Food, Agriculture, Sovereignty and Sustainability

Phil McMichael, who's a professor of development sociology at Cornell and he also has a number of books settlers in the agrarian question development, and social change a global perspective food regimes and agrarian questions, and he's edited a number of books including biofuels land and agrarian change with June Boras and Ian Schoons. He does food regime analysis as many of you know, and he examines the agrarian question historically. Good morning all IBM runs an advertisement on television that says, "let's build a smarter planet." while this refrain normalizes technological fixes, it also assumes either that humans are the chosen species or that the planet is somehow undeveloped or indeed ill-equipped to manage the future a future that we now call the anthropocene age. Mastering nature undoing biodiversity and displacing other species has been the goal of what Daniel Quinn calls, the takers. Ever since the early domestication of agriculture, in contrast the makers, those who practice biocentrism have understood implicitly the takers folly. I like to think of the food sovereignty movement as approximating the sensibility of the makers. While a part of this movement includes indigenous peoples who may embody the maker role, much of the food sovereignty movement is concerned with reversing the taker syndrome. That is, promoting food justice, re-peasantising by co-producing with nature, and as the canadians put it so nicely, resetting the table. This is not a unified movement as many papers have emphasized, but the movement embodies a unifying sensibility in so far as its many strands struggle to replace taking by making. For example restoring carbon cycles with agroecology, building nested local markets, or finding ways to restore food systems to a human democratic scale that is ecosystem systemic. As via campesina puts it, reproducing a model of life. In this sense, as mark edelman suggests, peasantness is a political rather than an analytical category. And as i argue, it performs the warning function of the proverbial canary in the mine. There are many many strands to this process and their attentions and or contradictions so thoughtfully addressed by many of the papers. How to get from a to b is the question they're ultimately asking. The answer to which is bubbling up across a multitude of local experiments as depicted in, for example Raj Patel's generation food project website. Remodeling life, that is reversing the ontology of taking, is not a simple project but it is a matter of survival. Robert Watson the istead director remarked quote, "that business as usual would mean more environmental degradation and the earth's halves and have not splitting further apart, it would leave us facing a world nobody would want to inhabit." It is this future that the food sovereignty movement confronts. Tt the same time as much of the rest of the world is engaged in building a smarter planet. While food sovereignty initially politicized neo-liberal claims of food security via a food export regime, the ensuing food crisis has triggered a restructuring of that regime. A governing world price at its lowest in 150 years in 1999 and therefore at its deadliest for smallholders forced to compete against subsidised corporate agro-exports has given way now, to price volatility, agflation, and managed trade associated with the land grabbing. In 2000, via campesina observed that the massive movement of food around the world is forcing the increased movement of people. But now it is the case, that the massive movement of money around the world will accelerate the increased movement of people off the land. It's the difference between the dumping of surplus food bombs, that is the cheap food regime, and enclosure via financial cluster bombs. The latter being deployed indiscriminately on landscapes renamed 'financial assets' to produce fungible, or flex crops, or simply inflate value. Governance mechanisms like the new alliance for food security and nutrition, enable this process with non-trade partnerships underwritten by land re-titling in a counter-mobilization against UN-based right to food initiatives. This marks a new convergence of financial and territorial forms of power, historically distinct cycles across hegemonic eras, as Giovanni Arigi explained, but now increasingly integrated with devastating effect on inhabitants and habitats, One might paraphrase phrase Olivier de Shooter, by observing the new land governance mechanisms seek to responsibly execute the terms of the classical agrarian question, Under these conditions, Peter Rossett and Maria Elena Martinez Torres, for example observe the brazilian MST has less idle land to occupy simply for social purposes. As that land is being enclosed as a financial asset. And so, the MST is compelled fortuitously or not to update its claims for agrarian citizenship, by sponsoring agroecological practices, and craft a thoroughly modern vision of biodiversity preservation, If food sovereignty is understood as the historic counter movement and counterpart to the food regime, it's important to trace this changing landscape of exploitation and possibility, I focus on the process of emptying the countryside. Arguably at the tipping point, with the possible expulsion of approximately 1.5 billion landed people by mid-century, with all the losses that that entails. It's a process as Jennifer Clapp notes scarcely visible to the urban consumer who may assume agribusiness feeds the world. And it's a process justified by a developmentalist view of the countryside as comprising 'unlimited supplies of labor.' As land grab governance is materialized, agrarian counter movements and their allies, are mobilizing in national spaces and international forums like the CFS the FAO, and adopting human rights approaches to challenge market or investor rights in defense of territory and land access, outlined in the recent land sovereignty manifesto by June Boris and Jenny Franco. I would argue this moment is over determined by a combination of the land grab and financialization. The latter having reduced food to a fungible relation, is premised on unlocking value in empty calories, marginalizing those who know how to work the land, and hastening the exhaustion of natural processes by converting them to speculative resources. That is new fictitious commodities. Rendering them vulnerable to enclosure and exhaustion. This can only exert upward pressure on food prices, and reactivate food riots, and accumulating recognition of the urban dimensions of the 21st century agrarian question. That is that wealth ultimately flows from the land and that there is a strategic and civilizational significance of the land, of farming the land responsibly for people rather than for profit. Thank you.

