Translating Food Sovereignty: Cultivating Justice in an Age of Transnational Governance

In its current state, the global food system is socially and ecologically unsustainable: nearly two billion people are food insecure, and food systems are the number one contributor to climate change. While corporations and agro-exporting states continue to promote agro-industrial production as the solution to these problems, growing global food sovereignty movements are challenging this model by demanding local and democratic control over food systems.

Translating Food Sovereignty accompanies activists based in the Pacific Northwest of the United States as they mobilize the claim of food sovereignty across local, regional, and global arenas of governance. In contrast to many social movements that have chosen to frame their social justice claims through the language of human rights, food sovereignty activists are one of the first to have articulated themselves in relation to the neoliberal transnational order of networked governance. While this global regulatory framework emerged to deepen market logics, Matthew C. Canfield reveals how activists are leveraging this order to make more expansionary social justice claims. This nuanced, deeply engaged ethnography illustrates how food sovereignty activists are re-imagining and re-constructing relations between communities, nature, and markets, thereby cultivating new forms of transnational governance from the bottom-up.