In Cultivating Socialism: Venezuela, ALBA, and the Politics of Food Sovereignty, Rowan Lubbock offers a compelling multiscalar analysis of the pursuit of food sovereignty. His account of the Boliviarian Alliance for the Peoples of Our America (ALBA) and the central role of the Venezuelan state invites us to revisit the promise of regional integration as part of a socialist project of continental proportions. Cultivating Socialism highlights ALBA’s revolutionary challenge to US hegemony in Latin America and to the region’s historical dependency on commodity exports and outward-oriented growth. To do so, Lubbock – and the Venezuelan state – look to their neighbours and citizens to think about other sites and scales of transformation. There, he provides a Marxian and Poulantzasian reading not only of sovereignty but also of the subject of food sovereignty, seeing its achievement as ‘a democratic road to socialism’.
This is not an abstract debate. The recent US military strikes on Venezuelan fishing boats in the Caribbean (which have now expanded to a range of other victims) serve as reminders that sovereignty in the region remains violently contested. These stand in sharp contrast with the hope for a multipolar world raised by the Pink Tide, with former president Hugo Chávez having led the most carmine version of these experiences. As Lubbock traces the unfolding of genuinely innovative and promising initiatives, we are reminded of that moment’s radical imagination but also of the contradictions that accumulated over time, grounding most to a halt.
One of the starkest contradictions Lubbock develops is the rooting of food sovereignty in oil revenues. As he acknowledges, oil was the ‘death knell of Venezuelan agriculture’. Present-day Venezuela depends much on imports to feed its highly urbanised population, which is consequently vulnerable to fluctuations on commodity prices and, of course, to sanctions. To make matters worse, and in contrast with the agroecological premises of food sovereignty, this reliance on an extractivist development model exposed the short-sighted, modernising beliefs that guided the making of the ‘magical state’ – then writ large into the ‘magical region’, as Venezuelan oil wealth was channelled into funding ALBA’s cooperation initiatives.
Amidst these contradictions, one of the book’s finest contributions lies in reminding us that responses to the neoliberal food regime need not to be confined to the local, and that there are other ways to imagine and practise transnationalism beyond the dictates of global capital. As Lubbock underscores, the regional scale is both a site and a framework for complementary food production and knowledge sharing. With the concept of Grandnational Entreprises, Lubbock discusses a complementary agroecological practice, underpinned by the notions of a ‘cooperative advantage’ supported by a regional ‘map of goods’ and the drive for endogenous development. Even if firmly grounded on the experiences of social movements and communities, ALBA emerges as the space where horizons for emancipation are made possible.
In fact, the effervescence of social movements in the 1990s – propelled, in more ways than one, by the neoliberal restructuring of Latin America’s political economy – was constitutive of this cross-boundary revolutionary agenda. These movements were also essential to the rise of some Pink Tide governments that, over time, contributed to smother some of this effervescence through centralisation, bureaucracy and clientelism. In the case of Bolivia, the ALBA member-state I know best, Evo Morales and the Movement towards Socialism (MAS) owe much of their radical proposals and constitutional advances to Indigenous and peasant movements that they later weakened, coopted, and dismantled. Here, Lubbock’s reflections perfectly capture ALBA’s member-states ‘general problem of challenging the capitalist state, which distributes rights precisely to augment (not diminish) its power of control’.
For all its attention to scale and structure, one of the dimensions I missed in Cultivating Socialism was the actual experience of food. I come to this book as someone who studies food practices among the residents of peripheral neighbourhoods in urban Brazil, taking an everyday, ethnographic approach to how people access, prepare and eat their food. Within the hidden abodes of social reproduction lies a less considered space of food sovereignty: the kitchen. Cultivating Socialism does not claim, or need, to analyse what Venezuela’s majority-urban population wants to eat and who cooks it. Yet, in its absence, I was reminded of Hannah Garth’s Food in Cuba, where she follows families in Santiago as they navigate the everyday labour of preparing a ‘decent meal’. In a context where access to food is tightly regulated, one can clearly visualise the cultural and social significance of particular foodstuffs as sites of dignity and autonomy.
Chapter 5 concentrates most of the quotes from Lubbock’s year-long fieldwork in Venezuela and is a valuable, if underexplored, source of bottom-up knowledge of what food sovereignty is – in its pursuit, enjoyment and frustrations. The class-struggle between factory floor and management does not go unnoticed to Lubbock, which is a welcome contribution, but the discussion of the contested terms upon which food sovereignty is defined remain at arms-length even when we are invited to join him in a crowded square and in the back of a truck. Similarly, there is little attention to the gendered and racialised character of the labour involved in pursuing sovereignty even at the smallest of scales.
In this sense, both food and the people entitled to food security stay at the backstage in this analysis. Even the choice of rice as the exemplary crop under the ALBA-Arroz could be seen as emblematic. Rice is a global staple, but also historically a crop of control – a grain whose cultivation and standardisation has often underpinned state power. As an exasperated worker tells the author, once the rice processing plant is paralysed, ‘we used to receive anything … Venezuela is passing through a huge crisis… We cannot be married to just one product; we must be open to everything’. While Lubbock’s interlocutor is explicitly discussing corn, wheat and cereals, I am left wondering what other products are essential in the food sovereignty they envision for their community, Venezuela and ALBA.
Questioning what is produced, where, how and by whom is as important as questioning for whom this food is produced. This can help produce research that aligns with the more encompassing definitions of food sovereignty, which consider the ‘aspirations and needs of those who produce, distribute and consume food’ as enunciated in La Vía Campesina’s most recent definition of the concept. These principles are also echoed in how some of the ALBA-Arroz workers define food sovereignty. To one, it means ‘assuring that the people have access to food’, while the other argues that the aim of food sovereignty is ‘to guarantee every Venezuelan or every family their food … and that this food comes at a just price’. A third worker offers their own definition as ‘stopping the importation of food, and thus where lies the triumph of food sovereignty and security of the country – in the countryside’. In all three cases, the national remains the scale of where food sovereignty is achievable and aspired, highlighting that amidst other barriers to Grandnational Enterprises – hierarchical structures akin to those of capitalist firms; that military managers were inept to organise production; that processing firms lacked inputs; and that many peasants were forced to shift towards unregulated crops to cross-subsidise their losses – shifting scale remained an important challenge.
To wrap up, Lubbock provides a critical and engaging analysis of how ALBA’s project of socialist integration was both radical and limited. While it offered the potential for sovereignty both above and below the national scale, it was ultimately captured by an increasingly centralising state with decreasing rents. As Lubbock reminds us, socialisation – rather than statisation – of property and knowledge is essential to transform power relations. Yet, this cannot be fulfilled without addressing the more concrete dimensions of production and reproduction. Sovereignty is not merely declared in government advertisement and conventions but continuously built and sustained. Ultimately, Cultivating Socialism dares us to reimagine another world that is possible and to think about food sovereignty at a scale that matches the power of capital.
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