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This essay conceptualizes food security and food sovereignty as fluid and changing discourses that define the problem of hunger. I trace the discursive geohistories of food security and food sovereignty in order to identify oppositions and relationalities between them. I argue that the interpretations of, and relations between, food security and food sovereignty vary by geography and scale, as well as by the conceptual and theoretical differences within the discourses themselves. When and where these discourses develop and emerge is central to understanding their oppositions and convergences. How scale is constructed within particular discourses is also important to understanding how they co-exist relationally or in opposition. Food security and food sovereignty discourses are tied to distinctive political and economic histories, ecologies, and identities at the national and local levels. They are differentially deployed depending upon geographic context and the political economy of development and underdevelopment. Both discourses are dynamic and changing in relation to the wider political and cultural economies of food system dynamics across scale. Uniform definitions of each term should be resisted. The point is to understand the geographies of their relational overlap and their continual difference.

JSTOR is a not-for-profit service that helps scholars, researchers, and students discover, use, and build upon a wide range of content in a trusted digital archive. We use information technology and tools to increase productivity and facilitate new forms of scholarship. For more information about JSTOR, please contact support@jstor.org.. Clark University is collaborating with JSTOR to digitize, preserve and extend access to Economic Geography.Abstract: Shifting cultivators are often held responsible for deforestation in the humid tropics. The neo-Malthusian link between population growth and shifting cultivation negates historical considerations of the political economy of deforestation in specific places. Using concepts drawn from regional geography and political ecology, this paper examines the role played by the colonial state in the organization of land use and agriculture as central to an explanation of deforestation in Madagascar. Almost three-quarters of the primary forest was cleared from 1895 to 1925 due to the state's economic objectives, ideologically expressed as a concern for rational forest management and conservation. This concern prompted a ban on shifting cultivation. The Malagasy interpreted the ban as depriving them of independent access to subsistence and forcing them into wage work. This case study demonstrates how ideas concerning shifting cultivation and deforestation are political constructions of various groups with specific material interests. A synthesis of the political ecology and regional geography perspectives reveals how a consideration of the interactions among human groups, the environment, and social formations is central to a regional explanation of tropical deforestation. Population growth and shifting cultivation practices cannot fully account for deforestation in Madagascar during the colonial period.The particular way environmental "problems" such as deforestation and soil erosion are defined, delimited, and discussed shapes the possibilities for solving them. Neo-Malthusian theory, in its various guises, which links population growth, shifting cultivation practices, and deforestation, is a case in point. A substantial component of recent academic and popular environmental writing on deforestation inAfrica, Asia, and Latin America posits a * I would like to thank Michael Watts, David IHodge, Victoria Lawson, Joseph Velikonja, and the students in my rural development seminar for comments and criticisms on this draft. The comments of two anonymous reviewers were particularly helpful. This research was funded by The Rockefeller Foundation and the Graduate School Research Fund of the University of Washington. cause-effect relationship between population growth, shifting cultivation practices, and increasing rates of deforestation (Allen and Barnes 1985; Peters and Neuenschwander 1988; Russell 1988; Shoumatoff 1988; Knox 1989). In general, exponential population growth and shifting cultivation are causally linked to deforestation and environmental degradation. Roughly 250 to 300...

Lawson) In this paper, we argue for the importance of constructing a human geography of white class difference. More particularly, we present a theoretical framework for understanding the cultural politics of class and whiteness in the context of rural restructuring. We theorize these politics through an examination of the national discourse of redneck that has emerged in the US. We analyze the term "redneck" as one of several rhetorical categories that refer to rural white poor people. We argue that while various terms are employed in geographically specific ways and cannot be used interchangeably, they nonetheless function similarly in positioning the white rural poor. Our examination of redneck discourse exemplifies these processes and points up the need for a broader analysis of representational strategies that reinforce class difference among whites. Drawing upon three case studies of white rural poverty, we deconstruct these imagined rural spaces by situating discourses about white rural poor people in the context of geographically specific political economies of power and social relations in Kentucky, Florida, and Washington. These case studies, as well as the national discourse of redneck, represent rural poverty as a lifestyle choice and as an individualized cultural trait. Abstract rural spaces are construed as poor, underdeveloped, and wild; rural, white poor people are represented as lazy, dirty, obsolescent, conservative, or alternative. A focus upon the political economy of community resource relationships and the construction and reproduction of redneck discourses reveals how exploitative material processes are justified by naming others and blaming the persistence of rural poverty upon the poor themselves.

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