Unsettling Food Sovereignty in Australia

• In Event: Diversifying Agri-food STS Scholarship Across Transnational Borders I

Abstract

Food sovereignty is a concept used among grassroots agrarian movements seeking to give disenfranchised and landless peoples control over their food systems. Since the early 1990s, the global food sovereignty movement has been crucial for the advancement of the political rights and interests of approximately 200 million peasants, small and medium-size farmers, landless people, women farmers, indigenous people, migrants and agricultural workers throughout Central and South America, Africa, Asia, and parts of Europe. This movement seeks to establish ‘new social relations free of oppression and inequality between men and women, peoples, racial groups and economic classes and generations’ (La Via Campesina, Declaration of Nyéléni).

In recent years, activists and small-scale farmers in Australia have mobilised food sovereignty politics in order to establish a more just food system. However, this paper argues Australia is quite distinct from other locations in which food sovereignty has been deployed. In this settler-colonial context, it is not indigenous peoples using the politics of food sovereignty, but the inheritors and beneficiaries of colonial violence and dispossession of Indigenous Australians. Furthermore, agricultural practices and technologies were central to nineteenth century justifications for the physical dispossession of Indigenous Australians. This history, and its contemporary effects, raises significant ethical and political questions for contemporary proponents of food sovereignty in Australia.

This paper uses philosophical and historical methods to critically explore the role of agricultural technologies in processes of colonisation, and the problems and possibilities of contemporary agri-food practices and discourses in settler-colonial contexts such as Australia.

Author

• Christopher Mayes, Dea