A Right to Food Systems

My report for Common Wealth focuses on connecting calls for the adoption of a legislative ‘Right to Food’ with more collectivist global campaigns around food sovereignty⁷ and the need to democratise ownership and access to land and food systems. In this sense, it is a move towards making a ‘Right to Food’ a starting point for a Right to Food Systems. Whereas a Right to Food supposes individuals’ right to access sufficient nutritious food, guaranteed by legislation and overseen by named authorities, a Right to Food Systems would attempt to allow communities at varying scales to have greater control of their local food systems through the establishment of alternative food networks which would eschew the logic of competition in favour of collaboration, mutual aid, and improved socio-ecological relations. Given this frame, it is perhaps worth noting the question of scale. Such proposals take England, Scotland, Wales and the occupied six counties in the North of Ireland as a starting point. They are rooted in an acknowledgement that producing more food for human consumption domestically is necessary to reduce ecological damage created elsewhere by our imperial mode of living. As such, this vision forms part of a societal transition away from imperialist geographies of extraction, which recognises the historical extent to which systems of agricultural production, self-sufficiency and ecologies have been degraded and disturbed by two centuries of the Global North’s ‘large planet diet’. On this point, accusations of solutionism or wishful thinking would be perhaps merited, yet an attempted break with imperialism must be a pivotal demand for any eco-socialist agenda.

Within these parameters, with an eye on the immediate conjuncture, I assert how calls for individuals to have a legal right to access food can be harnessed as a transitional step towards building the institutions and social infrastructures that will facilitate decommodification, commoning, and empowerment within the food system. Acceptance that individuals should have legally enshrined access to food necessitates consideration of how such a right could be delivered. As such, this vision articulates the delivery of such a right with the development and instigation of food systems change through the mobilisation of state resources, and the devolution and entrenchment of community power and food sovereignty.

I accept that a Right to Food, as called for by many, is perhaps an obvious example of solutionism. It speaks to an understanding of a future in which ‘rights’ are immutable realities rather than messy, mediated, and fallible political tools. Yet rather than settling for this liberal acceptance of individual rights, such calls can be used as a starting point for creating and incubating alternative food networks which look to build mutual aid, and to prefigure and model social relations of care, solidarity, and commensality.⁸ The report offers examples of institutions established or transformed to deliver a right to food using public resources: universal free school meals, public restaurants, community-owned retail and co-operatively run supply chains and processors. In making this assertion, Riofrancos’ work on institutions is a touchstone; Raymond Williams’s understanding of “reform as response,” outlined in the New Left Review in 1976, is also relevant. Williams contrasts reform as response with the more conventional (often Fabian) “representative reform,” which tends towards mere amelioration, and makes no direct challenge to the existing system. There is a solutionism to this reformism, a manipulation from above. For Williams, responsive reformism consists in diverse modes of organising around a suite of intersecting and converging demands, leading to substantive societal change. The question of what we eat and where it comes from offers a vector for channelling these intersecting demands into myriad spheres of contestation: land use and ownership, biodiversity and ecological regeneration, public spaces and social integration and solidarity, public health, shared and individual cultural expression and, fundamentally, time and wages. Discourses of rights and widely-shared associated understandings of personal autonomy and dignity provide a starting-point for beginning to manifest such a vision, but they cannot be the endpoint.

Further, such futures pose complexities in terms of their realisation. Such changes would have to be delivered in an interlinked way on both a ‘local’ and a national level. ‘Local’, as anyone involved with the politics of food should be aware, is a slippery term. In this context, discussions of local actions refer to existing local authorities. How such institutions will look in the future will (and should) change. However, in the first instance, these authorities could serve as a medium for establishing a Right to Food Systems and community food power. Conventional arguments for a Right to Food acknowledge that responsibilities would have to be created for local authorities to ensure its delivery. This could offer an institutional starting point for the establishment of more democratic small-scale institutions and networks for purchasing and distributing food. The system should allow for a degree of local flexibility in terms of how such provision could be offered; organisational forms such as public-commons partnerships should be encouraged and facilitated. Legislation could also call for the establishment of food councils, or more radical forms of currently existing local food partnerships.

