scholarly journals Agroecological Formación in Rural Social Movements

2014 ◽  
Vol 98 ◽  
pp. 31-37 ◽  
Author(s):  
Nils McCune ◽  
Juan Reardon ◽  
Peter Rosset
Keyword(s):  
Social Movements ◽  
Social Movement ◽  
Food System ◽  
Food Sovereignty ◽  
Ways Of Knowing ◽  
Agricultural Landscapes ◽  
Small Scale ◽  
Ecological Processes ◽  
Local Circuits ◽  
Rural Social Movements

Among the many sectors currently engaged in struggle against the corporate food system, small farmers play a particularly important role—not only do they constitute a legitimate alternative to global agribusiness, but also they are the heirs to long traditions of local knowledge and practice. In defending peasant agriculture, rural social movements defend popular control over seeds and genetic resources, water, land and territory against the onslaught of globalized financial capital. A framework called food sovereignty has been developed by the international peasant movement La Via Campesina (LVC), to encompass the various elements of a food system alternative based on reclaiming popular resource control, defending small-scale agriculture and traditional knowledge, rebuilding local circuits of food and labor, and recovering the ecological processes that can make farming sustainable. Recognizing the need to develop “movement people” capable of integrating many ecological, social, cultural and political criteria into their organizational activities, LVC increasingly has articulated processes of popular education and consciousness-raising as part of the global social movement for agroecology and food sovereignty. Given the enormous diversity of organizations and actors in LVC, an underlying feature known in Spanish as diálogo de saberes (roughly the equivalent of “dialogue between ways of knowing”) has characterized LVC processes of education, training, formation and exchange in agroecology. The diálogo de saberes takes place at the level of training centers and schools of the LVC organizations, as well as the larger scale of agricultural landscapes and peasant territories. The interactions between peasant, family or communal farmers, their organizations, their youth and their agroecology create social processes that assume the form and dynamic of a social movement in several countries of Latin America.

scholarly journals Contesting Market-Based Conservation: Payments for Ecosystem Services as a Surface of Engagement for Rural Social Movements in Mexico

2013 ◽  
Vol 6 (1) ◽  
pp. 134-150 ◽  
Author(s):  
Elizabeth Shapiro-Garza
Keyword(s):  
Social Movements ◽  
Ecosystem Services ◽  
Social Movement ◽  
Financial Incentives ◽  
Technical Assistance ◽  
Federal State ◽  
International Lending ◽  
Non Governmental Organizations ◽  
Lending Institutions ◽  
Rural Social Movements

The Mexican national Payment for Ecosystem Services (PES) programs, which provide financial incentives for rural landholders to conserve forest, were originally designed under the logic of market-based conservation. Based on a multi-sited, multi-scalar ethnography of Mexico's PES programs, this article examines the process through which a national rural social movement was able to redefine the market-based narrative of PES, the historical and political context that provided this window of opportunity, and the ways in which the movement's engagement led to a hybridization of the policy itself. The involvement of the rural social movement introduced a very different conception of PES – as a recognition by Mexico's federal state and urban society of the value of campesino (peasant) environmental stewardship and the economic support needed to allow these stewards to remain on the land. The direct involvement of movement members in the redesign of the programs had a significant impact on their conformation that reflected this vision of revaluing the rural: the inclusion of agroforests and sustainably managed timber lands; requirements for self-defined forest management plans; provision of dedicated funding for technical assistance; and the training of local extensionists. In mapping the evolution of the Mexican national PES programs we can begin to see how, in this particular place and time, rural social movements employed PES as “useful surfaces of engagement” (Escobar 1999: 13) for contesting the market-based notions of the federal state, international lending institutions and conservation non-governmental organizations. I position this analysis in the context of the global project of “grabbing green” and as an example of the frictions that can inhibit and even partially reverse the logic of the seemingly inexorable rise of market-based conservation policy and projects.

Religion as a Political Tool

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
Sarah Sarzynski
Keyword(s):  
Social Movements ◽  
Popular Culture ◽  
Social Movement ◽  
Northeastern Brazil ◽  
Rural Workers ◽  
Brazilian Government ◽  
Government Documents ◽  
The 1960S ◽  
Religiously Based ◽  
Rural Social Movements

This chapter examines how discourses of religious practices and beliefs of messianism and Catholic radicalism functioned to both unite rural workers and criminalize the rural social movements, while also coding o Nordeste as fanatical and non-modern. By connecting films and popular culture to rural social movement publications and U.S. and Brazilian government documents, the chapter shows the conflicting ways in which political and cultural actors resurrected the historical messianic movement and war of Canudos (1896-7) in the 1960s. Conservatives emphasized the “fanatical” features of social movement leaders and participants, mobilizing the dominant stereotype of Nordestinos as religiously devious. Rural social movements established their own religiously based narrative of a revolutionary Jesus who fought against the wealthy for the poor. The radicalization of Catholic doctrine along with debates about the meaning of past struggles in the Northeast such as Canudos both shifted and upheld the prevailing constructions of Northeastern Brazil.

