Seminar: “Food sovereignty in the Caribbean? Exploring the possibilities through the lens of rice production in the Dominican Republic” by Marion Werner

Title: “Food sovereignty in the Caribbean? Exploring the possibilities through the lens of rice production in the Dominican Republic”

Speaker: Marion Werner, Department of Geography, SUNY-Buffalo

Date: Monday, October 22nd 2018

Time: 12:30 h

Venue: Room Z/022 ICTA-UAB

This talk considers broader debates on food sovereignty and uneven development in relation to the Dominican Republic’s food system. The Dominican state plays a central role in national food production relative to many of its neighbours in the Caribbean, a region highly exposed to international market regulation of food and agriculture. I explore why this is the case through the lens of the country’s formidable rice economy, which regularly meets domestic demand. Drawing on interviews with sector and government leaders and a survey of small rice farmers, I argue that Dominican rice production materializes state sovereignty in the context of a regulatory patchwork that is formally dominated by international markets and multinational corporations. The preponderance of these latter forces is slated to intensify under a free trade agreement (i.e., DR-CAFTA) that lowers tariff protections on sensitive food items, including rice. My analysis points to the challenges for transformative food sovereignty politics in this context, where state practices are at once hostile to progressive demands for food justice and, at the same time, relatively effective in undermining the hyper-marketization agenda advanced by Washington. 

Bio

Marion Werner is an Associate Professor and co-Director of the Center for Trade, Environment and Development in the Department of Geography at the State University of New York, Buffalo. She is the author of Global Displacements: The making of uneven development in the Caribbean (Wiley-Blackwell, 2016) and co-editor of The Doreen Massey Reader and Doreen Massey: Critical Dialogues (Agenda, 2018). She is a visiting professor in the Department of Geography at the Autonomous University of Barcelona (UAB) for 2018-2019.