Food As Commons for Beginners

A Conversation with Jose Luis Vivero Pol

London was very hot this week, both politically and literally. The Prime Minister resigned, a heatwave hit, and the chatter at the multitude of Climate Action Week events was what the new government’s food and climate ambitions might be.

I slept fitfully in a hotel room that mercifully had a small fan, listened to inspiring women shaping the future of food, and attended a funeral for the food system replete with rousing calls for change, poignant readings, and delicious refreshments.

I moderated a discussion where indigenous leaders spoke of how they have kept rainforests standing for generations, heard how Europe and Africa can advance food and climate resilience in the run-up to COP32, made new friends, and caught up with old ones. On the way home, I devoured pages of The Ministry For the Future.

There was a common theme running throughout the events and the book - collective action and shared goals and responsibilities. It all felt very apt to this week’s Thin Ink.

Photo by me

I first met Jose Luis Vivero Pol in October 2019 in Yangon, Myanmar, at a forum on evolving agrifood systems in Asia. This was before COVID-19 and the coup turned everything upside down, and my birthplace was buzzing with possibilities.

I was emceeing the two-day event, and Jose Luis was one of the speakers. I was struck by both his knowledge and his passion for the work he was doing and of my country.

I learnt later on this is quintessential him - he cares deeply about all the countries he has worked in a career spanning three decades, most recently Cameroon. He has worked for civil society, the European Commission, the FAO, and the WFP, but it’s his academic work that I want to focus on.

For many years, he has been advocating for food to be governed as a commons, not only as a commodity. I’ve always been intrigued by the idea. Finally, when he had a moment of free time in between assignments, I asked him to explain the basic principles, which he did for nearly two hours.

So below is a heavily condensed and edited version of our conversation, including what gets lost when food is only valued by its price, why Garrett Hardin’s famous “tragedy of the commons” got it backwards, and what it would actually take to reverse decades of food commodification.

Take this as a beginner’s guide. I hope to keep digging into this subject in the coming months and years.

THIN: You’ve argued that food is a biological necessity, a cultural expression, a human right, as well as a traded commodity, all at the same time. You’ve also said we’ve let the commodity dimension swallow all the others. What do we lose when we determine food’s value only by its price?

JOSE LUIS: That’s a very complex question, so I will try to unpack it. Firstly, it’s important to recognise that considering food as a commodity, a commons, a human right, or a public good - these are all social constructs. They are not givens. They are time-, place- and society-bound considerations.

We have organised our societies in a certain way, but they could always be organised differently.

Food is mostly valued as a commodity because its tradability in monetary terms becomes its most relevant dimension. I’m not against trading food. Food has been traded, exchanged or bartered for millennia.

But commodification, in a more technical sense, is something different: where the value of food for human societies is exclusively determined by its price in the market. And this price determines who gets access and who does not.

So caviar is highly priced and therefore considered highly valuable. Maize or quinoa have lower prices and therefore treated as less valuable. But food is much more than that. Food is culture. It is medicine in some contexts. Some foods are sacred. Food is a human right in many countries. In others it is regarded as public good. And all over the world, food is one of the renewable resources Earth offers to humans to feed.

When the tradable dimension obscures the others, we end up with what I would call the absolute commodification of food that dominates the industrial food system today. Value and price are conflated. Therefore, you can only get access to food if you have enough money to pay the price, and that explains the problem of access that we have in all the countries in the world, both in the Global North and South.

THIN: So what you’re saying is that food can be a commodity, but not only that.

JOSE LUIS: Yes, nicely phrased. Food can be a commodity, but not always and not only. I’d like to develop parallels with current public health and education systems found all over the world.

For instance, under universal health systems, you can pay for health treatment if you wish, but you can also get access to health as an entitlement if you are living in countries like Italy or Spain, where we are.

So if you have a heart attack on the streets, there will be an ambulance that will come to carry you to the hospital, and you will be healed without paying any money. Well, you have already paid for those services with your taxes, but you don’t have a monetary transaction with the state or a private hospital for this treatment. Health is not commoditised in our countries. Actually, it is enacted as a constitutional right and valued as a public good.

You can pay for your medical treatment… but in general, the institutional architecture of public health systems in Europe ensures that everybody, regardless of their purchasing power, will get access to adequate health services. The same applies to education. Education for All schemes are widely accepted as a mainstream policy, beneficial to all.

