Dipartimento di Scienze Politiche e Sociali - Tesi di Dottorato
Permanent URI for this collectionhttps://lisa.unical.it/handle/10955/107
Questa collezione raccoglie le Tesi di Dottorato afferenti al Dipartimento di Scienze Politiche e Sociali dell'Università della Calabria.
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Item Agrifinancialization and transnational agrarian movements(Università della Calabria, 2020-04-16) Conti, Mauro; Jedlowski, Paolo; Vitale, Annamaria; Borras, Saturnino M.The food price crisis exploded in 2007/2008 with extreme price volatility and high prices, fuelling the Arab spring and other social riots. These extreme price fluctuations have been threatening global food security, increasing the number of undernourished people. The food price crisis shed light on the role of finance in agriculture and the ongoing process of financialization of agriculture. The neoliberal policies promoted by the International Monetary Fund and World Bank, through Structural Adjustment Policies, gave rise to new Transnational Agrarian Movements (TAMs) and the food sovereignty claims. These new TAMs differentiated politically from the existing TAMs and Farmers Organizations that were oriented towards the production of commodities for export and for the international markets. The research problematique addresses the interaction between financialization of agriculture, as a consequence of the end of Bretton Woods agreements, which, reshaping the countryside, also generates the rise of new TAMs claiming for food sovereignty: so the research question is how has the contemporary financialization impacted agriculture and shaped politically the contemporary political orientation of transnational agrarian movements? The research assumes the Arrighian world-system theory, among the different theoretical frameworks, to understand financialization as part of the worldwide economic cycle generating the Bretton Woods crisis and the reshaping of the space of global governance, with a specific focus on agriculture. The dissertation identifies how financialization in agriculture generated a dichotomy in the space of global governance (Intellectual Prop-erty Rights versus Collective Rights), where TAMs strategically entered claiming for food sovereignty and resisting any further penetration of capital in agriculture from within the production process and through policy dialogue for public policies with governments. In the actual financialization phase, the hegemonic powers are trying to generate a new material expansion solving the dichotomy of the global governance of agriculture through the appropriation of world biodiversity, which implies deepening the capital penetration in the internal agroecological frontier, and mainly expand the external frontier including all the biodiversity (crop wild relatives, plants, animal and marine biodiversity) in the capital accumulation system. The new TAMs are opposing this phase of financialization fostering a new material expansion based on agroecology and re-peasantization of the mode of production, which remunerates labour and natural resources rather than capital. The site of the study situated in the UN Rome based Food Agencies, as space strategically selected by TAMs to re-establish the centrality of the Governments in defining the Agriculture policies and regulations, therefore confronting the neoliberal policies and the financialization processes. Therefore, the United Nation Rome Food Agencies are an essential space to understand the TAMs perspective and strategy, in the different processes and discussion that are relevant for the penetration of capital in the countryside and in the control of natural resources, even beyond the Rome processes themselves.Item Siamo parte della soluzione: la via contadina per la sovranità alimentare(2014) Giunta, Isabella; Vitale, AnnamariaThe subject of the thesis is the international peasant movement Vía Campesina, born in 1993 with the aim to fight against the invisibility imposed to the peasantry by the dominant narrative of agricultural modernization. Vía Campesina claims that the peasant social figure is contemporaneous and that is caracterized by the ability to innovate and to produce alternative visions of future. Its main proposal is the food sovereignty. Our study is focused on the collective actions aimed to promote the food sovereignty principles and conducted at national level by organizations affiliated to this international movement. We analyze the articulation between heterogeneous actors, their mechanisms to produce collective horizons and actions, as well as the impacts produced, especially in terms of institutional innovation. In reference to the Ecuadorian case study, the Constitution (2008) declared food sovereignty a strategic goal and a government obligation, embracing many of the proposals put forth since the late 1990s by Ecuadorian federations linked to Vía Campesina. The issue of food sovereignty has expanded from the inner circles of peasant organizations to the wider context of the whole Ecuadorian society. We provide an overview of this process, describing the collective actions that made it possible. Moreover, we attempt to explain the reasons why the ‘Agrarian Revolution’ is currently evaluated as weak, and the motivations for a gap between constitutional mandates and the ongoing official policies. The Italian case study shows fewer results, mainly concentrated at local and European level, however the organizations linked to Via Campesina are engaged in political advocacy to obtain institutional instruments aimed to promote food sovereignty. In this framework, we consider that the food sovereignty proposal works as a polysemic and an open signifier, capable of providing a renewed sense to the historical peasant claims, such as access to land and other means of production, but joining them with new buzzwords, dictated by the political, socio-ecologic and economic global transformations, but also by the changes experienced by the same social actors. Finally, there is a constituent power in the collective action conducted by the organizations of Via Campesina and aimed to political advocacy: they work as motors of social and institutional transformations.