Abstract
Although food supply chains are global, and urban populations have ballooned, human beings nonetheless remain inextricably linked to the land by the food they eat. However, the ways in which links between land and human nutrition are articulated and maintained today are complex. This article seeks to explore this complexity, in light of current policy debates, including those related to the Second International Conference on Nutrition.
Similar content being viewed by others
Notes
Javier Chocobar, Ely Sandra Juarez, Roberto Lopez, Mario Lopez, Mártires Lopez, Cristian Ferreyra, Miguel Galván, Celestina Jara, Lila Coyipé, Imer Flores and Juan Diaz Asijak.
Understood as the ability to benefit from that land (Ribot and Peluso, 2003).
NAFTA is the North American Free Trade Agreement among Canada, Mexico and the United States, which came into force on 1 January 1994. The DR-CAFTA is the Dominican Republic, Central America and US Free Trade Agreement, enforced from 2005 on.
See GRAIN’s 2008 report, and their ongoing news and analysis at www.farmlandgrab.org, also Edelman et al., (2013); Scoones et al., (2013): Rulli et al., (2013); Rulli and D’Odorico (2013); Fairhead et al., (2012); Borras et al., (2013); Margulis et al., (2013); Mehta et al., (2012); Borras et al., (2012); two international conferences on land-grabbing (2011, 2012). For working paper series, see: www.iss.nl/ldpi. N.B.: We adhere to Borras et al.’s (2012) understanding of land grabbing as ‘capturing control of relatively vast tracts of land and other natural resources through a variety of mechanisms that involve large-scale capital that often shifts resource use orientation into extractive character, whether for international or domestic purposes, as capital’s response to the convergence of food, energy and financial crises, climate change mitigation imperatives, and demands for resources from newer hubs of global capital’ (851, stress added).
Food sovereignty, based on the Nyéléni Declaration of 2007 (www.nyeleni.org/IMG/pdf/DeclNyeleni-en.pdf), is broadly defined as ‘the right of peoples to healthy and culturally appropriate food produced through ecologically sound and sustainable methods, and their right to define their own food and agriculture systems’. For a critical discussion on the food sovereignty vision, see the three forthcoming special issues on food sovereignty in the Journal of Peasant Studies, Globalizations and Third World Quarterly.
References
Alonso-Fradejas, Alberto (2012) ‘Land Control-Grabbing in Guatemala: The political economy of contemporary agrarian change’, Canadian Journal of Development Studies 33 (4): 509–528.
Aranda, Dario (2010) ‘Si hace BOOM, es soja’, Revista MU, Año 4 (35): 13.
Aranda, Dario (2013) ‘Argentina Profunda: Extractivism and resistance’, Upsidedown World, 19 Feb.
Bacon, David (2008) Illegal People: How globalization creates migration and criminalizes immigrants. Boston, MA: Beacon Press Books.
Bidaseca, Karina, Andrea Gigena, Florencia Gómez, Ana Mariel Weinstock, Enrique Oyharzábal and Daniel Otal (2013) Relevamiento y sistematizacion de problemas de tierras de los agricultores familiares en Argentina. Buenos Aires: Ministerio de la Agricultura, Ganadería y Pesca de la Nación.
Borras, Saturnino M., Cristóbal Kay, Sergio Gómez and John Wilkinson (2012) ‘Land Grabbing and Global Capitalist Accumulation: Features in Latin America’, Canadian Journal of Development Studies 33 (4): 402–416.
Borras, Saturnino M., Ruth Hall, Ian Scoones, Ben White and Wendy Wolford (2013) ‘Governing the Global Land Grab: The role of the state in the rush for land’, Development & Change 44 (2): 189–471.
Brem-Wilson, Josh (2014) ‘Towards Food Sovereignty: Interrogating peasant voice in the UN committee on world food security’, paper presented at Food Sovereignty: A Critical Dialogue, The Hague, the Netherlands, 24 January.
Brent, Zoe (2013) Land Conflicts in Argentina: From resistance to systemic transformation. Oakland: Food First & Transnational Institute (TNI) No. 4.
CIRS (2012) Farmworker Mobile Market Feasibility Study. California Institute of Rural Studies Davis: UC Sustainable Agriculture Research and Education Program (SAREP) Competitive Grant Program.
De Schutter, Olivier (2011) ‘The right to an adequate diet: the agriculture-food-health nexus’, Report presented at the 19th Session of the United Nations Human Rights Council, Geneva, Switzerland.
De Schutter, Olivier and Kaitlin Y. Cordes (2011) Accounting for Hunger: The right to food in the era of globalisation. Oxford: Hart Publishing LTD.
Deininger, Klaus, Derek Byerlee, Jonathan Lindsay, Andrew Norton, Harris Selod and Mercedes Stickler (2011) Rising Global Interest in Farmland: Can it yield sustainable and equitable benefits?. Washington DC: World Bank.
Edelman, Marc, Carlos Oya and Saturnino M. Borras Jr. (2013) ‘Global Land Grabs: historical processes, theoretical and methodological implications and current trajectories’, Third World Quarterly 34 (9): 1517–1531.
Fairhead, James, Melissa Leach and Ian Scoones (2012) ‘Green Grabbing: a new appropriation of nature?’ Journal of Peasant Studies 39 (2): 237–261.
FAO/WHO (2013) Second International Conference on Nutrition (ICN2), Concept Note. Rome: Food and Agriculture Organization, World Health Organization.
FM Del Monte MOCASE-VC (2012) ‘Siguen amenazas y persecusión de paramilitares a camepsinos’, MOCASE VIA CAMPESINA.
