Technocracy upside-down: Alternative and subaltern indicators for food sovereignty in Ecuador

• In Event: Agri-food model, social inequalities and alternatives in Latin America

Abstract

Ecuador is one of the pioneers to have included the paradigm of food sovereignty in its Constitution of 2008. The purpose of this contribution is to explore the various discursive and governance-related meanings food sovereignty has taken for various actors in the country since then. More specifically, the local (and international) quest for territory under the header “food sovereignty” is herein understood as a contested battlefield similar to culture (Wallerstein, 1990), wrought by actors such as the Ministry of Agriculture (MAGAP), international NGOs and ethnic and agro-ecological associations, mainly working with and through smallholders agricultures. While state-centered views regard food sovereignty primarily as a technocratic program of governmental control to rapidly increase productivity and viability through agribusinesses (a view much aligned with the current international mainstream), local smallholders struggle to implement effective and community-organized seals of quality, based on ago-ecology, organic farming or mixed forms, in order to improve their access to credits and markets.

Yet, Ecuador has a notable record of using and re-framing international discourses and governance tools, for example with regard to human rights indicators that became turned “upside-down” as “human-ecology indicators” during 2010-2014. Since 2009, the Ecuadorian Plurinational and Intercultural Conference on Food Sovereignty (COPISA) has in fact a mandate to develop intercultural indicators for food sovereignty as part and parcel of a novel governance agenda that should facilitate the shift toward a smallholders- oriented agriculture in the country. Reviewing current struggles, discourses and already existing, rudimentary international models for intercultural and food sovereignty indicators, this contribution sets out to propose an alternative set of viable indicators with the potential to turn the technocratic state discourse upside-down.

Author

• Johannes M Waldmueller, New York University / Universidad Andina Simón Bolívar, Quito