I’m proposing a similar system to be applied to food: a public food system, combining public and private actors, that guarantees adequate food for all, as a mandatory entitlement, as a commons and public good.

THIN: That’s a great analogy! Now, is this where the food as commons come in? First though, I’d like you to talk about the terminology itself. The word “commons” can mean a lot of things in English, like shared or public. What do you actually mean by food as a commons?

JOSE LUIS: Commons can be a noun (a resource), but I actually think it is better defined as a verb: commoning. Doing things together. Taking decisions together. Governing a resource together. Actually, commoning is direct democracy. It is also related to sharing: not only the use of a resource but also the management responsibilities and the duty of care.

There are four elements in each commons: the resource (that can be material like fish or immaterial like knowledge), a community connected to that resource, rules and institutions that the community develops in order to govern it, and finally, a purpose for that institution All the commons are governed with a goal in mind.

And with food, the reason is obvious. Food is governed by the communities (neighbourhoods, tribes, etc) because it is essential to each commoner (a member of a commons). Every human being, every single day, regardless of age, culture or religion, needs to eat. And because food is essential for everybody, my argument is that everybody should have some say in how it is produced, distributed, and governed.

But I always make one important clarification here. Commons do not mean something that belongs to everybody or to nobody. A commons cannot exist without a community.

This is what scholars like Elinor Ostrom, the first female economist to win the Nobel Prize in Economics, spent decades documenting: commons are not chaotic free-for-all systems. They have institutions, sanctions, unwritten rules and boundaries like formal institutions. They are often extremely sophisticated systems of governance that are attuned to their environments and societal needs. That’s why they are so resilient.

THIN: How is this different from food as a public good, or food as a human right?

JOSE LUIS: I like to refer always to food as a public good, human right, and commons. I don’t want to be a hardliner of valuing food as a commons exclusively because I recognise that food has multiple meanings.

Enacting food as a commons, the authority to govern food rests primarily with the community. With food as a public good, the authority lies with the state, whereas with food as a human right, it becomes a legal construct with right holders and duty bearers. Governments have obligations, but judges and courts also become important, because if that right is violated, people can seek legal remedy.

I sometimes think of those definitions as being on opposite sides of a river. On one side, food as commodity. On the other, food as commons, public good and human right, recognising the multiple dimensions and the essentialness of food to every human being

So they overlap in many ways although they do not refer exactly to the same political concept.

THIN: What about food sovereignty? Where does that intersect with food as commons?

JOSE LUIS: The food sovereignty movement shares a lot of commonalities with the idea of food as a commons.

Actually, both reject the idea that food should simply be treated and allocated as a commodity, and both insist that people should have much more democratic control over food systems.

For many years, the food sovereignty movements did not explicitly use the language of commons. But more recently, that has started to change, partly because more people are paying attention to indigenous peoples’ food systems, where this way of thinking has existed al along.

If you look at indigenous communities - from the Inuit in northern Canada to groups in Papua New Guinea - they value food differently. For them, food is sacred. It is relational and a Mother Earth’s product. There is a connection between food, natural cycles and divinities.

I’ve always felt very aligned with food sovereignty movements. My contribution, if I can call it that, is simply to say perhaps we should recognise more explicitly that many indigenous peoples’ food systems, and also many contemporary food initiatives like community-supported agriculture or food-sharing initiatives, are already treating food in this multidimensional way.

THIN: Garrett Hardin’s “tragedy of the commons” is one of the most cited ideas in modern economics. You’ve pushed back on this. Why do you think that framing is wrong when it comes to food systems?

JOSE LUIS: Firstly, I think Hardin’s paper was mislabelled from the very beginning. It wasn’t the tragedy of the commons. It was the tragedy of resources that belong to no one.

The commons, they belong to the commoners, to the communities. That could be an ethnic group, a neighbourhood, perhaps a village. They have institutions and rules. That is something Garrett Hardin forgot.

He described the commons as the Wild West, as a no man’s land. Everybody could go there and grab whatever they want without rules. But that is not true.

Take the acequias in southern Spain, for example - traditional irrigation systems managed collectively by farming communities in Sierra Nevada. If I live in Granada city, I cannot simply decide I have rights to that water because I am not part of the community governing it.

Or take the Scandinavian countries, where people can forage berries or mushrooms or fish trouts in the rivers on land that do not belong to them under the customary Viking-inherited “every man’s right.” That doesn’t mean unlimited access to do anything.

