The Politics of European Food Sovereignty Scholars towards the Farm-to-Fork Strategy: Can the EU scale up food sovereignty?
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2022-06-29
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en
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This thesis contributes to the discussion on the role of the state in the scaling up of food sovereignty by analysing how European food sovereignty scholars position their politics towards the Farm-to-Fork (F2F) strategy of the EU. This is done by reviewing the literature on the development and the contents of the F2F strategy and the Common Agricultural Policy that preceded it. Afterwards, Text Oriented Discourse Analysis is used on three documents. First on the Declaration of Nyéléni to find the central themes and principles of the food sovereignty movement and afterwards on two responses of European food sovereignty scholars on the F2F strategy to see how these scholars draw on the food sovereignty principles to position themselves towards the F2F strategy. The results show that the F2F strategy tries to address the problems in the European food system by making the dominant practices more sustainable by focussing on the innovation of new technologies. The European food sovereignty scholars, on the other hand, call for a radical change in the European food system, by shifting from treating food as a commodity to treating food as a right and a commons. They see an active role for the F2F strategy to realise this, even more so than the food sovereignty movement itself does. Besides shifting the narrative on food, they call for the F2F strategy to implement agroecology; to empower small-scale producers; to decentralise the European food system and to keep food corporations in check. If these goals are met, food sovereignty would go a long way, evolving from a shared vision to a reality in Europe.
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Faculteit der Managementwetenschappen