Abstract
This chapter explores the food sovereignty practices of La Vía Campesina member organisations in Chile, México, Brazil and Australia to map the discursive connections between the Australian and Latin American food sovereignty movements. The author identifies the emergence of transnational publics concerned not only about what we eat but also the specific function of rural space, the type of development that should take place in it and who should benefit from this. She identifies unresolved tensions in systems of food provisioning and the articulation of food sovereignty on both continents. Focusing on the contradictions that have emerged in the corporate food regime, where hunger and obesity, scarcity and abundance co-exist, she highlights the unique role of the Latin American campesino in stabilizing food supply in times of crisis, such as the food price hikes of 2007–2008 which triggered riots in over 40 countries. Analysing the engagement of different actors in the struggle for food sovereignty in Australia and Latin America this study highlights the individuality of experience and the employment of distinct cultural and regional symbols in issue-framing on local and country scales.
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Notes
- 1.
In the neoliberal, developed economies of the Global North strong private property rights, technological rationalism and free markets are favoured and agricultural production is frequently heavily subsidized; in the Global South the need for land reform and redistribution, and fairer terms for trade, persist. Globally, the imposition of an agro-export orientation, coupled with the transformation of land and labour markets, has made all states highly susceptible to market forces.
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Mann, A. (2019). Common Ground: Connections and Tensions Between Food Sovereignty Movements in Australia and Latin America. In: Peñaloza, F., Walsh, S. (eds) Mapping South-South Connections. Studies of the Americas. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-78577-6_4
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