In making good on the need to provide food for people, in need and more generally, existing public institutions could be resourced and encouraged to invest in the development of social infrastructure. This could precede the development of more systematic alternative food networks, community restaurants, and organisational forms such as co-operatives, community-supported agriculture, or efforts to reduce food waste and promote sharing and commoning. Many of these approaches have already been adopted by grassroots initiatives in many villages, towns, and cities.⁹ But their capacity to scale up is limited by their reliance on goodwill and their ability to access grant funding or similar resources. Local authorities should be empowered and resourced to provide investment and the utilisation and repurposing of land and premises towards these ends, as well as providing advisory and networking functions.

The capacity for localised forms of government to enact such policies in their current hollowed out form is obviously compromised. Further, the capacity to furnish novel supply chains with sufficient quantities of agroecologically produced food¹⁰ in the immediate future is also limited. As such, national policies are required to empower such authorities, as well as to attempt to correct and transform the existing structures of land ownership, monopoly capital and subsidies which reproduce the current broken food system and its significant ecological impacts.

Local institutions could be empowered to help develop more regionalised food systems and commons in a number of ways. The devolution of capacities to local authorities and their sufficient funding via progressive taxation and demilitarisation offer clear first steps. The establishment of confederative spaces for knowledge-sharing and cooperation across municipalities or regional bodies could see these develop further. Given the conservative nature of many local authorities, means of ensuring that funding was being appropriately channelled, and efforts made to work in these directions were taking place suggests the need for some form of continued centralised oversight, which obviously presents problems, the answers to which require further consideration and debate. Social organisation through trade unions, solidarity-orientated groups, and the politicisation of existing community movements in order to exert popular pressure on local authorities entering unfamiliar territory could serve to take advantage of a transitional moment, in line with Williams’ thinking.

There remains the broader question of how to support and facilitate agricultural change so that a Right to Food does not intensify the ecologically harmful practices of agri-business. How can we ensure that everybody has access to sufficient food that is produced in an agroecologically sustainable way? This problem is the subject of ongoing work by institutions and thinkers of various political stripes ranging from the Land Workers’ Alliance, a union for small producers, to the royalty-endorsed Food, Farming and Countryside Commission. My recent work with Common Wealth highlights a few of these, most notably land reform. Land reform proposals include taking land into public ownership for agriculture, financial support for horticulture, peri-urban farming and smaller farms, and institutional, legislative, and financial support and shelter for alternative organisational forms and ownership models such as community land trusts, co-operatives, and community-supported agriculture. These are not novel ideas; however, they are not yet sufficiently linked to the debates around food justice and the need to ensure that alternative food networks are accessible to the majority of people. Research and development is needed around how to successfully introduce different methods of producing food. Financing and facilitating this research will be vital. So too will be finding people to do the fundamental work within the food system, and ensuring that they are paid enough to secure their livelihoods. These issues are picked up in greater detail in other work produced by Common Wealth (which perhaps provokes similar questions around solutionism in a slightly different context). Conceptualising and campaigning for these measures as an assemblage, as an incubator for the above-mentioned processes of decommodifying and commoning ownership, is essential. Together, they could cohere into systematic alternatives; apart they are liable to absorption and integration into uneven patterns of capitalist development—in urban areas, as vectors of gentrification, in rural areas, as ‘empowering’ insular bourgeois attempts at hobby farming or self-sufficiency without any community participation and integration.

Notable by their absence within this framework too are the unequal and often oppressive power dynamics of food preparation work, ranging from shopping to washing up. This is a question alluded to earlier as regards the historical development of the capitalist household and the gendered division of labour therein. Who cooks affects what gets cooked, how and when and thus must be considered in these questions. It is possible to hope that these approaches have the potential to disturb the gendered devaluation of certain forms of care work and reproductive labour by increasingly foregrounding food provisioning as a shared societal task. It could do so in a way that subverts the existing tendency to imbue cooking with cultural value but as a vector for masculine posturing as typified by the celebrity head chef. In an eco-socialist transformation of food systems, cooking as an act of care should come to the fore in a way that transcends binary gendered ideas of who should care and how. Yet these approaches alone will not remedy centuries of patriarchal outsourcing in the same way that efforts to incubate and grow socialism are never guaranteed to liberate people who are not men. I have not been able to sufficiently articulate the interrelations between struggles over our land, our kitchens and our stomachs here but hope these are generative directions.