Without further ado, I would like to turn it over to James Scott, who needs no introduction. Thank you. I want to welcome everyone and I first want to thank, what I have come collectively to call, the food sovereignty mob. For all of the work that they've done to bring this together. We never imagined that there was such a public that, uh, would come to an event and this event, and, we planned it as a small dialogue, and look, uh, what's happened, uh, so, it's a tribute to the the fact that the zeitgeist is headed in this direction. Um, the, as you know food sovereignty is a contested concept and I like, Henry Bernstein, who authored the first paper in this series, uh I am a skeptic, uh in terms of food sovereignty. Um, but not quite for the same reasons as Henry. I have several objections to food sovereignty. The first objection, is that the word's too hard to spell. Sovereignty is just, um right, I have to pause every time I write it, and I think we should come up with another term just because, uh it's annoyance. Especially to people who are not native speakers of english, Um so, but if we were to say food security, then we would put ourselves in the world of homeland security, and surveillance, and as uh it was just said, everything is being recorded. Um, the um, there's a way however in which it seems to me food security is the bedrock of every other right. Without it, we are all putty in the hands of those who would give, or deny us sustenance. And if we don't have that security, we're at one level turned into a bunch of servile beggars, uh who are incapable of exercising our independent judgment,- and will. And the absence of food security is of course, the threat to food security, is these days, as neo-liberalism, as much as despots. That neoliberalism threatens food security by the huge inequalities and political distortions that it makes possible. By the land grabs. By the innovation of property in life forms. A new, if you like commons, that has been seized and made into private property. And in general, the destruction of common property resources and the privatization of virtually everything. Another problem that I have with the term food sovereignty, is that it gestures in the direction of the nation state as the political unit that is supposed to secure our future. My impression is that the nation state has not been a very good guarantor of our future, let alone our food security. And national boundaries make absolutely no agro-ecological sense. A delta nation, like Bangladesh, needs, if you like, for exchange a hilly property nearby which which they can exchange complementary goods. You could say, switzerland, needs a delta or an estuary in just the same way. That national boundaries are almost always a kind of violation of natural agro-ecological units of exchange and complementarity. A watershed is often a satisfactory unit of agro-specialization and exchange, but the fact is that rivers are more commonly international boundaries rather than, recognizing the fact, that rivers actually join people. The rivers as boundaries make absolutely no sense, the Rhine the Danube the Mekong the Upper-Delta, actually divide groups that are united around the river and around a particular watershed. And of course, it's a very rare nation state that places the subsistence security of its population at the top of its policy agenda. This may be inevitable but as Amartya Sen, if we if one reads Amartya Sen carefully. Yes, Amartya Sen says, in a nation that is a democracy with a free press, if you have a famine the state will be under enormous pressure to relieve the famine. But he goes on to say, that if you have systematic malnutrition and a level of mortality just below a level of a serious famine, this can go on, more or less in it forever and not reach the level of a political explosion that would force even a democratic state to relieve the famine. The the real problem, and I know it's not much raised here, and perhaps it's politically incorrect, with food sovereignty, is that it takes for granted, a homo-sapiens population of over 7 billion, that it's on its way to nine billion. In the