in food governance; the world should be crowdfed by billions of small producers that are also consumers. Additionally, the transition towards a food commons regime will need a different kind of state, a partner state, with different duties and skills to steer that transition. The desirable functions are shaped by partnering and innovation rather than command-and-control. Public authorities will need to play a leading role in support of existing commons and the creation of new commons for their societal value. The challenge for the private sector within this new paradigm is to be driven by a different ethos while making profit: keeping indeed an entrepreneurial spirit but focused on social aims and satisfying needs. Family farming and more socially-embedded forms of production such as co-operatives and social enterprises are two examples of this. Thus, this food commons transition does not rule out markets as one of several mechanisms for food distribution, but does it reject market hegemony over our food supplies since other sources are available. In that sense, by limiting the influence of market provision and encouraging (politically and financially) the development of other modes of food provision (state or communal), we can re-build a more balanced tricentric food system. Unlike the market, the food commons are about cooperation, sharing, stewardship, equity, selfproduction, sustainability, collectiveness, embeddedness and direct democracy from local to global. This invokes a radical paradigm shift from individual competitiveness as the engine of progress via endless growth towards collective cooperation as the driver of happiness and the common good. We need to develop a food system that first, provides for sustainable nutrition for all and second, provides meaning and not just utility, to food production, trading and consumption. The re-commoning of food will open up the transition towards a new food regime in which primacy rests in its absolute needs of human beings and the different dimensions of food are properly valued.
4