UC Santa Barbara

ABSTRACT

The Practice of Food Sovereignty and Buen Vivir in Ecuador’s Sierra Region

by

Clayton Frederick

Ecuadorian member organizations of the transnational social movement La Vía Campesina won legal recognition of the state’s responsibility to guarantee one of their central demands, food sovereignty, or the people’s right to determine their agri-food systems and the extent to which this right can be exercised, in that country’s 2008 constitution and 2009 food sovereignty law. These victories came after decades of uprisings by rural and indigenous social movements resulted in the election in 2006 of Ecuador’s populist president, Rafael Correa, who denounced neoliberalism and made the alternative development paradigm of buen vivir (or “living well,” from the Kichwa sumak kawsay) a central part of his Citizen’s Revolution. Academic literature in the wake of these developments has focused on the ideas of plurinationality and ecologically sustainable development embodied in the concept of buen vivir (Davalos 2009, Escobar 2010, Cobey 2012, Oviedo 2014), analysis of state-social movement interaction in institutionalizing the food sovereignty policy regime (Peña 2013), and participation in this process by urban consumer movements (Van Ongeval 2012).

Nevertheless, research into the praxis of food sovereignty and buen vivir by rural communities themselves remains limited. In order to address the dearth in academic literature on these topics and investigate the gap between food sovereignty in principle and in practice, this project takes an action research approach to investigate practices of food sovereignty in three communities of the Sierra region of Ecuador. Specifically, the questions of 1) how practices of food sovereignty mesh with or contradict state policy and social movement rhetoric, 2) how such practices inform the notion of buen vivir as an alternative development strategy, and 3) the extent to which an action researcher can contribute to the food sovereignty of the communities being studied are addressed. These are addressed via the researcher’s participant observation at the invitation of each community as a participant on a multicultural exchange program sponsored by the Quito-based NGO Huayra Causay, for whom the researcher interned for a period of six months.

The study finds positive outcomes such as mobilization for grassroots land reform, collaboration with multinational NGOs for targeted investment in irrigation infrastructure and the creation of community governance for its oversight, and partnership with municipal governments to promote rural producer’s associations with direct marketing opportunities such as farmer’s markets. However, significant obstacles still remain, such as contradictory policy, high rate of return conditionality for state investment, and intransigence of the national assembly in the participatory legislative process for food sovereignty, making the notion of buen vivir a still-distant ideal for the communities studied.