ABSTRACT
The state versus market dichotomy – central to the pioneering work of Polanyi (2001), among others – recurs throughout the debates in the pages that follow. Van der Ploeg, for example, sees food sovereignty as an alternative to the market economy. Peasants, he maintains, ‘need the means and space’ to fuel agricultural growth, improve livelihoods and increase food provision. Autonomy from input and credit markets ‘allows peasant farms to produce for the markets, without being completely dependent on them’. He suggests that innovations that cannot be ‘taken over’ are central to food sovereignty, such as the system of rice intensification (SRI), a set of low-cost agroecological practices that has resulted in spectacular yield increases on small farms in several Asian countries and elsewhere. This vision of food sovereignty as an alternative to the market is not, however, shared by all contributors to this collection. Some, like Edelman, point to the Left’s failure to analytically ‘own’ the often dismal experience of anti-market command economies under what used to be called ‘actually existing socialism’, while several others point to the necessity of markets that permit small producers to realize income and consumers to obtain a varied supply of foodstuffs (e.g. Burnett and Murphy, Giunta). These contributions, while approaching the market issue from widely divergent angles, share an appreciation for what Giunta, paraphrasing the Ecuadorian constitution, terms ‘a dynamic and balanced relationship between society, state and market, in harmony with Nature’ (Giunta 2014, 1214).
