The food and agriculture sector is both a major contributor to climate change and especially vulnerable to its worst impacts. This means that much is at stake in what is a complex set of contested political dynamics as new governance agendas are rolled out. On one hand, there is a strong push for 'climate-smart agriculture' (CSA) and related initiatives in the area of marine resources such as the idea of the blue economy, as an attempt to bring a range of viewpoints together to address the interrelationship between these ecological and economic systems. On the other hand, critics see these strategies as promotion of more of the same kinds of policies that created stress in the climate-food system in the first place. To unpack these issues, this special forum brings together a collection of papers that highlight three overlapping themes that lie at the centre of these debates, yet which have not been fully acknowledged by those implementing CSA initiatives: the role of power and interests in shaping governance approaches to climate and food systems; the ways in which existing approaches, primarily those promoting open markets and technology, are reinforced in governance initiatives; and the sidelining of questions of inequality.
China's growth has provoked changes in global geopolitics, deeply influencing the global economy and trade relations. China has increased its demand for primary (agro)commodities and developed new investment partnerships abroad to secure its access to resources such as minerals, hydrocarbons and industrial flex crops. This paper analyzes the increasing economic and political relations between China and Latin America and raises questions concerning new trajectories of agrarian change and resource access, asking whether, how and to what extent a new consensus has emerged in reaction to the 'Washington Consensus' which ushered in neoliberal policies to the region from the 1970s onward.
As food sovereignty spreads to new realms that dramatically diverge from the agrarian context in which it was originally conceived, this raises new challenges, as well as opportunities, for already complex transnational agrarian movements. In the face of such challenges, calls for convergence have increasingly been put forward as a strategy for building political power. Looking at the US case, we argue that historically rooted resistance efforts for agrarian justice, food justice and immigrant labor justice across the food system are not only drawing inspiration from food sovereignty, but helping to shape what food sovereignty means in the US. By digging into the histories of these resistance efforts, we can better understand the divides that exist as well as the potential for and politics of convergence. The US case thus offers important insights, especially into the roles of race and immigration in the politics of convergence that might strengthen the global movement for food sovereignty as it expands to new contexts and seeks to engage with new constituencies.
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