Post-Graduate Seminar
Alternative exchange systems and food sovereignty: hunger, food production and solidary consumption in Brazil

Luciane Lucas

January 28th, 2009, 17:00, CES Seminar Room

Presentation
Hunger has historical roots, although many analyses insist in circumscribing the issue to the available quantity of food. Behind this argument lies, very often, the appetite of a market that has learned to transform food into a financial asset. But if finacialization of the productive structures – parallel to the submission of food to the speculative logic of capital - , is a typically contemporary phenomenon, one cannot say the same about the influence of market economy on hunger, a very ancient phenomenon. Looking back on the historical origins of capitalism in Brazil and the colonial market that preceded it, it is clear that the colonialization model and the proliferation of latifundiums are the origin of the hunger issue in Latin American countries. We have identified, therefore, that, historically, hunger merges with the food consumption trajectory. Contrasting with the hunger in Southern countries not rarely we encounter Northern countries’ appetite, in such a way that food fluxes constitute a silent narrative of the strength relations established between production and consumption in material exchanges between Nations.

This seminar shall seek to demonstrate, hence, that hunger in Brazil is related to the production and consumption model taken on since its colonialization – with particular focus to the latifundiums model. Consequently, we shall discuss how food sovereignty needs to articulate itself in terms of a political project moulded into alternative exchange systems – more precisely into an emancipatory consumption model. That is, parting from a first analysis of the Solidary Economics in Brazil mapping data, we shall seek to discuss: 1) if a emancipatory consumption model is possible; 2) in what measure can food sovereignty articulate with this model and 3) if the Solidary Economics mapping presently shows proof that local food sovereignty experiences are constituting a silent and important axis within solidary consumption.

Biographic note
Luciane Lucas dos Santos is a post-doctoral student at the Centre for Social Studies (CES), University of Coimbra, under orientation of Professor Boaventura de Sousa Santos. She concluded her doctorate degree in Communication at the Federal University of Rio de Janeiro inn 2004 and is presently professor and researcher at the Masters Programme in Communication and Consumer Practises at the Escola Superior de Propaganda e Marketing (ESPM) and assistant professor at Rio de Janeiro State University (UERJ). Her research relates to the following themes: consumption and modes of production; discoursive practises and social representations in the media.