Transnational Food Security

Emily Webster, Ankita Gupta, Ruth Ambros, Emily Webster, Ankita Gupta, Ruth Ambros

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2020
• Topic: Politics & International Relations
• eBook ISBN:
  9781000051377
• Subtopic: Conservatism & Liberalism
• Index: Politics & International Relations

Transnational Food Security addresses food security from an international relations, political economy and legal perspective analysing the relationship between food security and the environment and climate change, trade, finance and contracts, and the intersection between food and human rights.

The topic of food concerns one of the most basic and profound aspects of human survival. Universal and equal access to food is, at the same time, ridden with problems of power, inequality, distribution and implicated in old and new geopolitical conflicts. As such, 'food' and food security are central to conditions of poverty and hunger, development and 'modernisation', transitional justice and rule of law reform around the world. As a problem of critique and scholarly inquiry, food prompts an inter-disciplinary assessment of the nature of food security in the modern world. The contributors to this book take us deep into the complexity of food and illustrate the challenges of adequately understanding and approaching questions of food security and food sovereignty in a globally interconnected world.

Transnational Food Security will be of great interest to scholars of international relations, political economy, and transnational law. The chapters were originally published as a special issue of Transnational Legal Theory Journal.

Introduction: transnational food (in)security

Emily Webster and Peer Zumbansen

ABSTRACT

Serving as introduction to the first Annual Transnational Legal Theory Symposium—with a focus on Transnational Food (In)Security—this essay provides an overview of the themes that stood at the centre of the conference and which pervade the symposium contributions. The topic of food concerns one of humanity’s basic and profound aspects of survival. Universal and equal access to food is, at the same time, ridden with problems of power, inequality, distribution and implicated in old and new geopolitical conflicts. As such, ‘food’ has ties and is central to conditions of poverty and hunger, development and ‘modernisation’, transitional justice and rule of law reform around the world. As a problem of critique and scholarly inquiry, food prompts an inter-disciplinary assessment of the nature and different aspects of what is at issue here. The contributors to this symposium take us deep into the complexity of food and illustrate the challenges of adequately understanding and approaching questions of food security and food sovereignty in a globally interconnected world.

The concept of food security is deceptively simple …

[e]nsuring global food security is, however, not simple.¹

¹ Rosemary Rayfuse and Nicole Weisfelt, ‘The International Policy and Regulatory Challenges of Food Security: An Overview’, The Challenge of Food Security: International Policy and Regulatory Frameworks (Elgar, 2012) 3.

Food and nutritional anthropology in particular, and food studies generally, manage to rise above the dualisms that threaten to segment most fields of study. This field resists separating biological from cultural, individual from society, and local from global culture, but rather struggles with their entanglements.²

² Carole Counihan and Penny Van Esterik, ‘Why Food? Why Culture? Why Now?’ Introduction to the Third Edition, in: Carole Counihan and Penny Van Esterik (eds.), Food and Culture. A Reader (Routledge, 3rd edn, 2013), 1.

A crisis of global proportions

There are currently 815 million people suffering from chronic hunger and 52 million children suffering from acute malnourishment in the world.³ A decade after the devastating world food crisis of 2007–2008⁴ which triggered food riots in several countries and starkly demonstrated the fragilities and interconnectedness of modern global food production, food insecurity continues to increase.⁵ There are several factors that have contributed to this, including but not limited to, armed conflict, the globalisation and financialisation of the food system and climate change. Indeed, climate change is fast becoming an issue of grave and overriding concern due to its global and complex nature and its devastating impacts upon food production—hitting the most vulnerable populations with the greatest severity.⁶ It is within this context that the increasingly urgent question of how to feed the world in an equitable and sustainable way, has given rise to lively debate and deep contestation.

³ FAO, ‘What We Do’ (Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations, 2018) online: <http://www.fao.org/about/what-we-do/en/> accessed 27 May 2018.

⁴ ‘Global Food Crisis 2008—Global Issues’ (Global Issues, 8 October 2008) online: <http://www.globalissues.org/article/758/global-food-crisis-2008>.

⁵ FAO and others, ‘The State of Food Security and Nutrition in the World 2018: Building Resilience for Peace and Food Security’ (2018) online: <https://docs.wfp.org/api/documents/WFP-0000074343/download/?_ga=2.194982701.1690239477.1548006449-382277349.1548006449>.

⁶ Ibid.

Access to food has always been an issue of central importance to humanity. ‘Achieving food security has … been a project of international institutions throughout the twentieth century, and a transnational project long before that’.⁷ The establishment of the Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO) in 1945 and the subsequent proliferation of international instruments, have emanated from concerted attempts to address this problem.⁸ Nevertheless, there is little consensus regarding the root causes of food insecurity nor how this problem can, and should, be remedied.⁹ There are broadly two different perspectives regarding the causes of and answers to food insecurity. According to the first set of arguments, more food must be produced to feed the world’s growing population through, for example, technological innovation or agricultural expansion.¹⁰ The competing view holds that sufficient food to meet the world’s needs is already being produced but that it is inadequately and unequally distributed.¹¹ Under these larger umbrellas, the debate unfolds around more specific issues, a central one of which concerns the relationship between poverty and access to food.¹² Another, scrutinises the relationship between food insecurity and the global dominance of the economic liberalism paradigm.¹³ In that regard, Anne Orford has argued:

Something in the routine operation of international economic life, organised around global value chains, free trade, and open markets, produces a system of compulsion such that food is exported to foreign lands while the people who grow it are undernourished.¹⁴

¹⁴ Ibid, 16.

