Thinking Globally and Systemically: The 2016 Food Justice Summit
Control over food, and the resources necessary to produce food, has had a long and intimate relationship with the economic logic that currently rules our world.
When common lands were taken from commoners in England's "great enclosure movement" several hundred years ago, it was justified as a transformation of "waste" into "improved" land. To "improve" literally meant to do something for monetary profit. Peasant evictions and the commercialization of agriculture were claimed necessary to the process of modernization and increasing productivity, thus purportedly contributing to the common good. This historical moment of massive dispossession arguably marks the very origins of capitalism.
The same rationality that underlay England's enclosure movement vindicated colonial endeavors around the world. Imperial projects fathomed their legitimacy in particular and peculiar valuations of improvement and progress, constructing ideologies by which expropriating local populations was adding to the "common stock."
Such ideas persisted in 19th century Hawaiʻi, informing the Māhele enclosures and subsequent plantation development. Missionaries and business interests melded morality with the logic of profit, advising that land privatization would liberate innate human desires and build a strong and productive nation. As the sophisticated
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