year 1750, there were 750 million homo-sapiens uh on the planet. And now there are over seven billion. So, if we're talking about invasive species, it seems to me, homo-sapiens is the most prolific invasive species and an invasive species that is responsible for the life world of almost any other life-form on the planet. It seems to me, that we can't talk about foods, if our job is to simply provide for all the homo-sapiens we can produce, then we're in something of a paradoxical situation. It's also the case that, I was surprised, I think this is correct that 80 percent of the world's calories that are consumed, come from just three grains wheat, rice, and maize. Well that's completely astounding that we have become, as someone said, we become canaries or birds. All right uh that from a wide spectrum historical diet, we have become so concentrated on three major grains, and the carbohydrates and calories that come from, from those, that it's an extraordinary thing to step back, and ask about the food part of food sovereignty and how that has changed historically as well. Not to mention meat consumption and other forms of nutrition. Referring to Henry Bernstein's paper, he despairs, his argument is that there are no peasants anymore. He'll make this argument for himself. That there are petty commodity producers and I think he's uh completely right in that respect. But petty commodity producers come in all kinds of forms and produce different commodities under radically different conditions of land tenure social organization. I think for example of the Amish and Mennonite farmers not so very far from Connecticut to manage, actually although they produce for the market, manage to insulate themselves as much as possible from the market for inputs. So that if they have 30 cows, they don't actually buy hay and fodder for they only have as many cows as they can produce off their own land in order to minimize their exposure to market fluctuations. I provisionally, and just to be provocative, would like to make the distinction between what I would call proletarian crops. By which I mean these major grains that are relatively easy to grow, can be grown extensively, that store rather well, can be shipped intercontinentally, fairly easily, and can be grown actually pretty efficiently in large units, whether these are public or private units. They have important returns to scale and we could contrast these proletarian crops with what I call petty bourgeois crops. The ideal typical example of a petty bourgeois crop to me is, the raspberry. That is you can't ship it very far. You can't put more than three or four on top of one another. No matter what you do, it's not going to last more than four or five days. It has to be grown close to the to the place where it's consumed. But the whole range of the rest of the spectrum of our entire diet of fruits, and vegetables, and so on; it seems to me are the zone in which petty commodity production can be enormously productive, is close to the markets at which food is consumed. And we might think of a division of labor between large units, and I said, the large units could be either private or public and organized as cooperatives, I don't mean to prejudge the forms in which they might be produced, but it seems to me they are subject to different scales and different agroeconomic processes than what I call this large portion of our total nutritional needs, that come from what I have jokingly, but not entirely, have jokingly called petty bourgeois crops that might be produced by petty commodity producers. I'm, uh, i've tried to be conscious of the time I hope i've um good. Thank you.

Henry Bernstein, an emeritus professor of development studies at the School of Oriental and African Studies in London. He was the editor of JPS for 15 years from 1985 to 2000 with Terrence Byers. He was the co-founding editor of another great journal, the Journal of agrarian change in 2001 Again with Terrence Byers. And he's an emeritus editor there he's the author of many many great things including capitalism and agriculture, which kicked off the initiatives in critical agrarian studies.

