Episode 48: Jose Vivero Pol on The Food Commons
What do we mean by the food commons? What can we learn from Nobel-prize winning economist Elinor Ostrom about debunking the “tragedy of the commons” mythology?
Why is food treated like a commodity and how can food be a common good? Who stands to gain by shifting this paradigm?
Jose Luis Vivero Pol has a PhD from the Catholic University of Louvain. He is an anti-hunger and social rights activist with fourteen years of experience on food security policies and programs, Right to Food advocacy, nutrition interventions, and food sovereignty in Latin America, Africa, and the Caucasus. Additionally, he has experience in biodiversity conservation and plant genetic resources. An agricultural engineer by profession, his current interests include the ethical, legal, and political dimensions of the transition toward fairer and more sustainable food systems, the governance of global commons, and the motivations for biodiversity conservation and anti-hunger actions. He is an editor of the Routledge Handbook of Food as a Commons, an indispensable resource on the topic.
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Episode #48 Notes
0:30 - What do you mean by a “commons” and where does it orginiate?
2:30 - On The Tragedy of The Commons, and why it’s BS.
6:00 - What are some commons in our everyday lives that we might take for granted?
9:00 - How is a food commons different than our current food system?
15:50 - How do market relations interface with the commons?
30:15 - What is preferable about a food commons?
35:00 - What happens to the private market in a food commons system?
42:30 - How do social movements and activism interface with food commons?
48:00 - Book recommendations!
Routledge Handbook of Food as a Commons, Jose Luis Vivero-Pol
Free, Fair, and Alive, David Bollier and Silke Helfrich
Re-Enchanting the World: Feminism and the Politics of the Commons, Silvia Federici
Mutual Aid, Peter Kropotkin
Governing The Commons, Elinor Ostrum
