Lucas McKinnon
Pacific Gateway Center
Honolulu, HI
My summer work has been testing ground for the tangible, an opportunity to engage the theory and discourse of international human rights within a local nonprofit constrained by seasonal funding, private donors, socio-politics, and the vestiges of dispossession. PGC operates in this arena, which permits the organization to focus on myriad human rights abuses across the state – including food insecurity, lack of political representation, and human trafficking. However, over the last few months, it has become clear that a number of our programs and activities are permissible and operationalized within a predetermined field, precisely organized according to the limits of the capitalist agribiopolitics of the state. In this form of ‘NGOization’, options for transformative justice are precluded by laws and practices set forth by the county, state, US military, and private corporations.
It has been eye-opening to see the parallels between my initial study of Paraguayan agribiopolitics and the situation domestically, and important to recognize the globalized ubiquity of the challenges posed by land-grabbing, privatization, the death of the commons, imperceptible adjustments to the meaning and practice of violence and, increasingly thereby, the protection of the corporate state’s ‘right to maim.’ These challenges color the ongoing programming of PGC, problematizing the normative qualities of public health, sustainable farming, and immigrant rights. In a concrete example, Monsanto is our neighbor to the north and south of our organically managed farms. The corporation shares the same public water source as PGC (runoff), leases land for cheap to other immigrant farmers (greenwashing), and dominates the local agricultural market with GMO seed corn (global corporate integration). Similarly in Paraguay, Monsanto was the largest regional landowner and user of inorganic pesticides in the area we were to be working. Many of the obstacles to effecting resilient agriculture and secure food systems are spread – and obfuscated – globally.
Although the daily issues we deal with are not new to me, working specifically within the framework of international human rights has given me a deeper understanding and more acute critique of my role and work. Engaging in agriculture and food system policy was, for me, a way to engage on a more fundamental level with preventive global public health. This summer has proven that any effort toward transformative public health must be founded on Third World Approaches to International Law (TWAIL), wary of international law’s propensity for both oppression and emancipation. I look forward to my continued work with PGC, the relationships I have been fortunate to develop here in Hawaii, and to learn from and collaborate with my fellowship cohort going forward.