⁷ Anne Orford, ‘Food Security, Free Trade, and the Battle for the State’ (2015) 11(2) Journal of International Law and International Relations 1, 5; United Nations, ‘Transforming Our World: The 2030 Agenda for Sustainable Development’ (2015) A/RES/70/1 online: <https://sustainabledevelopment.un.org/content/documents/21252030%20Agenda%20for%20Sustainable%20Development%20web.pdf>; ‘World Food Summit, Rome Declaration and Plan of Action’ (1996) online: <http://www.fao.org/wfs/index_en.htm> accessed 27 May 2018; ‘Ministerial Declaration: Action Plan on Food Price Volatility and Agriculture, Meeting of G20 Agriculture Ministers' (Paris, 22 and 23 June 2011) online: <http://www.oecd.org/site/agrfcn/48479226.pdf>.

⁸ Lucy Jarosz, ‘Comparing Food Security and Food Sovereignty Discourses’ (2014) 4(2) Dialogues in Human Geography 168; Orford (n 7).

⁹ Orford (n 7) 2.

¹⁰ Jarosz (n 8) 169.

¹¹ Hilal Elver, ‘Rising Hunger and Malnutrition in conflict and natural disaster zones’ (2019) 9(3–4) Transnational Legal Theory, 1, 3 (this issue); Olivier de Schutter, ‘International Trade in Agriculture and the Right to Food’ Dialogues in Globalization (No 46/November 2009) 46 online: https://www.researchgate.net/publication/238704700_International_Trade_in_Agriculture_and_the_Right_to_Food; Oxfam, ‘There Is Enough Food to Feed the World’ (Oxfam Canada) online: https://www.oxfam.ca/there-enough-food-feed-world.

¹² ‘World Food Summit, Rome Declaration and Plan of Action’ (n 7).

¹³ Orford (n 7) 2.

The foregoing provides an important perspective on the role that history plays in the present-day production of food insecurity. This also implies that ‘answers’ to the current situation have to acknowledge the historical creation of conditions that cannot, by themselves, be easily set aside or undone. While a historical perspective on food insecurity must include an in-depth engagement with the colonial and post-colonial realities of the international economic and legal system, the closer scrutiny of governance arrangements over the second half of the twentieth century also reveals important shifts in the institutional arrangements that we, as lawyers, tend to take for granted. In that regard, the growing and intensifying internationalisation and transnationalisation of regulatory arrangements point to the need to take a fresh look at the idea that policy programmes are the prerogative and within the exclusionary competence of nation states.¹⁵

¹⁵ See again Orford (n 7) 4, who argues that ‘in a transnational food system characterised by economic interdependence and shared vulnerability, states can no longer (if they ever could) guarantee access to food for their populations through domestic means alone’.

In recognition of its border-crossing dimensions, the concept of ‘food security’ emerged as the basis of the various food-related programmes as they were introduced by international organisations.¹⁶ According to the communiqué issued at the World Food Summit in 1996: ‘Food security exists when all people, at all times, have physical and economic access to sufficient, safe and nutritious food that meets their dietary needs and food preferences for an active and healthy life’.¹⁷ It is important to highlight how closely this approach to food security has in fact been related to market-oriented approaches to food production and food distribution, firmly grounded in a liberal concept of global market dynamics¹⁸ against the background of ‘neoliberal development discourses’.¹⁹ This particular, and for a long time dominating, food security narrative has prompted a great deal of scholarly debate over the last few years.²⁰ These efforts, for better or worse, helped to carve out more specifically that a liberal market-based approach to food security had to rest on the working assumption that food insecurity exists because ‘food production and its distribution do not meet the needs of the world’s population’.²¹ Therefore, the dominating argument held that more and better food production²² and, importantly, access to food²³ was required, utilising existing technologies, liberalised trade, and global finance.²⁴

¹⁶ For an overview of the history of food security as an international project see, eg, Orford (n 7); Rosemary Rayfuse and Nicole Weisfelt (eds), The Challenge of Food Security: International Policy and Regulatory Frameworks (Edward Elgar, 2012); Robin Sharp, The Struggle for Food Security (FAO, 1979); Daniel J Gustafson and John Markie, ‘A Stronger Global Architecture for Food and Agriculture: Some Lessons from FAO’s History and Recent Evaluation’ in Jennifer Clapp and Marc J Cohen, The Global Food Crisis: Governance Challenges and Opportunities (Wilfred Laurier University Press, 2009); Baris Karapinar and Christian Häberli (eds), Food Crises and the WTO (Cambridge University Press, 2010); Joseph A McMahon and Melaku Geboye Desta (eds), Research Handbook on the WTO Agriculture Agreement (Edward Elgar, 2012); Eugenio Diaz-Bonilla, On Food Security Stocks, Peace Clauses, Permanent Solutions After Bali (IFPRI Discussion Paper, November 2014); S Ryan Isakson, ‘Food and Finance: The Financial Transformation of Agro-Food Supply Chains’ (2014) 41(5) The Journal of Peasant Studies 749...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Contents
• Citation Information
• Notes on Contributors
• 1 Introduction: transnational food (in)security
• 2 At the brink of famine in conflict and natural disaster zones: human rights approach to extreme hunger and malnutrition
• 3 Third world sovereignty, indigenous sovereignty, and food sovereignty: living with sovereignty despite the map
• 4 The effects of oil pollution on the marine environment in the Gulf of Guinea—the Bonga Oil Field example
• 5 Compromised collaborations: food, fuel, and power in transnational food security governance
• 6 International law and feeding the world in times of climate change
• 7 GMO risks, food security, climate change and the entrenchment of neo-liberal legal narratives
• Trade and the Financialisation of Food
• Food Security/Sovereignty: A Challenge for Human Rights
• Index