Friedmann, Harriet (1992) ‘Distance and Durability: shaky foundations of the world food economy’, Third World Quarterly 13 (2): 371–383.
Friedmann, Harriet (2005) ‘From Colonialism to Green Capitalism: Social movements and emergence of food regimes’, in Frederick H. Buttel and Philip McMichael (eds.) New Directions in the Sociology of Global Development (Research in Rural Sociology and Development, Volume 11) pp. 227–264, Bingley: Emerald Group Publishing Limited.
Friedmann, Harriet and Philip McMichael (1989) ‘Agriculture and the State System; The rise and decline of national agricultures, 1870 to the present’, Sociologia Ruralis XXIX (2): 93–117.
GRAIN (2008) Seized: The 2008 land grab for food and financial security, http://www.grain.org/article/entries/93-seized-the-2008-landgrab-for-food-and-financial-security, accessed 10 September 2014.
Kerssen, Tanya M. (2013) Grabbing Power: The new struggles for land, food and democracy in northern honduras. Oakland: Food First Books.
Lappé, A. (2014) ‘Hunger & Food Security: Do we really need industrial agriculture to feed the world?’. Real Food Media, Food Myth Busters: The real story about what we eat.
La Vía Campesina and FIAN International (2014) Land Conflicts and the Criminalization of Peasant Movements in Paraguay: The case of marina kue and the ‘curuguaty massacre’. Oakland: Food First & Transnational Institute (TNI).
Levine, James A. (2011) ‘Poverty and Obesity in the U.S.’, Diabetes 60 (11): 2667–8.
Margulis, Matias E., Nora McKeon and Saturnino M. Borras (2013) ‘Land Grabbing and Global Governance: Critical perspectives’, Globalizations journal 10 (1): 1–23.
McIntyre, Beverly D., Hans R. Herren, Judi Wakhungu and Robert T. Watson (2009) ‘Agriculture at a Crossroads’. International Assessment of Agricultural Knowledge, Science and Technology for Development (IAASTD): Global report. Synthesis Report, Washington DC: Island Press.
McKay, Ben, Sérgio Sauer, Ben Richardson and Roman Herre (2014) The Politics of Sugarcane Flexing in Brazil and Beyond. Amsterdam: Transnational Institute (TNI).
McMichael, M. (2014) ‘The Land Question in the Food Sovereignty Project’, Globalizations London: Routledge.
Mehta, Lyla, Gert Jan Veldwisch and Jennifer Franco (2012) ‘Introduction to the Special Issue: Water grabbing? Focus on the (re)appropriation of finite water resources’, Water Alternatives 5 (2): 193–207.
Oliveira, Gustavo de L.T. and Mindi Schneider (2014) The Politics of Flexing Soybeans in China and Brazil. Amsterdam: Transnational Institute (TNI).
Ribot, Jesse C. and Nancy Lee Peluso (2003) ‘A Theory of Access’, Rural Sociology 68 (2): 153–181.
Rulli, Maria Cristina and Paolo D’Odorico (2013) ‘The Science of Evidence: The value of global studies on land rush’, The Journal of Peasant Studies 40 (5): 907–909.
Rulli, Maria Cristina, Antonio Saviori and Paolo D’Odorico (2013) ‘Global land and water grabbing’, Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America (PNAS) January 15, 110: 892–897.
Schneider, Mindi and Shefali Sharma (2014) China’s Pork Miracle Agribusiness and Development in China’s Pork Industry. Institute for Agriculture and Trade Policy: Minneapolis, Minnesota.
Scrinis, Gyorgy (2012) ‘Nutritionism and Functional Foods’, in David M. Kaplan (ed.) The Philosophy of Food pp. 269–91, Berkeley: University of California Press.
Scoones, Ian, Ruth Hall, Saturnino M. Borras Jr, Ben White, Wendy Wolford, Marc Edelman, Ward Anseeuw, Jann Lay, Peter Messerli, Markus Giger, Michael Taylor and Carlos Oya, GRAIN (2013) ‘Forum on Land Grabbing part 2 on Methodologies’, Journal of Peasant Studies 40 (3).
Sen, Amartya (1981) Poverty and Famines: An essay on entitlement and deprivation. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
Tomlinson, I. (2013) ‘Doubling food production to feed the 9 billion: A critical perspective on a key discourse of feed security in the UK’, Journal of Rural Studies 29: 81–90.
Villarejo, Don, Stephen A. McCurdy, Bonnie Bade, Steve Samuels, David Lighthall and Williams Daniel (2010) ‘The Health of California’s Immigrant Hired Farmworkers’, American Journal of Industrial Medicine 53 (4): 387–397.
Weis, Tony (2010) ‘The Accelerating Biophysical Contradictions of Industrial Capitalist Agriculture’, Journal of Agrarian Change 10 (3): 315–341.
Weis, Tony (2013) ‘The Meat of the Global Food Crisis’, Journal of Peasant Studies 40 (1): 65–85.
Windfuhr, Michael and Jennie Jonsén (2005) Food Sovereignty: Towards democracy in localized food systems. Rugby: ITDG Publishing.
Additional information
Explores the complex nexus between land and nutrition in light of current policy debates, including those related for the Second International Conference on Nutrition
Rights and permissions
About this article
Cite this article
Brent, Z., Schiavoni, C. & Alonso-Fradejas, A. No Time to Lose Common Ground: Why land matters in nutrition debates. Development 57, 218–225 (2014). https://doi.org/10.1057/dev.2014.72
Published:
Issue Date:
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1057/dev.2014.72