1st Edition
Food Sovereignty and Urban Agriculture Concepts, Politics, and Practice in South Africa
This book analyses the interplay of urban agriculture and food sovereignty through the innovative lens of the "critical urban food perspective". It focuses on the mobilisation of urban food producers as a powerful response to highly exclusionary dynamics in the agri-food system including insufficient food access and disastrous land dispossessions.
This volume particularly aims to fill the gap in the current literature by engaging with food sovereignty discourses and movements in urban areas. Related activism of urban food producers in the Global South remains underrepresented in practice and in literature. Therefore, this book engages with the lived realities of an urban agriculture initiative in George, South Africa. Building on theoretical notions of the "right to the city" and "everyday forms of resistance", the book illuminates how deprived food producers expose inequalities and propose alternatives. The findings of in-depth empirical research reveal that dwellers perceive farming as a mean to overcome historical segregation, high food prices, and unhealthy nutrition. Hence, they breathe life into food sovereignty in practice and suggest further alliances beyond the city.
The book will be of interest to scholars and students of alternative food politics, agrarian transformation, and food movements as well as rural-urban intersections.
Acknowledgements
1 Why food sovereignty in the city matters now
Confronting the dominant agri-food system
Urban agriculture, exclusion, and calls for food sovereignty
Analytical framework: critical urban food perspective
Research approach
Overview of the book
2 Rethinking South Africa’s agri-food system: Notions of food sovereignty and urban agriculture
South Africa’s commercialised agri-food system
Food sovereignty in discourse: roots, actors, and challenges
Initial challenges
Incipient attempts towards food sovereignty
Further endeavours and urban issues
Notions of urban agriculture and introduction of the case study
Concluding remarks
3 Exposing marginalisation: Food and farming in the city
Initial mobilisation
Socio-economic backgrounds
Different types of urban agriculture and microhistories
Organisation and cooperation
Critical reflection of the prevailing nutrition landscape
Concluding remarks
4 Proposing food sovereignty
Local access to nutritious food
Valuing food providers
Access to land
Community knowledge and skills
Biodiversity and connection to nature
Concluding remarks
5 Politicising alternatives from below
Uncovering political dimensions and rights to the city
Growing food sovereignty across the rural-urban divide
Creating changes within and beyond the existing system
Concluding remarks
6 Conclusions: Urban South Africa and beyond
Critical urban food perspective
Lived realities of food producers at the urban margins
Political dimensions and food producers’ agency
Trajectories of food sovereignty and alliances
Biography
Anne Siebert is a postdoctoral researcher and lecturer at the Institute of Development Research and Development Policy (IEE), Ruhr-University Bochum, Germany. She obtained a joint PhD degree in International Development Studies from the IEE and the Institute of Social Studies, Erasmus University Rotterdam, The Netherlands. Her research experience and interest revolve around food politics and social movements, and how these have shaped dominant agri-food systems, governance, rural-urban interlinkages, as well as research methodology.
