Matthew C.Canfield, Translating Food Sovereignty: Cultivating Justice in an Age of Transnational Governance, Stanford University Press, 2022, 280 pp, hb US/CAN $105.00, pb US/CAN $26.00

The past few years have presented significant challenges for food and food systems, prompting more lawyers to view food not merely as a health risk requiring regulation and rather as central to the organisation of societies and key to climate action. Matt Canfield's book Translating Food Sovereignty contributes to this ongoing transition of food away from semi-invisibility in the legal horizon and provides lawyers with multiple opportunities to educate themselves on the spaces, notions, and people that constitute transnational food governance. The book's main contribution is twofold. First, we are invited to familiarise ourselves with a vocabulary and conversations imported from food systems studies, sociology, and political economy. Canfield provides us with enough explanations and genealogical accounts to understand concepts that are new to the legal arena but are often deployed in food and agrarian studies. Second, we are offered the opportunity to ‘use’ food to engage in a systemic reflection of global governance as a ‘legally constitutive site of struggle’ (10) of opposing visions and aspirations. A central point of friction, and a core element of the book, is the notion of food sovereignty. This is mostly because of the role it has assumed in the rhetoric and praxis of resistance that Indigenous Peoples and civil society organisations are leveraging against the universalisation of a food system that is based on the premises of profit maximisation, financial returns, and hyper-productivism. Canfield presents the notion through its history and the multiple declarations that defined the term since the end of the twentieth century, culminating with the definition adopted by the 2007 Nyéléni International Forum on Food Sovereignty, which is today the most utilised. Then, more than 500 people from 80 countries recognised the Western and modernist origin of the notion of sovereignty and decided to subvert it and redefine it according to a people-based, rather than a state-based, vision. Food sovereignty was thus coined as ‘the right of peoples to healthy and culturally appropriate food produced through ecologically sound and sustainable methods, and their right to define their own food and agriculture systems’ (48). Its bottom-up and non-institutionalised genealogy is key to understanding its role in ongoing struggles and the importance it may play in legal analysis too, particularly the way in which it complexifies the usual debate about international law and human rights law ‘as part of the problem’ or ‘as part of the solution’. To elucidate the idea of transnational food governance as a ‘legally constitutive site of struggle’ in which resistance can originate and consolidate, Canfield provides concrete examples, drawing on the research that he conducted among the US and Canadian food sovereignty movements across different geographies. He introduces us to four ‘arenas of governance – from local food policy councils to global value chains to transnational networks – through which [food sovereignty movements] articulate holistic social justice claims that are no longer constrained by liberal legalism’ (188). The four main chapters of the book offer the reader the chance to dive into the political and legal tensions that characterise these four arenas, from the micro to the macro: the Puget Sound Regional Food Policy Council, the food workers’ pickets in Skagit County, the Africa-US Food Sovereignty Strategy Summit, and the Civil Society and Indigenous People Mechanism of the Committee on World Food Security at the Food and Agricultural Organization of the United Nations. For each of them, Canfield presents the actors, challenges, and processes, showing in particular the way in which the concept of food sovereignty is translated and operationalised. As expected, these policy arenas – and the networks that operate across them – are far from homogeneous and monolithic. Food sovereignty offers a joint political platform to farmers, workers, movements and Indigenous Peoples to go beyond individualised and fragmented understanding of food as a commodity. It promotes a systemic approach to food systems as inherently political and intertwined with human and ecological processes. In all its translations, food sovereignty requires moving beyond a superficial understanding of food systems as a matter of individual experiences and circulations of goods and requires asking questions of justice, agency and recognition. Law and governance play a significant role in each of these arenas, both as tactical instruments to promote food sovereignty and as obstacles to its achievement. Each example that Canfield draws on offers a unique reflection on the relationship between law, food systems, and food sovereignty. By engaging with the Puget Sound Regional Food Policy Council, Canfield challenges the notion of local food arenas as inherently collaborative spaces, emphasising the intense tensions that can arise when governance is decentralised and different groups advance their own interpretations and visions. In the case of Familias Unidas por la Justicia (FJU) workers, he addresses ongoing discussions on private governance and corporate codes of conduct, highlighting the importance of broad political and cross-chain mobilisation, while also exposing the limitations of ‘voluntary’ actions. Through the example of the Africa-US Food Sovereignty Strategy Summit and the collective struggle against the commercialisation of the genetically modified ‘super banana’, Canfield reminds legal scholars of the role that law plays in upholding the privatisation of genetic material. He underscores how legal monopolies often conflict with the principles of self-determination and the rights of peasants, rendering them incompatible with food sovereignty. Finally, the Committee on World Food Security is used by the author to challenge the distinction between global and local governance levels. Canfield provides accounts of ‘food sovereignty activists engag[ing] in translocal translation, bringing