I looked at some of the food sovereignty literature, not all of it because it's very wide-ranging, it's very diverse as I indicated and that's demonstrated in the richness and variety of the papers for this conference. But I noticed certain things and one of them is that a lot of the arguments for food sovereignty are at least illustrated, sometimes premised on, with our call, emblematic instances of other ways of farming than corporate industrialized agriculture. And it seemed to me, at least in the literature I looked at, there are two kinds of emblematic instance which interestingly reproduce this north-south divide. Even though some people here, notably and ourS whose work I always read with great interest, have tried to suggest and argue ways of transcending such divides as indeed in this concept of the new the new peasantries. And one kind of emblematic instance, is of farmers in the South, certain types of farmers, who are, who are not surplus producers. That is, that their ambitions, and their energies, and their ingenuity, whatever it might be, is basically directed to feeding themselves and their families. I've no problem with that, except it doesn't help us address the question of how, farmers like that, are going to feed the rest of the world's population. And I think the population question is extremely important, as Jim Scott indicated this morning, and one can try to understand it and address it without falling into Malthusian positions which de Shooter warned us against. But in fact, you know, the population question is very central, for example, to the work of John Martinez ali-a, who was one of the founders of ecological economics. So farmers many of these instances are from Central American and arid parts of West Africa. Then a second emblematic instance, is those who are actively involved in commodity production, commodity relations, and markets, including the new peasants as Yandou calls them. And they may find ways of trying to negotiate their positions as commodity producers and the pressures on them, both in terms of the techniques they use more rather than less agro-ecological, and to try to achieve some element of relative autonomy within markets. And again, I understand this, I can see this happening, and it seems to me that farmers of that kind, often called middle farmers in the food sovereignty literature. And they're not poor farmers, it seems to me that there is more potential to produce the surpluses that are required by all those in the world's population who don't farm, who don't produce food. Many of the rural, it's not just the question of urban populations, but unlike Yandao, I don't see that their search for room for maneuver or negotiating the way they are commodity producers, is actually all that different in principle from what other kinds of commodity producers do. They all seek to find advantages in markets and so on. So seven minutes hvave sped by for me. Maybe not for you but I've tried to use the time to lay down some lines of provocation that might feed into our debates during this conference.

Olivier De Schutter is the United Nations Special Rapporteur. Prior to accepting that position in 2008, he was the general secretary of the International Federation of Human Rights. He's also a professor at the Catholic University of Leuven, and a member of the law faculty at New York University, among other affiliations. His most recent book is International Human Rights Law.

Thank you. Well ladies and gentlemen, dear friends. Let me begin by taking a look back. When the idea of food sovereignty emerged twenty years ago, from the writings of Mark Edelman on peasants in Guatemala, from the protests of small farmers in Karnataka, from the meeting, the famous meeting, held in Mons in 1993 that founded La Via Campesina. People like Rafael Alegria and political Sandy's these visionaries in the past. The food sovereignty message had indeed a lesson to teache us. Policies in the areas of food and agriculture should not be taken hostage to the exigencies of international trade. This was of course at the time when the Uruguay Round of trade negotiations was coming to an end and agriculture had been put on the table of this global bargain to be struck. Agriculture was set to become the next frontier of the great middle of commodification. And farmers from the world over were asked to compete against one another and let the least competitive disappear. The trade negotiators wanted their farmers to compete. But instead, rallying behind the slogan of food sovereignty, the farmers decided to unite. A strange ballot of words began to emerge. Those talking about freedom of trade the trade liberalisation were condemning farmers to new forms of pressure and coercion from the global marketplace and from the large Agri food companies that dominated. And though speaking of food sovereignty, meant in fact, alliances across national borders. Social movements rather than governments. And to borrow from Yahn though of Vannderfuch, his beautiful sentence, the art of farming against the business of Agriculture.Food sovereignty activists and the allies were attacked on a number of grounds.

