From the scientific and industrial revolution to the present day, food – an essential element of life – has been progressively transformed into a private, transnational, mono-dimensional commodity of mass consumption for a global market. But over the last decade there has been an increased recognition that this can be challenged and reconceptualized if food is regarded and enacted as a commons.
This Handbook provides the first comprehensive review and synthesis of knowledge and new thinking on how food and food systems can be thought, interpreted and practiced around the old/new paradigms of commons and commoning. The overall aim is to investigate the multiple constraints that occur within and sustain the dominant food and nutrition regime and to explore how it can change when different elements of the current food systems are explored and re-imagined from a commons perspective. Chapters do not define the notion of commons but engage with different schools of thought:
1.- the economic approach, based on rivalry and excludability;
2.- the political approach, recognizing the plurality of social constructions and incorporating epistemologies from the South;
3.- the legal approach that describes three types of proprietary regimes (private, public and collective) and different layers of entitlement (bundles of rights); and
4.- the radical-activist approach that considers the commons as the most subversive, coherent and history-rooted alternative to the dominant neoliberal narrative.
These schools have different and rather diverging epistemologies, vocabularies, ideological stances and policy proposals to deal with the construction of food systems, their governance, the distributive implications and the socio-ecological impact on Nature and Society. The book sparks the debate on food as a commons between and within disciplines, with particular attention to spaces of resistance (food sovereignty, de-growth, open knowledge, transition town, occupations, bottom-up social innovations) and organizational scales (local food, national policies, South–South collaborations, international governance and multi-national agreements). Overall, it shows the consequences of a shift to the alternative paradigm of food as a commons in terms of food, the planet and living beings.
Author(s): Jose Luis Vivero Pol, Tomaso Ferrando, Olivier de Schutter and Ugo Mattei, editors
Series: Routledge Handbooks
Edition: 2019
Publisher: Routledge
Year: 2019
Language: English
Pages: 408
City: Abingdon
Tags: Food, Commons, food security, agriculture, food systems, collective actions, commodities, commodification, nutrition, rural development
1 Introduction: The food commons are coming … 1
Jose Luis Vivero-Pol, Tomaso Ferrando, Olivier De Schutter and Ugo Mattei
PART I
Rebranding food and alternative narratives of transition 23
2 The idea of food as a commons: Multiple understandings for multiple dimensions of food 25
Jose Luis Vivero-Pol
3 The food system as a commons 42
Giacomo Pettenati, Alessia Toldo and Tomaso Ferrando
4 Growing a care-based commons food regime 57
Marina Chang
5 New roles for citizens, markets and the state towards an open-source agricultural revolution 70
Alex Pazaitis and Michel Bauwens
6 Food security as a global public good 85
Cristian Timmermann
PART II
Exploring the multiple dimensions of food 101
7 Food, needs and commons 103
John O’Neill
8 Community-based commons and rights systems 121
George Kent
9 Food as cultural core: Human milk, cultural commons and commodification 138
Penny Van Esterik
10 Food as a commodity 155
Noah Zerbe
PART III
Food-related elements considered as commons 171
11 Traditional agricultural knowledge as a commons 173
Victoria Reyes-García, Petra Benyei and Laura Calvet-Mir
12 Scientific knowledge of food and agriculture in public institutions: Movement from public to private goods 185
Molly D. Anderson
13 Western Gastronomy, inherited commons and market logic: Cooking up a crisis 203
Christian Barrère
14 Genetic resources for food and agriculture as commons 218
Christine Frison and Brendan Coolsaet
15 Water, food and climate commoning in South African cities: Contradictions and prospects 231
Patrick Bond and Mary Galvin
PART IV
Commoning from below: Current examples of commons-based food systems 249
16 The ‘Campesino a Campesino’ Agroecology Movement in Cuba: Food Sovereignty and Food as a Commons 251
Peter M. Rosset and Valentín Val
17 The commoning of food governance in Canada: Pathways towards a national food policy? 266
Hugo Martorell and Peter Andrée
18 Food surplus as charitable provision: Obstacles to re-introducing
food as a commons 281
Tara Kenny and Colin Sage
19 Community-building through food self-provisioning in central and eastern Europe: An analysis through the food commons framework 296
Bálint Balázs
PART V
Dialogue of alternative narratives of transition 311
20 Can food as a commons advance food sovereignty? 313
Eric Holt-Giménez and Ilja van Lammeren
21 Land as a Commons: Examples from the UK and Italy 329
Chris Maughan and Tomaso Ferrando
22 The centrality of food for social emancipation: Civic food networks as real utopias projects 342
Maria Fonte and Ivan Cucco
23 Climate change, the food commons and human health 356
Cristina Tirado von der Pahlen
PART VI
Conclusions 371
24 Food as commons: Towards a new relationship between the public, the civic and the private 373
Olivier De Schutter, Ugo Mattei, Jose Luis Vivero-Pol and Tomaso Ferrando
