Following Michael Fakhri’s excellent presentation on the Right to Food and Food Sovereignty at the Third World Approaches to International Law (TWAIL) conference hosted by the National University of Singapore from 19 to 21 July 2018, Flora IP caught up with him to hear more about his research. Michael is a faculty member of the Environmental and Natural Resources Law Center where he co-leads the Food Resiliency Project at the School of Law, University of Oregon. His academic interests include Food Policy, TWAIL, International Economic Law, Commercial Law and Urban Farming.
Flora IP (FI): You presented a paper on the Right to Food and Food Sovereignty at the Third World Approaches to International Law (TWAIL) Conference, can you tell me more about this paper?
Michael Fakhri (MF): In this paper, I am looking at food sovereignty, but I want to start with my understanding of sovereignty. What has been amazing about not just the idea of food sovereignty, but the food sovereignty movement is that they have challenged all of us to rethink our understanding of sovereignty, law and rights. So, I start with the limits of sovereignty. Like many TWAILers (TWAIL Scholars), I come from a country where we struggled for our sovereignty, but it has proven to be a bitter-sweet victory. We are struggling to understand how to change our relationships with each other and with concepts of authority.
The food sovereignty movement starts from the grassroots and is explicitly political, dynamic and open to dialogue.
I am learning from the movement. I am learning from their struggle. I am learning from their specific fights. The paper is then about the relationship between third world sovereignty and food sovereignty. Food sovereignty also has its indigenous peoples as part of the movement, but the indigenous struggle for sovereignty and against sovereignty has its history.
In this paper, I am trying to think like a teacher and a student. How can I look at these struggles, their everyday practices and turn them into teachable concepts in ways for students to be inspired and to know where to look for new ideas and new dynamics?
FI: How did you get interested in research on food and TWAIL?
MF: Food – Food started when I was doing my PhD. I was blessed and lucky to have a mentor and supervisor who gave me the freedom to work on any topic. In our first meeting, she asked: what do you want to do?
At first, I thought this was a luxury; then I realised that it is also a curse. With that degree of freedom, I had to ask myself – who am I? Because a PhD is a long process. It is a lonely process, and if I was not honest with myself, if I was not working from my heart every single day, the PhD was going to be bigger than me. It was going to take over. I had to be in charge of the PhD. So, I thought – what is the first thing I think about and what do I talk about when I talk to my friends? Before I say hello, I ask – what did you make for lunch? And we share recipes. Also, being an immigrant, one’s relationship with food changes.
Food is pleasure. Food is fun, Food is every day.
My PhD and first book were about sugar. I have met people who grew up on sugar cane farms. I have met people who have talked about diabetics in their families simply because I said I study sugar. Food is a topic that by definition opens up conversations and leads to sharing. As I am getting older, I realise that I am reverting to my family origins of peasantry. We are peasants from Lebanon. My father is retired, and he has an apple orchard. We talk about the apple season, what he is doing for irrigation. And now with my garden, there is the pleasure in engaging with life -with the biosphere every single day. Because I realise that the more I engage with life as it is happening, the more I appreciate other layers of complexities. Just when I tried to figure out something, I realise other connections. It humbles you in terms of knowledge.
TWAIL – I was a student activist in law school. The way I was taught law was that my politics was what I did after class. I did not have the means of articulating my politics through law.
I was working as a lawyer in a big corporate firm in Toronto when September 11 happened. Being an Arab in a large financial tower, many of the partners started saying racist things. I was naïve because I was surprised. But now I realise that I shouldn’t have been surprised. Of course, that’s the response expected.
Then I started searching for the people in international law that expressed the feelings that I had which I did not know how to describe in law. I’ve always been inspired by the work of Edward Said. So, I just typed Edward Said in a legal database, and it was the work of Antony Anghie that popped up. I read it, and it was inspirational. The other work was a piece by Richard Falk about Edward Said – International Law and Edward Said. In his footnote, he mentioned some people including Balakrishnan Rajagopal. I thought I want to hang out with these people, and I did through happenstance, meetings and reading more.
TWAIL has turned into a friendship, a home, a love and a comradery that I have never experienced anywhere. So, TWAIL has given me strength and confidence.
There is no card, website or application to becoming a TWAILer. You just write a piece saying, I am thinking about the same questions of social justice, equality, oppression, liberation with a particular history. If you want to be in TWAIL, that means you are in TWAIL. TWAIL is open. You self- identify.
FI: Simply put, what is TWAIL?
MF: TWAIL is an intellectual movement whose origins start, I think, primarily in the 1950s, when in Asia and Africa, the majority of people around the world gained independence. Of course, the peoples of Latin America gained their independence a lot earlier. You will see this history in TWAIL. There is a larger number of scholars from Asia, Africa and Latin America. So, it is a movement that its starting point is thinking about international law as the moment of independence, with all its dark sides, problems and limitations. It is post-colonial in that sense.
The key concept that runs through all TWAIL thinking is that you cannot understand international law without understanding imperialism.
Now, what we mean by imperialism, we will have differences. What role imperialism plays within law, we will have our differences. Is law able to push against imperialism or is it inevitably a dead end, we will have our differences. But it is those differences that make the community. But we agree on the question: Can international law provide a new future despite its imperial tendencies.
FI: How does TWAIL shape your scholarly work?
MF: TWAIL for me is a community, so when I am writing, it is the audience that I am imagining. My writing is a continuation of the conversations I have with people. Writing can be a very lonely process. With academic writing, the language can be technical. But I want people to read my work. I’m excited to send my piece to a friend, comrade, or colleague. I look to them to learn. For example, when I want to learn about investment law, I start with, who in TWAIL is writing about investment law? When I want to learn about intellectual property, I look at who in TWAIL is doing intellectual property. They are my teachers too. They are my entry point into scholarship.
FI: What legal (and non-legal) changes would you like to see in the food and agriculture systems at the international and regional/national levels?
MF: Our friendship started through our shared interest in agroecology. So, let us put our friendship in this conversation. I am excited about agroecology because it is challenging everyone’s relationship with each other. When I say everyone, it is not just humans. With the non-human world: plants, spirit world and ecological dynamics. To think in such holistic and interconnected ways, by definition means we have to reimagine law. So, one version of law’s relationship with agroecology could be the scientists, agroecologists, food producers on the ground through their experimentation and everyday practices are going to redefine the new system and then law will be the technical tool to implement whatever they figure out. But I do not think that is the right way to go. If we embed law within these new agroecological practices, it will emerge in new forms, it should change your sense of what counts as law, what we mean by law.
I am hoping agroecology will give law all the humility it always needs.
I think law as a way of asserting and using the language of authority and power; it has an arrogance that you cannot do away with. If you embed it in agroecological practices, law then serves a dynamic that is always changing. Dynamics of life are always complex. The term evolution is an ecological term. Evolution is not an idea of progress but one of continuous adaptation and change, which I think law can learn a lot from.
FI: Can you share some of your favourite information sources?
MF: There is a lot of literature on agroecology and food sovereignty, but the advice I was given when I was a graduate student was: read everything, not just academic publications. Read fiction, read whatever you feel will nourish your mind and body. When I write, my inspirations often are not necessarily legal. I enjoy science fiction. A lot of my ideas and inspiration have come from writers such as Ursula Le Guin. Science fiction is a way of imagining a new world, a new future and new relationships. That is what I will like to do with law. I will like to be a science fiction writer in law. I would highly recommend that people do not make a distinction between their scholarly reading and their pleasure reading, as that also forces one to become a better writer.
Read more about Michael’s scholarly work here.
Photo credit: School of Law, University of Oregon.