First they were attacked of putting the interests of food producers above those of consumers. Especially urban consumers who were supposed to want abundant and cheap food and a variety of foods all year round. With the longest shelf life possible please. But we have now learned the answers to this accusation. We now know much more about the considerable damage caused by the, so called, low cost food system that was being cooked for us. Ill health from bad diets made of industrially processed foods. Low wages in the food sector from the tomato pluckers in Florida to the fast-food workers in McDonald outlets . Ecological damage on a large scale. All can be traced back to the obsession with more production, bigger scale and lower prices for all but the company is driving the system. Low prices we now insist, should not serve as a substitute for decent wages and for social policies that can allow everyone, even the poor, to afford prices that are fair for all. Food sovereignty activists were accused of denying the benefits of trade and the efficiency gained that can result from each region specializing in to what it is comparatively best at producing. To this the answer has been, our answer has been, that trade over long distances controlled by the companies who have the logistics and the networks and the ability to source the bananas and they soybean from farmers located thousands of miles apart, is not the only trade there is. And local and regional markets have been neglected and insufficiently supported, just as global markets have expanded and, in part, because of that very expansion. And as has been Agarwal reminded us, the food sovereignty activists are now able to point at the considerable risk that countries are taking when they depend on imports for their food. As global markets undergo regular shocks and prices regularly spike. Now these were the debates over the past 20 years and these debates are still very much alive. No clear winner has emerged. The battle for food sovereignty still must be fought. Must be fought in the streets. It must be fought in the fields. It must be spoke fought in the papers. The pages of the Guardian, of the New York Times and these are all spaces that must be occupied and recaptured. But the generation has passed and the problems facing the food systems have grown bigger. Food sovereignty today is much more than it was. It is invoked by Food Policy councils in North America. From Quebec to to Oakland. It is the rallying cry behind the growth of farmers markets and community supported agriculture, agricultural schemes. It's a slogan, that is heard in food banks, that seek to reconnect people to the local farmers and to the food systems that depend on, more broadly, such as a shop in Toronto. It is referred to, by those who want to produce their own food, through vegetable gardens, in the urban neighborhoods, or in the schools at which they send their children. This represents a remarkably diverse set of initiatives and it may be tempting to conclude that the success of food sovereignty, as a concept, stems from its very ambiguity. Allowing different experiments to unite behind it and to gradually, thus, contribute to giving it meaning. Though there is much truth to this view, I think it should not blind us to the fact that, in fact there exists a deep underlying convergence behind all these various initiatives.

Second-generation food sovereignty seems to me to present five key characteristics. First, it seeks to build bridges between urban consumers and local farmers by inventing different ways of rebuilding local food systems. This is in part a change of strategy. The frontline has been, in the past, the WTO Ministerials in Seatle and Hong Kong. It is now the local school board, the company canteen, or the local farmers markets. Alliances are now being built at local level between citizens, farmers, and municipalities. Food sovereignty was accused of placing the interests of farmers above those of urban consumers. Magic, now it turns out that the Urban's are the most dynamic part of the movement. Secondly, these various innovations that form food sovereignty today, are Democratizing innovations. People were passive consumers. They've become active citizens seeking to reclaim control over their food systems and exercise their right to choose. It's not simply that the act of consuming has become political, although it is also about that, it is more than this. People see to co-design the food system on which they depend, to participate in shaping this the system. We were familiar with the slogan of workplace democracy. We now must open up our eyes to food democracy.

Third, the social innovations that form the food sovereignty movement seek to strengthen social links. As Cal Poly has shown the penetration of market relationships in all the areas of life has impoverished human relationships. People are individualized and less and less socialized. They're assigned the role as producers or as consumers, as buyer's or seller's and they communicate through prices. But when they found the Food Policy Council, when they establish a community garden, or join forces to convince the local school board to buy local, they become human beings. Stronger community links which are social relationships, it turns out, is not simply a way to make our lives more interesting and more worth living, in the direction of humanism, to borrow from to the Shannons reference to the manifestos of the Zapatistas. It is also better for health. It turns out, in fact, that the single most important factor for increased life expectancy, even more important than reducing alcohol or abstaining from tobacco or avoiding excessively sedentary lifestyles, is to build social links.

Fourth, food sovereignty initiatives favour resilience over efficiency. They are guided by the realization that we have entered into an uncertain world. Peak Oil the imbalances in the cycle of nitrogen, genetic erosion, as a result of monocropping schemes, soul degradation, the repeated shocks that result from climate change, the logistical nightmares associated with urban congestion; these threats will mean, in the future, more instability and more volatility. And the need to invent more solutions and to do so faster. Just like resilience is at the heart of the cities and transition movement, it is a major concern to many bottom-up citizen-led initiatives that claim the right to food sovereignty. The key words here are reduced dependency and greater diversity. The more solutions can be designed locally, using local resources, the less vulnerable any local system will be to outside shocks such as sudden increases in energy prices, a breakdown of supplies, or an economic crisis that places basic items out of reach of the poorest. Local resource of course, not instead of outside resources, but in addition to them. And the more these solutions will be diverse, the better the local system will be equipped to deal with contingencies, which by definition, cannot be predicted in the form they will take but that we can predict with certainty will happen more in the future.

