Vivero Pol argues that conceptualizing food as a commons rather than a private good could help address world hunger and promote healthier and more sustainable food systems. Treating more aspects of food production and distribution as commons could help maximize access to nutritious food. Currently, the privatization and commodification of food resources has led to concentration of control in the food system and prioritized profits over access. Reframing food as a commons recognizes it as a human right and entitles all people to a minimum amount of food, while limiting the proprietary claims of food companies. Vivero Pol proposes decentralized, community-based food production systems as a transition toward greater "re-commonification" of food.

1. Seeing Food as a Commons Opens Up
Creative New Possibilities
by David Bollier – TRANSCEND Media Service
What would the world look like if we began to re-
conceptualize food as a commons? Jose Luis Vivero Pol of the
Centre for Philosophy of Law at Catholic University of Louvain
in Belgium has done just that in a recent essay, “Food as a
Commons: Reframing the Narrative of the Food System.”
The piece is impressive for daring to imagine
how the world’s estimated 668 million hungry
people might eat, and how all of us would
become healthier, if we treated more elements
of the food production and distribution
system as commons. Jose Luis Vivero Pol

2. Instead of managing food as a private good that can only be
produced and allocated through markets, re-conceptualizing
food as a commons helps us imagine “a more sustainable,
fairer and farmer-centered food system,” writes Vivero Pol.
One reason that the commons reframing is so useful is that it
helps us see the ubiquity of enclosures in the food system.
We can begin to see the galloping privatization of farmland,
water, energy and seeds. We can see the concentration of
various food sectors and the higher
prices and loss of consumer
sovereignty that comes from
oligopoly control.

3. Enclosure is snatching shared resources from us and
preventing us from managing them to maximize access and
good nutrition. This is often known these days as “resource
grabbing,” as companies and national governments race to
seize as many abundant, cheap natural resources as they can
on an international scale. This is one reason for the many
pernicious enclosures of land commons in Africa and Latin
America in recent years. There is a huge exodus from
traditional and indigenous lands as China, Saudi Arabia,
Korea, hedge funds and others buy
up natural resources. These
enclosures are moving us “from
diversity to uniformity, from
complexity to homoegeneity, and
from richness to impoverishment,” writes Vivero Pol.

4. Strangely, “no one has really questioned the
nature of food as a private good, produced
by private inputs or privately harvested in
enclosed areas of the world. "Yet asking such
a question helps us to see why massive
hunger can persist with food abundance.
The ethic of “no money, no food” means that
only those with sufficient "consumer demand" are entitled to
food. And even then, good health is no guarantee because
the industrialized food model actively promotes expensive
processed foods that are either non-nutritious or actively
harmful to our health, but more lucrative to companies.

5. It helps to remember that many aspects of food are already
considered commons, notes Vivero Pol. For example, fish
stocks, unpatented genetic resources, wild fruits, recipes,
agricultural knowledge and food safety regulations cannot be
owned and can be harvested and used by anyone or by
bounded commons.
Most cultivated food, however, is generally a private good,
which means that food is vulnerable to being traded, hoarded
and sold for competing uses (e.g., biofuels, animal feed) if it
can fetch more money. In the classic economists’ formulation,
food that is privatized and commoditized can be made
“excludable” and “rival,” and this in practice tends to override
any moral entitlements or human rights claims over food.

6. This means that private control has
enormous public consequences. If
people go hungry because they can’t
afford food, they suffer diet-related
illnesses such as diabetes and heart
disease. Their psychological health
suffers. They may die of malnutrition.
This of course has diverse economic,
political and social effects that an
economist would consider an
unfortunate but inexorable “externality”
for which buyers and sellers have no
responsibility. But it is quite obvious that
such are the predictable outcomes of
the commoditization of food.

7. So how might we convert privately
owned food production into more of
a public good? (Vivero Pol uses
“public good” and “commons”
interchangeably, while acknowledging
that the former term is used in
economic contexts and the latter in
sociological contexts. But I would
suggest that the two terms should be
emphatically separated to make clear
that the commons has generative
capacities and social grounding that a
"public good" does not.)”

8. Once we regard food as a commons, we can begin to see
that everybody ought to have a human right to food.
“Another implication would be that food should be kept out
of trade agreements dealing with pure private goods,” writes
Vivero Pol. We would also need to develop an international
legal framework to regulate food as a global level, and
guarantee everyone a minimum amount of food as a
“universal Basic Food Entitlement”.
The commons perspective would also help us push back on
the many proprietary rights and privileges that food
companies have claimed for themselves – the patent
privileges for seeds, the exemption from environmental
responsibility (for pesticides, large-scale pig farms and cattle
feedlots, etc.), the huge public subsidies foragribusiness, the
corporate capture of university research agendas, and more.

9. He proposes or revives such ideas as “social charters” and
“food trusts” adopted by local communities or associations.
Such “decentralized, self-governing systems of fooproduction”
would provide fairer access, higher efficiency and greater
concern for externalities in food production, than the market
would provide. The “re-commonification of food shall take
several generations,” predicts Vivero Pol, so he offers a
number of transition strategies for the commons, government
and market sectors.
It’s refreshing to read such imaginative yet rigorous
scholarship about food as a commons and how the concept
might be practically advanced. Policymakers, politicians and
commoners would all benefit from exploring the concepts that
Vivero Pol proposes.