Food for Justice: Power, Politics, and Food Inequalities in a Bioeconomy: Preliminary Research Program

Abstract

The Junior Research Group Food for Justice examines normative questions of inequalities, justice, and democracy that arise in disputes surrounding the question “how are we going to feed the world?”. Increasingly, citizens perceive the global food system as part of the historical causes of the ecological crisis and persisting hunger in the world. Although the reasons for these causal links have long been known (the use of food for profit, the gap between production and consumption, conflicts over land and water, exploitative labour relations, the energy matrix and waste generation, among others), research on food security and the bioeconomy tend to rely on the same solutions i.e searching for technological fixes toward a profit-oriented model that exploits living matter. What is needed in order to complexify the debate and contribute to socio-environmental transformation is more knowledge about which food system citizens desire, which alternative knowledges and technologies already successfully handle such claims for justice within food politics, and how to redirect public policies towards a democratic, ecological and just food system. Combining theoretical perspectives on global entangled inequalities with social movement research, Food for Justice looks at challenges and solutions both in Europe (focusing on Germany) and in Latin America (focusing on Brazil). The research consists, on one hand, of case studies of social mobilization targeting injustices in the food system and, on the other, case studies of alternative food initiatives, knowledges and technologies, such as agroecology and alternative food networks. Food for Justice aims at providing a theoretical and conceptual framework – grounded on empirical research – to analyse social and political projects that address inequalities based on class, gender, race, ethnicity, rurality, citizenship, and categorical divisions between humans and more-than-humans, thus building democratic, ecological and just food politics.