CASAS’ members Mauricio Betancourt, Claudia I. Camacho Benavides, Alonso Gutiérrez Navarro and Pei Jiang have published this article as a part of the Special Issue “Food Sovereignty and Systems Change” in The Journal of Peasant Studies.
Abstract: The metabolic rift concept highlights capitalism’s disruption of socioecological metabolism, extracting soil nutrients from rural areas for urban consumption and discarding them as waste. Partly in response, La Vía Campesina promotes food sovereignty, asserting communities’ rights to govern their food systems justly and sustainably. Its six pillars foster local production and resource circulation, offering a concrete path to repair the metabolic rift. Yet, the connection between metabolic rift, food sovereignty, and critical agrarian studies remains underdeveloped. This paper strengthens that nexus, arguing that each framework enriches the other, thereby fostering political practice. Through historical analysis of industrial agriculture, including its ties to Peru’s nineteenth-century guano (bird dung) trade, and its alternatives, we show how the metabolic rift disrupts food-soil cycles globally. In turn, we argue that food sovereignty praxis offers solutions to the metabolic rift. Integrating these frameworks within critical agrarian studies improves understanding of how food systems perpetuate or counter the rift, offering insights for the ecosocialist struggle within and beyond academia.
Read their full article here: https://doi.org/10.1080/03066150.2026.2617440
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CASAS
The Collective of Agrarian Scholar-Activists from the Global South (CASAS) is a community of Scholar-Activists working in critical agrarian studies.