Secondly, the concluding consequence of Hardin’s paper was that once you erase community governance and institutions, then privatisation or state control begin to look like the only alternatives. But they’re not because those commons already have governing institutions.

Finally, Hardin’s paper has been extensively debunked by many authors for several decades, so I am not the only one criticising its relevance to justify privatisations or state seizure.

THIN: Take us back to the beginning. How did you even get interested in this concept in the first place? Was there a lightbulb moment?

JOSE LUIS:  I’ve worked in food systems since 1998. I started with an assignment in Georgia, then worked with NGOs, the European Commission, FAO, and currently in the World Food Programme.

Throughout this period, the dominant narrative and the policies and programs most often referred to are always market driven. Like we need to facilitate businesses in the food system, we need to be more competitive, to sell better and more, to have better trading and negotiating power. Because as a commodity, the best allocation mechanism for food is globalised markets.

So I was wondering: why is that? Why don’t we think about public solutions, public programmes and public budgets (for food) in the same way we do in general for health and education? That was like a worm in my brain.

This question stayed in my head for maybe 15 years.

Then during my PhD in the University of Louvain, with Olivier De Schutter as my supervisor, I finally had time to step back and think seriously about it.

That was when I discovered inspiring authors such as Elinor Ostrom, Karl Polanyi, or Peter Kropotkin’s work on mutual aid, and a whole body of thinking around commons and cooperation as the fittest survival strategy for human beings.

And I suddenly realised there were millions of people already organising food systems differently, below the radar, outside the mainstream - indigenous communities and smallholder farmers. I even discovered the abundance of common lands in Europe that most people don’t even know still exist. We’re talking about hundred million hectares more or less. It’s incredible.

So it wasn’t really a sudden moment. It was more like a long accumulation of questions and doubts finally coming together.

THIN: Wow… I never knew about the common lands in Europe. I guess it feeds into this vicious cycle where people don’t know that a concept already exists in practice and is working, because they don’t see the examples or the body of research, and therefore we think the system we currently have is the only one we got.

JOSE LUIS: A colleague of mine, Antonio Manzoni, an Italian researcher, was analysing all the documents in the Common Agricultural Policy - legal documents, policy documents, subsidies, etc. and he found not a single mention of commons or common lands in Europe. They do not simply exist as policy-relevant subjects.

It’s a question of being below the radar, either inadvertently or on purpose. The commons are not seen, valued or measured in many European countries, and remember, you only value what you measure. They are not rendered visible, because the states and the markets don’t have an interest on doing that.

Because if they recognise how relevant the commons are for human beings, not only indigenous peoples, but also for Caucasian Westerners in London, well…. You need to pay some attention to institutions that are neither state- nor market-driven.

THIN: To me, seeds are one of the clearest examples of going from commons - where people share and manage them - to being privatised, legalised, and protected behind patents. Do you see it the same way too? And what do you think of the argument that farmers need better, improved, more resilient seeds to adapt to climate change and that can only be delivered through privatisation?

JOSE LUIS: I think the underlying statement or rationality that many in good faith advocate about this idea of privatisation of seeds is because they think only privatised seeds will incentivise innovation. Only by limiting the monetary profit to those who breed and improve the seeds, the good traits of seeds will be developed by private food companies.

Those who defend the privatisation of seeds don’t value the innovation being carried out through centuries and millennia by smallholder farmers, benefiting the whole humanity because it is shared as open-access knowledge. Sometimes thousands of minds working openly on a problem can produce better solutions than just a group of private breeders. Look at open-source software such as Mozilla Firefox, or even recipes by superstar chefs.

I’m not against making profits, I’m against profit maximisation at any cost, especially when the negative externalities fall upon nature, distant places, cheap labour or seed custodians, mostly women.

THIN: What would you say are the first steps towards de-commodifying food and governing it as a commons?

JOSE LUIS: The first step is recognition. I borrow here from Nancy Fraser’s work where she said states and market actors first need to recognise the legitimacy of the commons, collective actions for food, and indigenous people’s food systems. Those food systems do exist, are relevant to the people, are resilient to shocks (climate, economic and conflict) and are thriving despite waves of privatisation and enclosure.

The states may then use tools to govern and support those commons, such as laws and regulations, public budgets, targeted subsidies, and public procurement schemes. Actually, public procurement is a wonderful tool to leverage the transition towards more sustainable food systems.

