Food Movements Unite! ? Food sovereignty, the agrarian question, and the contours of civil society organising in the South African food system

Abstract

Significant scholarly attention has been given to the global food sovereignty movement. However, the global movement is ultimately rooted in national and local contexts. The political dynamics of movements in such contexts call for ongoing exploration, especially as to how the global discourse and principles of food sovereignty take root politically and socially. This article therefore provides an account of the movement terrain of organising members of popular classes around food questions in South Africa, and with which food sovereignty as a global idea, practice and political project articulates. A typology shows that the civil society forms of organising around food and food system change fall between justice-centred and food-centred conceptions, and they cohere around lifestyle, organic, food justice and systemic politics. The article shows how the form and content of this food movement emerged through the particularities of a settler colonial society and the associated articulations between race, class, gender, and ecology. Based on this, I argue that these types, their content, and their politics have been shaped through the historical, conjectural relationship between the agrarian question and the national question in South Africa, which can be understood through Stuart Hall’s concept of articulation. This argument has wider implications for how we think about food movements in the South – the potential to understand them in relation to the particularities of agrarian change in post-colonial contexts, the associated patterns of class fragmentation, and politics, that have been historically engendered by underdevelopment, precarity, and subordinate relations to the global economy.