Fifth, finally, food sovereignties interests are deeply aligned with those of agroecology. Indeed, it is no accident that at the same time that food sovereignty has been making progress, at the same time that the second-generation food sovereignty has merged in the world of farming itself, agroecology has been making such remarkable progress as a new way to think about our relationship to the ecosystems that feed us. Agroecology seeks to replace the dependency on external inputs derived from fossil energies by locally produced inputs recycled from the farm itself. Agroecology transforms the role of farmers. They were passive recipients of knowledge produced by others for them. Scientists in white coats working in laboratories at worst. At best the colonists trained to believe in universally applicable magic solutions that could apply in all regions. Farmers now with Agroecology, become co-producers of the knowledge that they use. And this knowledge is highly contextualized, it is linked to particular soils, ecosystems, and political economies. Agroecology is empowering not disempowering. It engages farmers in a social movement in which horizontal transfers of knowledge occur and which gradually is attempting to transform the food systems. Agroecology prioritizes diversity and farming, therefore it not only recognizes the complexity of nature and how nature works, instead of trying to simplify it, also is because of this diversity or source of resilience against future shocks and long long term stresses. The links between food sovereignty and Agroecology, therefore, not circumstantial they are based on a shared diagnosis and are based on the same impatience with the system that we have inherited. Now I have listed a range of problems associated with the dominant food system. Corporate led, energy thirsty, and so obsessed with low cost that it treats, as externalities, the costs of which should be borne by the collectivity ill-health, rural depopulation, and ecological damage that is it is associated with. This makes you think of Muhatma Gandhi's answer when he was asked what he thought about Western civilization. He said, "well I think it would be a good idea." Maybe time has come to recivilize the food systems or to recivitize them, relocalizing them, democratizing them. Allowing them to be guided less by a search for efficiency demanded by the markets and more by the quest of ownership that its citizens demand. There is considerable resistance to be expected. Vested interests, Malthusian anxieties, sunk costs, growth obsessed macroeconomics, a certain idea of progress, as Theodore Shannon mentioned, or modernization, shoppers routines. All this matters and these are all major obstacles to change, but the conventional food system is not made of one piece only. It can be transformed piece by piece. And alternatives can emerge from the bottom up as social innovations conceived as experiments. Creating alternatives and increasing the pressure for reform. This, in my view, is what food sovereignty is about. We need the wisdom of food sovereignty. And to explain what kind of wisdom I have in mind. I would like to finish with with a story. The words in this village woman who was respected for being a very wise person. She was known as a very wise person. And the young boy hoped to impress his friends by, by, trapping the woman. He caught a bird and put the bird in his hands and visited the woman and asked the woman well is this bird I have here, dead or alive. And of course if the woman responded it's alive, the bird would be killed suffocated and the woman would be trapped. And of course the woman answered, "my son the future is in your hands." Thank you.

Raj Patel writer academic activist, fellow at food first, a visiting scholar at UC Berkeley's Center for African Studies, the author of two best-selling books: Stuffed and Starved and The Value of Nothing, he straddles both a popular orientation in writing but also an academic one. Thanks Tony. We would threatened as someone microphone. Can you can you hear that.Can you hear me now. Excellent. Thanks Peter. So yeah we were threatened with being tasered, and as a someone who works at University of California where Secretary of State former Secretary of State Janet Napolitano was meaning to be our Chancellor this is a real and present danger. So I'm gonna, I'm actually gonna try and go short. But but I do I I wanted to talk about food sovereignty as a signifier on the move. Mark Adelman papers is really interesting to show us where food sovereignty has come from. But it's hard to keep up with it because it is dialectically being invented and reinvented at every Via Campesina meeting. And of course but, what Beno was showing us earlier on today, is part of a trajectory and I think what's really exciting about food sovereignty is precisely the sort of dire dialectical relationship between movement reality and people outside the movement. That said, it started somewhere and it's not in a particular moment in a particular food regime. You know food soverinity was born of peasants up against a neoliberal state. In Europe and and Central America. And so it's hard to see food sovereignty, and this is a sort of just a point of observation, food sovereignty is hard to find or to see satisfyingly. In Warsaw Pact countries for example, that were not in a similar sort of moment. And so while Cuba, for example, is the sort of go-to place for food sovereignty at a nation-state level. It's harder to see