Entitlement vs. Food Sovereignty

Entitlement vs. Food Sovereignty Approaches: Challenges for sustainable food and nutrition security in the changing agrarian landscape in Tamil Nadu, India.

ABSTRACT

The present day reality is that the laudable economic growth has not able to conquer the alarming rate of poverty, hunger and malnutrition in the world. The support-led and growth-mediated intervention measures provide grounds for farmers to opt for different livelihood options, determining their access and rights to food. Based on the fieldwork carried out in Anchetty panchayat in the northwest corner of Tamil Nadu, India, the paper examines how the entitlement and food sovereignty approaches to food security interact with the aspirations and rights of small farmers to seek diverse livelihoods in the changing landscape of agrarian economy and livelihood opportunities. It demonstrates that while entitlement approach lacks recognition of local actors and remains silent about ecological resources and biodiversity, food sovereignty approach seems too ideological to the rights of local actors and fails to capture the limitation of their freedom of choice and creating strategies to benefit from the contemporary knowledge economy. The paper suggests that any intervention for promoting food and nutrition security must understand the process of changes in the agrarian landscape, as they are based on the context specific ecology of practice.

Keywords: Food security, Entitlement, Food sovereignty, Wellbeing, Tamil Nadu, India

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Marginalization of millets

The following presentation was made as part of the panel presented at CASID Conference 2013 at the University of Victoria, Victoria, BC, Canada, 3-6 June 2013.

http://www.casid-acedi.ca/conferences/annual_conference/2013_call_for_papers

Marginalization of millets: Impacts of labour out-migration on food security and wellbeing of smallholder farmers in rural India

Hom Gartaula, Kirit Patel, Derek Johnson and Dinesh Moghariya

It is evident that green revolution has proved a technological advancement in agriculture and contributed to global food security. However, the way it has impacted the semi-arid tribal rural areas is different than the areas where there is high potential for high-input commercial agriculture. One of the resulting effects of green revolution in such semi-arid rainfed areas is the increasing trend of labour out-migration. The paper aims to contribute to our understanding of contemporary rural India by exploring wellbeing of the smallholder farmers in fulfilling their role in the ecology of practice. The paper uses both qualitative and quantitative research methods. Primarily drawing from a household survey conducted among the 138 households from two sites in India (68 from Anchetty, Tamil Nadu and 70 from Semiliguda, Odisha), the study shows that wellbeing is correlated with location, migration status and millet growing status of the respondent households with varied degrees of association. It is revealed that small millets are one of the major crops grown in the semi-arid rainfed farming systems in India, but due to farmers’ increasing engagement with other non-farm and off-farm activities the incentive to grow this traditional and culturally important crop is decreasing. The increasing importance of diverse livelihood activities does not only change the existing ways of living, but it also gives rise to new pathways that does not necessarily embrace the traditional value systems, beliefs and mores. However, one has to be aware that it is a part of the wider process of sociocultural transformation and a means to the ecology of practice, which can go along with or without the aid of labour out-migration.

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