Argentina: Building Food Sovereignty from a Feminist Economy
April 17 is a day of struggle for land. It commemorates the anniversary of one of the massacres of peasants perpetrated by police in our region. The crime, known as the “Eldorado do Carajás Massacre,” occurred in 1996 in Pará, Brazil, when families from the Landless Workers’ Movement (MST) were occupying a road in defense of their territory. It is a day that inspires mobilizations, land occupations, debates, and discussions in the movements that make up La Via Campesina on all continents. It is a fundamental date, on which we propose to vindicate peasant struggles for food sovereignty and for comprehensive, popular agrarian reform. And where feminist economics encourages us to continue developing proposals that are constantly evolving.
Agribusiness Commodifies Life
Agribusiness is the ultimate expression of capitalism in the countryside, just like hydrobusiness and mega-mining. It is a food system model that is seen as unique and hegemonic; it attacks the planet’s biodiversity, displaces and violates communities and cultures, and imposes rules of the game based not only on capitalism but also on colonialism, racism, patriarchy, heteronormativity, urban-centrism, and other systems of oppression, exploitation, and domination that, in reality, respond to a single matrix.
Feminist economics has called it “that scandalous thing” and defines it as a biocidal system. Agribusiness aims at accumulation and centers on money. It commodifies life in pursuit of monetary gain and systematically attacks life. It is not a system compatible with the diversity of lives that inhabit the planet.
The accumulation of capital entails the expropriation of others. We live in a system that considers some lives important and central (those of men, white, bourgeois, urban people) and the rest as expendable, usable, and even despicable. For a few to live well, many must sacrifice themselves. Sacrificial zones are territories placed at the service of capital: for their mineral, agricultural, or tourist interests, or for their lack of interest. In the latter case, they are turned into dumps and waste sites.
The same thing happens with human lives, and even with cultures. Some are of interest for what they offer as labor, while others are disposable and “mortible,” in a logic known as necropolitics.
Recovery of the Peasant Economy
The peasantry struggles and resists from a way of being, living, and producing that is different from the capitalist one. We don’t dare say it is anti-capitalist, but it is non-capitalist. It has built mechanisms of resistance over the centuries, surviving feudal and slave systems, and capitalism itself. It is, of course, infected by “that scandalous thing.” It is not pure, nor has it remained the same over time. It was never perfect, nor is it today.
But it is something different, something that can give us clues for thinking about systems outside of capitalism. On the one hand, peasant food production systems are essentially collective, whether family or community-based, and they rely on the commons. This “commons” does not refer only to farm work: it is also linked to community structures of care, leisure, and social relations.
It is also a production rooted in the territory, territorialized, that understands the cycles of nature and eco-dependence. In addition to producing food, peasants are those who care for water sources and forests. In the face of the artificialization of nature and time, among peasants we still find examples of time management linked to the processes of life and reproduction. Work times are determined by the periods of light, rain, sun, or the growth of plants and animals (although this is increasingly difficult to organize and predict in the era of climate change).
But above all, the peasant economy does not adhere to capitalism because it resists its commodification. In peasant logic, food is produced to satisfy the needs of the family and the community. Surpluses are exchanged or sold with the aim of improving the quality of life and its reproduction. For example, money is invested in machinery that makes work less arduous or in the education of young people. The goal is not accumulation.
Peasant and Feminist Economics
The peasant model is contested and losing. But that doesn’t mean the peasantry is resigned to its disappearance. On the contrary, it continues to struggle and fight against the expropriation of territories, against plunder and its commodification. And it doesn’t just resist, it also proposes: food sovereignty, the right of peoples to decide on their food systems, is a proposal that shakes the foundations of the system because it speaks of autonomy and power.
Contrasting the current agri-food system means interfering with private property, with the view of nature as a resource, with the concept of work, with colonialism and globalization, and with unequal power relations.
It is important that, to definitively subvert the system, we also question patriarchy, established roles, the distribution of tasks, and other basic issues so that all lives have equal value. This is where we begin to read and listen with curiosity to feminist economics. It helps us name things we’ve done and think about new ones; it brings us other debates and other considerations.
Feminist economics says that we must shift accumulation and the centrality of money. That the economy is the organization we need to carry on with our lives. The sustainability of life takes center stage. The jobs that guarantee this sustainability (and which now remain on the margins, invisible and undervalued) must be at the center. We must place life at the center.
This leads us to think about the care work that takes up so many hours a day. It also leads us to think about peasant work as a whole. If life is the center, let’s place food there, as it is one of the most basic needs to guarantee life.
This feminist economics also speaks to the vulnerability of life. It says that life (and especially a dignified and healthy life) doesn’t just happen; that for life to happen, it must be cared for. The lives of people, rivers, forests, deserts, and animals. They all interact, and they all need to be cared for.
We return, then, to care and also to the design of this agri-food system we call food sovereignty. The capitalist system, like agribusiness, only works because there are hours and hours of care work done for free, mostly by women; and because it also gratuitously abuses nature.
Food sovereignty will be feminist or it will not be
When we talk about food, let’s think about the hours of work, of caring for the land and animals, of caring for families, of community care, of cleaning private and collective spaces, of organizing events for socializing, of preparing food, of collecting and transporting firewood and water, of taking children to school, of caring for sick people, of accompanying neighbors. The list could go on. Let’s consider that these jobs are essential for the sustainability of life, and let’s also consider who performs them.
Let’s then think about food sovereignty from the perspective of care and the sustainability of life. Let’s imagine another way of distributing these tasks. Let’s consider the right to be cared for and to care for ourselves; the universal responsibility to care. Food and care are practices that are closely linked. Feminist economics helps us see these connections.
This text brings into dialogue conversations that have been taking place within peasant organizations. And these were debated at the Feminist Economics Meeting (held last March in the province of Buenos Aires). We intend to talk about time, about care, about “that scandalous thing,” about the lives we want to live. We intend to talk about food sovereignty and struggles for land from a feminist and care perspective.
These are dialogues, debates, and discussions that intertwine and don’t always converge. Sometimes it’s difficult; the intersectionality of oppression runs through us, and having a debate about peasants in urban spaces isn’t easy. Talking about a change in the productive matrix when there is hunger and urgency in the neighborhoods is complicated; understanding the timing of nature is also difficult. Visualizing the care work of those who “work in the production sector” of food is a challenge.
We came away with an idea that was repeated frequently at the meeting: feminist economics needs to be rooted and must be territorialized. That’s what we’re working toward. We continue to fight for land and territory, also on this April 17th, International Day of Peasant Women.
Translated from the article by Argentina’s National Peasant Indigenous Movement – MNCI Somos Tierra, written for Agencia Tierra Viva