What Role for Trade in Food Sovereignty? Insights from a Small Island Archipelago

The food sovereignty movement has been gathering momentum alongside critical engagements regarding its privileging of local food production as an expression of agency and control over food systems. Adopting a place-based approach, we explore the foodways of diverse communities across a small island archipelago – the Turks and Caicos Islands in the West Indies. Our approach contributes to a body of work that responds to a major methodological limitation noted of the food sovereignty movement: that its protagonists often assume the right to speak on behalf of communities, allegedly knowing what will be ‘good’ for them, while also exploring conditions of acceptable international trade. Based on interviews and focus groups, we unpack narratives relating to islanders’ changing foodways and aspirations, understood as two competing but inter-related themes of disruption and reification of current practices shaped by wider food regimes. Given that conditions of historic dependency implicate the islands in myriad sets of dependent trade relationships, we argue that small island economies, offer, and require, unique cases for understanding how sovereign conditions for trade might be developed in line with a food sovereignty framework.