Fundamentally, many of the above ideas speak to a socialist project that involves including more people in the work of food production, changes the landscape of land ownership, and impacts the way people interact with food and food systems on a national, a community level and within and between our shared social forms. Such changes are not only necessary, but potentially offer empowerment and the potential for intra- and inter-species relations of care. The capacity for national governments to deliver on such a programme, however, is just as, if not more, compromised than the capacity of local authorities to become bulwarks of food sovereignty across their respective jurisdictions. In Westminster, the Labour Party has attempted to position itself as an alternative political choice in food-producing areas, given dissatisfaction around post-Brexit trade policies pushed through by the Tories. Yet the way the party conceptualises investment as part of impending socio-ecological change is transparently about supporting and empowering business, with no ambition for or interest in the systemic socio-ecological change required for a just systemic reorientation in the Capitalocene. Here, then, the state is conceptualised as, at most ,intervening to stabilise the reproduction of capital—and the proposed measures are likely too limited to even manage that. Where there is potential for marginally more substantive approaches, such as in Wales or Scotland, devolved governments lack the resources and ambition to instigate broad radical change, despite the greater relative significance of their agricultural sectors.

In this light, such well-intentioned aspirational programmes as the one I have set out above are once again again perhaps open to accusations of solutionism and/or statism. My Common Wealth report puts forth a vision for how these changes could materialise through hypothetical supply chains, and the policies and institutions required to support them. Yet conceptual changes, new perspectives, and raising awareness alone will not suffice in a system rigged to suppress alternative modes of autonomous, shared living. Growing interest in ‘imaginaries’, ‘futuring’ forwarded by the academic left and civil society¹¹ cannot be sustained without attendant support and participation in concrete practices aimed at creating material change and building power in the present. These, in turn, have potential to overlap with imaginaries of technocratic solutionism deracinated from existing prefigurative practices, such as ‘Fully Automated Luxury Communism’. Many such opportunities for immediate engagement already exist to varying degrees, through community gardening projects, peri-urban farming, alternative food networks, and similar avenues. Yet these, too, have been subject to a long line of valid critiques¹² regarding their broad inaccessibility, and the bourgeois proclivities and imaginaries upon which many of them are rooted.

The capacity to engage in the development of community food power is also mediated by the lack of freedom and access to land implicated with the forced market dependence of people living in the birthplace of industrial capitalism. In returning to the foundational question of the ‘cost of living’, we encounter the fundamental question of alienation and the need to enter the labour market in order to procure food (aka proletarianisation). This brings us back to the histories discussed at the beginning of this essay and their relation to the phenomena that, I would argue, necessitate engagement with the state in various forms in tandem with the establishment of community power and organic networks of commoning and solidarity. Further, history has shown the capacity for the dynamics of profit, competition, growth, and expansion to endure whilst stifling alternative social relations. Accordingly, a desire to scale out alternative agricultures in an economy based on cheapness and surplus value requires consideration of the capacity for state power to facilitate eco-socialist futures but also simultaneously compromise the social processes of expansionary capital and its veins of intensification.

I do not necessarily believe that I have all (or any) of the answers regarding what the future of our food systems should or will look like. The ideas put forward here and in the Common Wealth report are attempts to link ideas and open up spaces for collaboration and future discussion. Hopeful attempts at radical politics and food systems transformation must reckon with their inherent utopian filaments. Yet, we must be wary, as Marx warned us, of writing recipes for the cookshops of the future. In this sense, I have attempted to be guided by a belief in the need to incubate and facilitate ways of living and caring that offer a glimpse of an alternative world: commoning, collaboration, equality, and dignity. But these are, at this moment in time, kernels in projects designed for a world which is far from what it could be.