The other day I read the New York municipal council is the second-largest food purchaser in the U.S., spending over $500 million annually to serve meals across public schools, hospitals, homeless shelters, and correctional facilities. So you can imagine the power of the Municipal Council to exert an influence in the food systems in New York state.

Subsidies are another aspect. They are heavily focused on a few caloric staples such a maize, soybeans, and industrial meat production… but if commons institutions were recognised and protected by law, then policies and regulations that favour their survival and expansion could be enacted and promoted through subsidies.

Institutionally speaking, we shall find a better balance in the triangle between three major political agents of the food systems: the enabling state, the social market, and the self-regulated collective actions. Currently, in most national food systems, collective actions/commons are occupying a small corner. I propose they should be facilitated to occupy a larger share in the food provision domain.

Disclaimer: I don’t want the commons to occupy the entire triangle because there is a commonsensical role for the states (food as a public good and human right) as well as the markets (food as a commodity).

THIN: Are there real-world examples of food already being governed as a commons?

JOSE LUIS: Yes. Thousands all over the world. Earlier, I talked about “every man’s right” in the Scandinavian countries.

Elinor Ostrom studied the lobster fisheries of Maine extensively: how communities developed their own rules and regulations around sustainability, quotas (who can fish, how many lobsters per day), and closed seasons to allow new broods to come through. She also studied the orchards and vegetable gardens of Huertas in Valencia.

In Cameroon and across Sub-Saharan Africa, there are thousands of examples - savannah lands, forest lands, pasturelands - where governance has been officially transferred from central governments to customary chiefs. Actually, researchers and UN institutions are claiming that almost half of Africa is still collectively governed as a commons (customary food systems).

The final example I would like to bring was issued by IFPRI, a CGIAR institution. They documented that 350 million people in India depend on common lands for their livelihoods nowadays. That means that one fifth of India is officially managed as common land.

THIN: What would you say to ordinary people who care about food but feel trapped inside the current system that is not of their making?

JOSE LUIS: My suggestion would be to take food seriously and act accordingly

Don’t take it for granted simply because you have money and can go to the supermarket to buy the food you want. Join an alternative food system like food buying groups, community-supported agriculture, or food sharing initiative in your city or village. Alternatively, you can become a member of your municipal food council.

Buy locally, seasonally and ecologically when possible. Grow something yourself, even something small. That food tastes differently.

Get cooking.

Be an active citizen and eater. Don’t be just a passive consumer.

A final disclaimer: I’m saying this for people like us (urbanites) not to people in South Sudan or rural Bolivia, because they already produce and consume their own food.

THIN: Is there anything else you’d like to add?

JOSE LUIS: I’ve been regretting a lot that this idea has not gained enough traction.

I would like to see more people writing, speaking, and collecting cases in the world and making this point more visible. If we want to shift the narrative, we need to convince more decision makers and bring more people to our sides.

I don’t talk about commons only, okay? Remember, it’s about this side of the river, including food sovereignty, food democracy, alternative food movements, food as human right, commons, and public good. Don’t be trapped in limiting or exclusionary definitions.

I’m pretty sure I won’t see something like a universal food access system in my lifetime - something equivalent to universal healthcare or public education - but I hope that will happen in a few generations. In any case, the seed has to be sown a century earlier.

Thin’s Pickings

1. Cattle and Soy capture 47% of family farming funds over three decades - O Joio e O Trigo
   A longread on how a programme set up to support family farms may be unwittingly supporting monoculture, according to the Brazilian investigative outlet which has recently launched a regular newsletter in English. You can subscribe here.
   

2. Why Your Summer Tomatoes Cost So Much - Bloomberg
   ”Weather has long affected grocery store prices, but increasingly frequent bouts of extreme heat, drought and flooding are putting household budgets on the frontlines of climate change.”
   

3. The War Forgotten by the World Is an Apocalypse Now - The New York Times

   For all its shortcomings in the coverage of domestic politics or Gaza, NYT remains one of the very few international outlets not to have forgotten Myanmar. This is a must-read. Pair it with this excellent documentary from the BBC that came out a couple of weeks ago.

As always, please feel free to share this post and send tips and thoughts on bluesky @thinink.bsky.social, mastodon @ThinInk@journa.host, my LinkedIn page, twitter @thinink, or via e-mail thin@thin-ink.net.