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Timo Bartholl engages in local grassroots work and has lived in the Maré favela in Rio de Janeiro since 2008. He works at the interface of university and community, is a geography professor at the Fluminense Federal University (UFF) in Niterói, Brazil, and a founding member of the Roça! Collective. Geographies in movement(s), militant investigation, favela resistance, urban struggles related to food sovereignty/ food autonomy, collective economies, and geopolitics from a Global South perspective are his key fields of interest.

Issue #153 of The Internationalist, we excerpt from his essay 'Favela Resistance and the Struggle for Food Sovereignty in Rio de Janeiro'. Here, he highlights how cities depend on the countryside for food, but achieving true food sovereignty for all urban residents requires building networks of resistance that connect marginalized neighborhoods to peri-urban and rural food producers.

When it comes to reflections on food and the city, one of the first things that come to mind is the high dependence of the urban areas on food production in non-urban areas. Whatever the city, people need to eat. But there seems to be limited space and conditions to grow crops and breed livestock that would be enough for a city’s whole population. “If the countryside doesn’t plant, the city doesn’t have dinner” is a common saying among social movements that defend small farmers and land occupiers in Brazil that underlines the importance of mainly peri-urban and rural-based small-scale food production for the maintenance of the metabolism of the urban. For cities to live, their inhabitants must have access to food. They need to eat. We have a general idea of just how important urban agriculture is in some urban contexts. Estimates are that 15 to 20 percent of what we eat comes from urban agriculture. For this reason, it has great importance, not only on a mere symbolic level but also in the very material sense of providing food: urban agriculture must be seen as an intrinsic part of urbanization processes. Still though, if the city in general terms depends on less densely populated agricultural areas in order “to have dinner,” what is there to be said about those parts of the cities inhabited by the people most struggling to guarantee their urban subsistence and survival, those who live in high density areas with precarious urban infrastructure, those who are repeatedly neglected by public authorities and subjected to contradictory forms of integration into capitalist market relations, or those who live in the urban peripheries? Could it be anything more than a theoretical provocation or challenge (to ourselves, as well as to others) to think of food security and more importantly, food sovereignty, and how to fight for these from the perspective of those at the urban margins? Can food sovereignty ever be attained at the urban peripheries, and if so, how?

What do we mean by urban? We do not only find agricultural activities in the more densely populated urban areas within cities, as is the case in the municipality of Rio de Janeiro with its approximately six million inhabitants, but throughout its metropolitan area as a whole, which consists of seventeen municipalities with a total of approximately twelve million city dwellers. With Paulo Roberto Alentejano we can consider that the process of urbanization includes processes that create new urban and new rural and new in-between forms of socio-spatial organization, that are not simply based on “the pure and simple elimination of the rural and its transmutation into the urban, but a more complex phenomenon, where the new urban and the new rural [or new urbans and new rurals, we might want to add], emerge from the shock of both.”

Especially in the West Zone of the Rio municipality we find what we can call, with Silvia Baptista, an “urban peasantry” in the region around the Pedra Branca mountain range, known as Sertão Carioca. At the fringes of the metropolitan area we find what we could call a “peri-urban” peasantry. The Rio de Janeiro metropolitan area produces food and some of it at a large scale, as is the case with bananas or manioc. This broader understanding of the urban, suggests that we should also broaden our notion of our struggle for the right to the city.

“Although the right to the city is generally taken almost exclusively as the struggle for access to urban equipment, it transcends this concept. In The Right to the City, Henri Lefebvre . . . makes it explicit that this is the right to fight against the subordination of lives to the exchange value of capital. This insubordination has the city as a privileged locus, place of meetings, of the centrality of power, which can potentiate social transformations. That is, the right to the city is the right to change humanity and society.”16In this sense the struggle for a right to the city has to be understood as a struggle for another (so)ci(e)ty. Cities cannot be transformed unless society and peripheries—be they urban, peri-urban, or rural—are organized in a different form. They cannot become more (food) sovereign. After all, full sovereignty at local level is only possible once we overcome the structure of current capitalist society based on exploitative and violent power relations toward a society that knows, as the Zapatistas have said, neither centers, nor peripheries.

In light of the diverse forms of agriculture in the Rio de Janeiro metropolitan area, it is important to note that the territory of our research experience was the densely populated favelas in the North Zone of Rio. The favelas of Maré characterize a region where only a few larger urban gardens have been established over the last decades; some of these were quite productive at some point, but could not all be maintained due to problems including the tension of armed conflicts near one of the main urban gardens on the grounds of a public grade school. In more than three hundred short interviews we conducted in mid-2018, not a single one of our interviewees, living in different parts of Maré, mentioned food consumption derived from homegrown food items. Supermarkets, fruit and vegetable stores, fairs, and street stands are the main sources of food here. The Maré region is traditionally home to an urban fishing community that have their boats at the Canal do Fundão from which they access the Guanabara Bay or even the open sea. Since the bay is highly polluted, even though fishing is still frequent, its importance for Maré’s population as a whole (be it as fishers or as consumers) has decreased over the past decades. This might explain why our research group never stopped to consider and analyze the importance of these remaining small-scale craft fishing activities throughout the project’s duration. Traditional street fish vendors, with whom we exchanged ideas, usually get their fish from main distribution centers such as Rio’s main food supply center CEASA-RJ. In general we must consider that in the favelas of Maré the amount of primary local food production is certainly significantly below potentially possible production levels. At the same time, we must consider that even reaching higher amounts of local primary food production, the area would continue to depend on bringing food from other areas that produce more than is locally needed. We must differentiate Maré as a densely populated inner-city periphery from less densely populated or even peri-urban peripheries of Rio’s metropolitan area. It is in this general spirit that we experienced our action research. We asked: How can we learn more about, and eventually produce, more agroecological healthy food and how can we get access to all the food that we cannot potentially produce here? Who to collaborate with, whose struggles to connect to, and how to network from the urban to the peri-urban and rural—and vice versa? We can refer to these questions as the challenge to imagine, think through, and bring forward the building and strengthening of rural-, peri-, and inner-urban networks of territories of resistance in the struggle to increase the (food) sovereignty of the popular (or peripheral) classes.

If we seem at times very distant from being able to increase our degree of sovereignty, especially when it comes to food in favelas such as those of Maré, understanding the favelas and their dynamics as territories of resistance can be crucial to grasp what might be essential in order to make food sovereignty here a less distant idea. In doing so, it is important to take sovereignty as a general concept further and to think of it in a self-emancipatory way. When we talk about food, we talk about food production, food distribution, and food consumption; therefore we also necessarily talk about multiple and entangled economic activities of primary importance for the material reproduction of any social group, be it rural or (peri-)urban. Only by collectivizing our ways of thinking and consequently putting all economic and community activities related to food into building stronger networks among more and less densely populated rural and (peri-)urban peripheries, will food sovereignty become a real possibility.

Excerpted with permission from Favela Resistance: Urban Periphery, Pacification, and the Struggle for Food Sovereignty, published by PM Press, 2025.

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