scholarly journals Towards Territorially Embedded, Equitable and Resilient Food Systems? Insights from Grassroots Responses to COVID-19 in Italy and the City Region of Rome

2021 ◽  
Vol 13 (5) ◽  
pp. 2425
Author(s):  
Simona Zollet ◽  
Luca Colombo ◽  
Paola De De Meo ◽  
Davide Marino ◽  
Steven R. McGreevy ◽  
...  
Keyword(s):  
Food Systems ◽  
Food System ◽  
Food Sovereignty ◽  
Alternative Food Networks ◽  
Small Scale ◽  
System Transformation ◽  
City Region ◽  
The Face ◽  
Negative Impacts ◽  
The City

The negative impacts of the COVID-19 pandemic have further exposed and exacerbated the structural weaknesses and inequalities embedded in the global industrial agri-food system. While the mainstream narrative continues to emphasise the importance of ensuring the uninterrupted functioning of global supply chains to counter COVID-related disruptions, the pandemic has also highlighted the resilience of small-scale, sustainable family farming and of spatially and socially embedded food systems. Based on a quantitative and qualitative analysis of three surveys, this study examines organic and agroecological farmers’ responses to the first COVID-related lockdown (March–May 2020) in Italy, as well as the responses of grassroots alternative food networks (AFN) in the city region of Rome. The results show how local grassroots action played a significant role in ensuring food access, provisioning, and distribution, often in the face of delayed or insufficient action of mainstream food system actors and institutions. These grassroots responses identify opportunities and barriers for agri-food system transformation away from neoliberal, market-based interventions and towards policies that support food sovereignty and democracy in the context of localised, agroecology-based and more resilient agri-food systems.

scholarly journals Envisioning the Future of European Food Systems: Approaches and Research Priorities After COVID-19

2021 ◽  
Vol 5 ◽  
Author(s):  
Matteo Vittuari ◽  
Giovanni Bazzocchi ◽  
Sonia Blasioli ◽  
Francesco Cirone ◽  
Albino Maggio ◽  
...  
Keyword(s):  
Food Production ◽  
Food Systems ◽  
Food System ◽  
Production Systems ◽  
Food Sovereignty ◽  
Research Priorities ◽  
Policy Framework ◽  
Small Scale ◽  
City Region ◽  
Research And Innovation

The COVID-19 pandemic unveiled the fragility of food sovereignty in cities and confirmed the close connection urban dwellers have with food. Although the pandemic was not responsible for a systemic failure, it suggested how citizens would accept and indeed support a transition toward more localized food production systems. As this attitudinal shift is aligned with the sustainability literature, this work aims to explore the tools and actions needed for a policy framework transformation that recognizes the multiple benefits of food systems, while considering local needs and circumstances. This perspective paper reviews the trends in production and consumption, and systematizes several impacts emerged across European food systems in response to the first wave of pandemic emergency, with the final aim of identifying challenges and future strategies for research and innovation toward the creation of resilient and sustainable city/region food systems. The proposal does not support a return to traditional small-scale economies that might not cope with the growing global population. It instead stands to reconstruct and upscale such connections using a “think globally act locally” mind-set, engaging local communities, and making existing and future citizen-led food system initiatives more sustainable. The work outlines a set of recommended actions for policy-makers: support innovative and localized food production, training and use of information and communication technology for food production and distribution; promote cross-pollination among city/region food systems; empower schools as agents of change in food provision and education about food systems; and support the development of assessment methodologies and the application of policy tools to ensure that the different sustainability dimensions of the food chain are considered.

‘We are not poor things’: territorio cuerpo-tierra and Colombian women’s organised struggles

2020 ◽  
pp. 146470012090950 ◽  
Author(s):  
Laura Rodriguez Castro
Keyword(s):  
Social Movements ◽  
Women Leaders ◽  
Food Sovereignty ◽  
Intimate Relationship ◽  
Global South ◽  
The Body ◽  
Relationship Of ◽  
Rural Social Movements ◽  
Politically Active ◽  
Depth Interviews

In this article, I use Lorena Cabnal’s notion of territorio cuerpo-tierra to analyse seventeen in-depth interviews with women leaders of rural social movements and other organisations in Colombia . In the interviews, social leaders condemn violence that is epistemic, systemic, militarised and that permeates all ambits of life. They denounce how the coloniality of power operates, while at the same time they propose alternatives for a better life from their own cosmovisions by enacting food sovereignty and constructing feminisms from ‘below’. I demonstrate how these social leaders’ actions are entangled in decolonial feminist struggles, which undermine the way in which women in the Global South have been constructed as ‘objects’ or ‘in need of saving’. These women are not ‘victims who need saving’, but politically active subjects who enact change locally and nationally through their ‘territories bodies-lands’. Not only do their narratives highlight the intimate relationship of the body with the land, but I argue that we must follow their lead in order to dismantle the coloniality of power.