that in China and in Russia and although Max Poor'S paper is a really interesting attempt to see that and Mindy Schneider's work is guidance in the right direction. I think we have a lot more work to do to understand what food sovereignty looks like in states that are far more authoritarian. The second thing is around class. I think Henry is right about class. And you know, again, this this is important to recognize that the food sovereignty emerges, as you know, as a thing that landless rural, you know, landless rural workers and the Connecticut State Farmers Association middle peasants can both agree on. And in order for that agreement to be able to move forward and in order for this you know this dialectical process to emerge, yes some things had to be sort of left out so he could go through that birth canal. And it's, there's these class contradictions I think are important and they are under-theorized I think and and so that that's why I thought Theodor's remarks this morning we're really provocative. But I'm not sure that they're there right. I'm not sure that it's true that the Via Campesina is a peasant movement becoming a class for itself because it's hard for landless peasants and landed peasants who have, you know, hundred thousand acre hundreds maybe say hundreds of five hundred acres to to be in a satisfying work Marxist way in the same class. So that's, I mean I think, there are ways to address that question, and in fact Harriet flagging of the Commons, is a really interesting way in which we might resolve that tension. But it's one that is in future iteration iterations I think of the definition of food sovereignty and Paul alluded to the use of rucked rights that I think you know a sort of transition point. If we ultimately I think we'll end up in some idea of the Commons soon after the Revolution. The third the third moment where I think there's there's stuff to say about food sovereignty is around its geography. And here I was surprised that Jim was reacting negatively to the idea of sovereignty. Because if you look at one of the definitions of food sovereignty, it's about unions and states and communities rights to do things. And most of us live in communities where we object to what the state is doing. Right, I mean there's already a conflict between the community and a state and a union that these are levels that have inherent contradiction in them. And it seems to be the Via Campesina has already some very interesting ways of addressing these sort of many layers of contradiction and many scales in which direct democracy happens. And that is of course Via Campesina itself. The way Via Campesina operates as making it as is albeit imperfect instantiation of a kind of direct democracy. And a kind of direct democracy that you can see most, I think, elegantly wrestled with by the anarchist theorist Andre Grubegdge in his book Don't Mourn Balkanize. He he talked about the Balkans as a place where there are conflicting kinds of territories where the nation-state is far more porous vanities in a historically has been in other parts of the world. And where you where where we might imagine organizing along food sheds or water sheds rather than along the contours of the nation-state. And so this multi scaler approach that I think Jim would like, and I guess this is my love letter to Jim right now, is actually what we already see in food sovereignty. And so the may be food sovereignty is about being sovereign at many different levels. So but and I think that there's there are that's what food sovereignty helps us do more than anything else is to imagine different kinds of political community. The papers here that address you know First Nations for example. First Nations mechanisms of government exists within the nation-state and hope ultimately to bypass them. But there are different ways in which we consider, reconceive political communities. And so if we're in the sort of the where of where is food sovereignty. I like is about a junta's paper on Ecuador where she they're lying about food sovereignty is always on the horizon. And it's a horizon free, I mean now I'm adding, I mean is usually it's a horizon that is ultimately free of capitalism patriarchy in the nation state. But it is, what's interesting about food sovereignty is that it is to borrow from Michael's with ideas around development. Food sovereignty strikes me as both a process and a project. Right, I mean it's a project of ridding ourselves... a project of increasing our autonomy to use Yondu's ideas. But it is also a process of getting to that horizon. And that's what's been really interesting to see about the definition of food sovereignty itself. That it's gone through this process. If you look at the the Declaration, the women's Declaration from from Jakarta Indonesia earlier on this year. It's a declaration that couldn't have been written in 1993. It took 20 years to get this amazing declaration about food sovereignty being about an end to violence against women. Without food sovereignty being about the renegotiation of productive and reproductive labor. Those kinds of realizations are part of the Hegelian Process whereby food sovereignty moves forward. And since only, since I have to finish right, now I think maybe that's a nice place to end. Because what we're doing here, after all, is engaging in this alien back and forth. And and I'm very grateful to June and his colleagues for bringing us a very real taste of what food sovereignty might look like. Thank you.