How will food-deficit regions move towards greater self-sufficiency?

Where agro-export-oriented large holdings continue to command significant portions of the best arable land, redistributive land reform remains the fundamental priority for any efforts to overcome food deficits and move towards greater self-sufficiency, together with increased public-sector investments in all of the smallholder-oriented supports needed to make agrarian reform successful (Borras 2008). But we must not assume that eschewing export production in the interests of strengthening local food production will tend towards progressive or redistributive outcomes. On the contrary, as the contribution by Paprocki and Cons indicates, this transformation can exacerbate other sorts of problems. Based on a carefully controlled study of two polders in Bangladesh – one subsistenceoriented and the other entirely given over to shrimp aquaculture – they argue that food sovereignty permits ‘a full spectrum of agrarian classes to continue to be peasants, though it does not necessarily yield greater equality in agrarian class relations’ (Paprocki and Cons 2014, 1111). In particular, despite some food sovereignty advocates’ claims to the contrary, they suggest that the implementation of food sovereignty per se does little to address problems of landlessness.