Translating Food Sovereignty

As I write this review in late 2022, the World Food Programme warns on its home page that 345 million people in eighty-two countries “are facing acute food insecurity” (https://www.wfp.org/emergencies/global-food-crisis). Averting catastrophe, the organization insists, requires rising “to the challenge of meeting people's immediate food needs, while at the same time supporting programmes that build long-term resilience.” The crisis has multiple origins—COVID-19 and the Russian invasion of Ukraine come the most readily to mind—but there are deeper systemic problems that long predate the current emergencies. These are the problems that food sovereignty activists have been fighting for decades to solve. It has not been an easy struggle, but change, as Matthew Canfield's book, Translating Food Sovereignty, makes clear, has happened in the recent past and is happening in the present as activists claiming food sovereignty are “actively transforming regulation to reflect their vision of decentralized, diverse, and democratic systems of food governance” (25). They are doing it by turning the structures of transnational governance—widely bemoaned for the power they have diverted to corporations—to their benefit.Translating Food Sovereignty is an examination of the origins and the actions of this transformation with a focus on the Puget Sound region of Washington State, the center of food sovereignty activity in the United States. Canfield—an anthropologist—embedded himself with those activists for years, volunteering with them, interviewing them, and observing them. He also went above the regional level, participating in international conferences and online forums. This participation, he argues, allowed him to see something that other scholars had missed: that food sovereignty activists are using what he has dubbed social practices of translation to create new kinds of transnational governance. They are, Canfield writes, “producing political constituencies and relations, undermining the forms of value supposed by global value chains, opposing the dominant forms of agricultural knowledge that have historically constituted private property and liberal sovereignty, and ultimately reimagining global governance by centering the voices of those most marginalized” (25).Canfield asserts that food sovereignty activists were particularly prepared for this work because of their roots in agroecology, which demands decentralization, sustainability, and equitability. Activists recognized that they could through translation—a term Canfield uses to describe the practice of sharing/communicating meaning and values along transnational networks—build shared networks of governance that could challenge and even replace the global value chains dominated by corporations, who had themselves challenged and replaced states as the ultimate wielders of power. The point, Canfield insists, is that activists have recognized and have begun to take advantage of the opportunities that transnational governance created. As one example, he examines the fight over the Super Banana, a Gates Foundation program to use a genetically modified banana to fight vitamin A deficiency in Uganda. Concerned on several levels about the bananas, Ugandan activists used food sovereignty networks to push back in different locations around the world, arguing instead for solutions based on “working with nature rather than against it” and listening to local farmers instead of silencing them with “innovations” (149). In another example, Canfield shows how farmworkers in Washington State unionized as Familias Unidas por la Justicia and forged networks with other food sovereignty activists and with small-scale producers to force changes that ultimately encompassed not just their own labor conditions but also value chain governance. These are two of several examples that Canfield uses to support his point that food sovereignty activists have used and are continuing to use structures built by neoliberalism to undermine it. It is a compelling argument, and Canfield is careful throughout the book to detail how his work is in conversation with multiple scholars of activism.For Canfield, the most important point of the work that the activists are doing is that it has the potential to change more than food. They have, through their work over the past two decades, “produced a new grammar of justice claims that directly confront the neoliberal mutations of transnational law and governance” (194). Critically, this is not a call to return to the past but, instead, a call to build a new kind of regulatory order: one that, among other things, brings marginalized groups into the decision-making process and prioritizes sustainability. Activists' “practices of translation,” Canfield concludes, “offer the most powerful democratic antidote to the social, economic, and ecological unsustainability of neoliberal capitalism” (196). The cure begins with food, but it will not end there

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