Security via Sovereignty

Lessons from the Global South

MYRIAM PAREDES AND MARK EDWARDS

The American shopper walking down a grocery store aisle naively participates in a food system full of ironies and unintended consequences. If asked to interpret the contrast between great volumes of food on the shelves and the request at the cash register for contributions to the food bank, a thoughtful person will quickly recognize the most blatant of ironies — a country that produces mass quantities of food and pays farmers to stop producing too much is also a country with 17.4 million food insecure households (Coleman-Jensen, Rabbitt, Gregory, and Singh 2015). But beyond this glaring contradiction, the complexities and frequent dysfunctions of the country's provisioning remain a mystery. One reason for shoppers' naiveté is the dominance of food security "thinking" about the feeding of populations and the lack of awareness of an alternative food sovereignty theoretical framework. In this chapter we highlight the distinctions, connections, and implications of these frameworks, advocating for a more thoughtful approach to understanding the feeding of the United States by incorporating the strengths of food sovereignty, a concept embraced by South Americans in their constitutions.

Consider another apparent contradiction. From a food security point of view, high rates of obesity and diabetes among poor Americans are nonintuitive, especially given that in other countries poverty can lead to stunted growth and gaunt faces. But a food sovereignty lens brings into focus the fact that powerful interests arrange for government-subsidized commodities that keep prices low on calorie-intensive, nutrition-poor diets, while healthy fruits and vegetables remain unsubsidized, more expensive, and therefore more accessible to middle and upper classes.

The sovereignty lens also reveals ironies inherent in the production and delivery components of the food system. For example, sometimes, the same trucks that transport organic produce from the rural "salad-bowl" areas to the cities are the same ones that bring back from port cities the less expensive canned produce gathered and processed elsewhere, at times from halfway around the world. So, rural farmworkers in the United States use their meager wages not to purchase the food they cultivated and harvested, but instead to buy food that other farmworkers produced more cheaply elsewhere. Even stranger, low-income workers and the unemployed, both in remote rural and in densely urban places, often find themselves in the midst of food deserts; that is, they live in places that lack a wide variety of affordable, quality foods and instead are full of cheap, highly processed foods. Supermarkets may choose to avoid urban ghettos, or not stock their stores with the same quality produce owing to economic and transportation obstacles, while little country stores are often so remote that food distribution companies decide not to deliver fresh dairy, bread, or produce to such small markets.

Further ironies appear when a sovereignty lens is used to consider the food access concerns of low-wage, working Americans. For example, many of the low-income inhabitants of these urban food deserts work in "food service" while low-income workers in rural places are often engaged in cultivating, harvesting, and packing food. In both rural and urban areas of the northwestern United States, food service workers have been among the highest represented workers among food insecure households (Grussing and Edwards 2006). Meanwhile, at the end of the food chain, consumers who work in retail (such as Walmart) often earn wages so low that they must turn to federal assistance (Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program — SNAP), providing them modest funds to purchase food, often from the very employers who pay them low wages.

The computer-precise and remarkably organized food-delivery system that daily feeds multitudes with safe, if not always healthy, food also displays occasional unintended consequences that achieve notoriety in the media. For example, the same amazingly efficient industrial food complex that distributes massive quantities to most parts of the country and the world also produces large outbreaks of food-borne illnesses when food safety is compromised. One bad crop of cantaloupes or batch of ice cream contaminated with Listeria (Centers for Disease Control and Prevention 2015b) or one side of beef infected with "mad cow disease" (Centers for Disease Control and Prevention 2015a) can put at risk thousands of consumers because indeed millions of consumers partake of the rationalized system that so widely distributes cantaloupes, ice cream, and hamburger from and to all parts of the country. From a food security point of view, such problems may be...