scholarly journals Social movements as agents of change: Fighting intersectional food inequalities, building food as webs of life

2021 ◽  
Vol 69 (3) ◽  
pp. 603-625
Author(s):  
Renata Motta
Keyword(s):  
Social Movements ◽  
Social Change ◽  
Animal Rights ◽  
Social Inequalities ◽  
Food System ◽  
Local Food ◽  
Food Sovereignty ◽  
Food Justice ◽  
Food Movements ◽  
Justice Movements

What does the diversity of social movements and food initiatives tell us about processes of social change? I argue that they offer a productive analytical lens to observe social change because they identify injustices and dynamics of inequalities in the food system and are actively engaged in transforming these. Alternative local food initiatives react to the environmental impacts of globalized food relations; food sovereignty movements highlight class inequalities and power asymmetries in the food system that affect people’s rights to culturally appropriate foodways; food justice movements denounce institutional racism; feminist movements fight persistent gender inequalities from food production to consumption; vegan movements defend animal rights. These are often mapped onto different world regions, with food justice movements more present in the US; food sovereignty movements louder in the Global South; feminist food movements more active in Latin America; and local food movements commonly in the Global North. This article brings together diverse strands of activism and research on social inequalities related to food under the conceptual umbrella of food inequalities. In addition to concept building, it contributes to a sociology of food studies by mapping the geopolitics of knowledge about social change behind the growing mobilization around food issues.

Die Bewegung für Klimagerechtigkeit und Energiedemokratie in Deutschland.

2016 ◽  
Vol 46 (184) ◽  
pp. 403-421 ◽  
Author(s):  
Henrik Sander
Keyword(s):  
Social Movements ◽  
Social Movement ◽  
Movement Analysis ◽  
Climate Justice ◽  
Climate Politics ◽  
Historical Materialist

This article argues that social movement research must be renewed by a historical-materialist perspective to be able to understand the emergence and effects of the relatively new climate justice movement in Germany. The previous research on NGOs and social movements in climate politics is presented and the recent development of the climate justice movement in Germany is illustrated. In a final step two cases of climate movement campaigns are explained by means of the historical-materialist movement analysis proposed by the author.

Fulfilling the Right to Food for South Africa: Justice, Security, Sovereignty and the Politics of Malnutrition

2020 ◽  
Vol 11 (3) ◽  
pp. 112-152
Author(s):  
Busiso Helard Moyo ◽  
Anne Marie Thompson Thow
Keyword(s):  
South Africa ◽  
Food Systems ◽  
Food System ◽  
Food Sovereignty ◽  
Food Justice ◽  
System Transformation ◽  
Right To Food ◽  
Economic Rights ◽  
The Individual ◽  
The Right

Despite South Africa’s celebrated constitutional commitments that have expanded and deepened South Africa’s commitment to realise socio-economic rights, limited progress in implementing right to food policies stands to compromise the country’s developmental path. If not a deliberate policy choice, the persistence of hunger, food insecurity and malnutrition in all its forms is a deep policy failure.  Food system transformation in South Africa requires addressing wider issues of who controls the food supply, thus influencing the food chain and the food choices of the individual and communities. This paper examines three global rights-based paradigms – ‘food justice’, ‘food security’ and ‘food sovereignty’ – that inform activism on the right to food globally and their relevance to food system change in South Africa; for both fulfilling the right to food and addressing all forms of malnutrition. We conclude that the emerging concept of food sovereignty has important yet largely unexplored possibilities for democratically managing food systems for better health outcomes.

Gerakan Sosial Melalui Sosio Drama Berbasis Kearifan Lokal Untuk Meningkatkan Nasionalisme Daerah Pedalaman

2018 ◽  
Vol 1 ◽  
pp. 36
Author(s):  
Ahmad Sudi Pratikno ◽  
Dewi Nurmasita
Keyword(s):  
Social Movements ◽  
Data Collection ◽  
Social Movement ◽  
Rural Area ◽  
Secondary Students ◽  
Research Subjects ◽  
Long Time ◽  
Descriptive Method

Social movement is an effort to provide benefits to others. However, within the context of cultivating the character, research on social movement through socio-drama based on local wisdom is very limited. This study aims to examine the increasing character of nationalism through social movements in the form of socio-drama. Research subjects were elementary and secondary students residing in rural area. This research used qualitative and descriptive method. Data collection techniques were documentations, observations, and interviews. The results showed that the increased character of nationalism only arise when playing socio-drama only, they would return to the previous character. Cultivating the character values need a long time, so the change of character did not necessarily happen.

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