11 - Reshaping Collective Dreams for a Just Food Future through Research and Activism in Western Avadh, India

Summary

The food sovereignty movement offers a compelling vision for food systems, articulating the rights of communities to define and build ecologically sound and locally empowering foodways (Sélingué, 2007). It challenges the hegemony of global industrial agri- food systems, as well as state oppression, and has inspired numerous movements and even governments to reimagine how we produce, process, and consume our food. However, despite recognizing the unequal power relations between corporations, state actors, farming communities, and consumers, the food sovereignty articulation ignores deep inequities within communities themselves. Unequal gender relations are embedded within families and communities, and increased labour requirements of ecological farming may fall disproportionately on women's shoulders, without any increase in their autonomy (Agarwal, 2014). Further, devolution of power to the community level can easily lead to the capture of resources by powerful community members. Brown (2018) documents how ecological farming methods developed in the aftermath of the 2004 tsunami in deltaic Tamilnadu, India, were sought to be consolidated through community- based organizations (CBOs). These quickly devolved along caste lines, with dominant caste farmers taking control of village- level federations, and perpetuating untouchability practices, such as segregated seating and food served in disposable utensils for Dalits (Brown, 2018). Thus, ecological structures can themselves become oppressive.

At the same time, very little research on agriculture, diets, and food security in the Global South has been undertaken with communities as equal partners in the research process. Both quantitative studies (that outsource fieldwork to local partners, with design and analysis done only by academic researchers) and ethnographies (where the lone researcher documents various concerns in a self- reflexive manner) do not give co- authorship or consider communities as active co- researchers. Thus, while the ills of monoculture farming or the malnutrition puzzle in India have been extensively researched (Gupta, 1989; Deaton and Drèze, 2009), there are few instances where marginalized communities themselves co- produce research, analyse findings, and use them to develop or refine action.

In late 2016, a chance meeting between Richa Kumar (henceforth, Richa K), a sociologist of agriculture, and Sudha, a researcher- activist, led to the development of a grounded, empirically rich, and action- oriented collaboration, whose trajectory we describe in this chapter (see Figures 11.1 and 11.2 for maps showing the study region).