local knowledge and experiences to the global level, and creating new understandings and strategies for governance back home’ (152). Because food is a site of struggle, readers are also warned that translation efforts and the redefinition of transnational governance structures are not an exclusive prerogative of peasants and grassroots organisations. Along with the ‘transnational governance from below’ of peasants and their allies, Translating Food Sovereignty also introduces ‘transnational governance from above’ as the increasing effort of some (corporate, financial, and state) actors and international organisations to promote narratives, laws, and policies supporting their vision of the future of food, in contrast with the spirit and goals of food sovereignty. This is happening, for example, with the push towards multistakeholderism to replace multilateralism, data-based governance as (false) solutions to food insecurity, and the appropriation of the notion of food sovereignty by the French and Italian governments to rebrand their agricultural ministries without any real engagement with the structural reforms implied in the peasants’ translation of the term. Given the increased participation of lawyers in arenas of food struggle, knowledge of these ‘traps’ becomes essential. But this is not all that lawyers can learn from the book. At a time when famine, starvation, and the fragilities of the global food system are increasingly discussed in law schools and legal journals, Translating Food Sovereignty uses food to offer a broader reflection on the limits of liberal legalism as ‘an ideology of law premised on individual rather than collective rights [that] has constantly served as a stumbling block for generations of social movements seeking egalitarian social change’ (4). For Canfield, food and the decision-making processes over food systems are not mere legal objects of analysis, but a ‘symbolic and material battleground over neoliberalism’ (9), and examining this allows readers to familiarise themselves with the innovative ways in which people are occupying transnational spaces and platforms to engage with law and transnational governance from below, appropriating their tools and vocabulary and developing counter-hegemonic practices and interpretations of the international legal order. By expanding from food systems to the tentacular processes of neoliberalism, Translating Food Sovereignty shows how food sovereignty is not just about producing food but rather about achieving an all-encompassing vision that subverts the patterns of colonialism and racialised capitalism. Peasants’ and food workers’ control over food systems is thus about building a future that combines human rights, dignity, and self-determination, and does so through food as essential to life. Therefore, it would not be enough to ‘translate food sovereignty’ into laws and legal structures that remedy starvation, famine, and exceptional violations of human rights. Rather, such a process would require following Susan Marks's suggestion in her seminal ‘Human Rights and Root Causes’ ((2011) 74 MLR 57) to identify the structural causes of contemporary food misery and challenge structures and systems that reproduce dependency, marginalisation, and socio-ecological oppression. Given the timing and geographical focus of the book, it could not deal with the way in which food sovereignty has recently been adopted by peasants, Indigenous people and food sovereignty activists to challenge what the Special Rapporteur on the right to food, Michael Fakhri, Starvation and the right to food, with an emphasis on the Palestinian people's food sovereignty (United Nations Thematic Report A/79/171, 17 July 2024) at https://www.ohchr.org/en/documents/thematic-reports/a79171-starvation-and-right-food-emphasis-palestinian-peoples-food (last visited 16 December 2024) and the High Level Panel of Experts on Food Security and Nutrition, Conflict-induced acute food crises: potential policy responses in light of current emergencies (Committee on World Food Security, HLPE Issues Paper, July 2024) at https://www.fao.org/docs/devhlpelibraries/default-document-library/hlpe-fsn-issues-papers_conflicts-and-fsn.pdf?sfvrsn=823378b6_4 [https://perma.cc/DZZ5-A77K] have defined as the weaponisation of food against the Palestinian people, the people of Sudan and other people who are living under illegal or prolonged occupations, wars and conflicts. This happened at the local level, where Indigenous people from all over the world marched and stood in solidarity with the Palestinians, but also at the Committee on World Food Security, where the struggle for food sovereignty described by Canfield has been intertwined with the fight for self-determination and the right to food of peoples under occupation and oppression. Once more, bottom-up organisation, networks and the vocabulary of rights are tactically appropriated and mobilised to achieve the long-term goal of a just food system and a just society. At a time when liberal legalism is showing evident cracks, Canfield's Translating Food Sovereignty challenges socio-legal scholars and practitioners to take food systems as a window into a broader field of counterhegemonic movements and actors that are mobilising law, policy, and governance to respond and move beyond neoliberalism and liberal legality. Through this lens, transnational food governance becomes a powerful heuristic that reveals the flaws and potential within the international legal order and urges action and participation rather than assuming that a just and sustainable future will happen. But it is not all. Transcending the food arena, Canfield's account of the hegemonic and counterhegemonic practices of translation can guide socio-legal scholars in uncovering other epistemic and normative frictions that lie beneath the mechanisms of racialised and financialised capitalism. Translating Food Sovereignty is thus about food, but mostly about how people are exercising their agency, appropriating and mobilising law, and redefining local and global governance processes rather than waiting to be saved by a system that seldom worked for them.

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