Introduction:
Balancing the Scales
In order to conduct research into
food security, researchers need to start with a broad conceptual framework for
what constitutes that security and what characterizes its absence. Not only
that, but researchers must also decide the scale at which to locate their
investigations: food security can be examined from a global perspective, with a
national focus, at the community level, or through the lens of individuals within
households. While there are probably well over 200 competing definitions for
food security, only two organizations have, since the late 1970s, defined the
boundaries of that debate while simultaneously providing major funding for worldwide
food security research, policy, and practice: the World Bank (WB) and the United
Nation’s Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO).
These international and multilateral
bodies, along with bit players like the United States Agency for International
Development (USAID), the International Monetary Fund (IMF), World Trade
Organization (WTO), and various other multinational agricultural interests, have
formed the collective force behind which governmental and non-governmental food
security policies have been historically transformed.
Through annual reports, research
journals, conferences, and funding decisions, these institutions have framed
food security discourse at various scales, starting in the 1970s at the
global/national macroeconomic level, and subsequently transitioning to a
position that today views food security as best examined at the local,
microeconomic level. The question of whether or not these changes have been the
result of a natural progression defined primarily by research/policy successes
and failures, or whether they are in fact simply theoretical readjustments
necessary to serve prevailing neoliberal economic practice, will be the focus
of this paper.
The
Background: Structural Adjustments
From an early focus on national food production,
grain stockpiling, agricultural self-sufficiency, and other macroeconomic
solutions to hunger, to one based on individual – usually female – microeconomic
interventions, food security research has gone through a series of paradigmatic
shifts of scale and ideology. A very strong argument can be made that these
changes have coincided directly with the rise of neoliberal economic policies. “This
discursive shift in policy […] devolves responsibility for addressing hunger
increasingly upon rural women. This is in line with the construction of
neoliberal subjects as entrepreneurial individuals who are responsible for
accessing food from the world market as it is shaped by the international
modalities of international institutions, transnational agribusiness, and the
consumption demands of the wealthy and middle classes primarily located in
Western countries.”
Capital’s neoliberal logic is one which
globally espouses the value of commodification, government deregulation, and
massive cutbacks in social spending. It is one that has driven the processes of
globalization in favour of corporate and monetary interests at the expense of
the global south, the environment, and democratic decision-making. It should
come as little surprise, therefore, that as neoliberal theory and the national ‘structural
adjustment policies’ informed by it have begun to dominate the global political
and socio-economic landscape, so too has food security, as defined by the FAO
and the WB, been manipulated to conform to this prevailing logic.
Driven at its core by the
collection of supranational institutions mentioned above, various 'free' trade
agreements, and the ideological tome known as the 'Washington Consensus',
neoliberalism demands the subordination of state policy and public spending to
the undemocratic dictates of international financial currents and treaty
obligations. When developed, developing, and underdeveloped countries reach a
crisis point – where international loans can no longer be repaid – the
International Monetary Fund ‘steps in’ to ‘save’ the country from bankruptcy. In
return, countries seeking IMF help must agree to agency-imposed structural
adjustment programs designed to stabilise and restart their economies. The
basic neoliberal tenets of these programs is the unlocking of countries' labour
markets and natural resources by global corporations for exploitation; the
minimisation of the size and role government; and the increased reliance on
market forces to distribute resources and services. Specific ‘structural
adjustments’ mandated by the IMF before a loan is granted include: privatising
government-owned enterprises and government-provided services; massively
reducing government spending; orienting economies to promote imports in
agriculture; lifting restrictions to trade, including barriers based on social
and ecological concerns; implementing higher interest rates; eliminating
subsidies on consumer items such as food, fuel, and medicines; and enforcing
tax increases on the middle and lower classes.
Populations in many countries have protested
strongly against IMF policies, most recently in violent clashes in the streets
of Athens. Nations throughout the world have witnessed ‘IMF riots’ following
the removal of price subsidies for goods such as bread and gasoline. “The
globalisation of markets erases borders for speculation and crime and
multiplies them for human beings. Countries are obliged to erase their national
borders for money to circulate, but to multiply their internal borders [in
order to maintain security and social order].” In nations currently experiencing
IMF ‘structural adjustment’, poverty has tripled on average, health care and
educational systems have collapsed, and income inequality has become
increasingly polarised.
The IMF and WB themselves do not
deny the disturbing effects that this aspect of globalisation can have on Third
World societies. Instead, neoliberal officials claim that ‘at some point’ in
the future these policies will lead to a prosperous ‘rebound’ that will benefit
the local and global economy. This almost shamanistic prediction is based on
the assumption that once an economy has gone through the difficult
‘transitional stages’ necessary to strengthen its credit and capital reserves,
the liberalized market will facilitate and encourage capital to ‘trickle down’
to less affluent segments of the population.
It is increasingly assumed by the
WB, FAO, and other food security policy-makers that this very same trickle down
process, and the neoliberal development theories linked to it, will be the key to
ensuring individual access to food going forward. “Food security is understood
as no different from mainstream development issues and thus is constructed as
requiring the same remedies of structural adjustment, trade liberalization, and
integration into global capital markets as a way to meet national food needs.
Food is deeply commodified in this definition.”
The
commodification and enclosure of the foodscape by capital poses serious
challenges for ensuring long-term, sustainable food security for a majority of
the global population.
The Neoliberal Food Security
Connection
As
governments and their social safety nets are dismantled and individuals are
increasingly forced to fend for themselves as isolated actors in the global
market, so too has the scale and definition of food security research witnessed
a relocation away from strong national food policies to a focus on improving
market access for individuals.
Battles between food-first
approaches to food security research and competing systems such as the
livelihoods framework illustrate, though imperfectly, the conflict between
making food security an individual matter of market access and examining the
larger institutional environments and economic systems in which hunger
continually occurs. Though a livelihoods framework can illuminate micro and
regional systemic and institutional barriers to access, etc., it tends to still
leave larger, macro barriers unexamined and thus does not often implicate
neoliberal economic theory. “Taken together, the political economy of hunger,
the changing discourse of food security, and the construction of food security
at the scale of “the poor” focuses attention upon individuals’ lack of
purchasing power or access rather than addressing the capitalist political
economy and the unequal relations of production and consumption in the workings
of the global food system.”
This picture of food security
research as being driven by a clear ideological agenda is often obscured by the
fact that the latest trends in examining local food security – with a focus on
individual poverty alleviation – is often accompanied by research that is increasingly
conducted in participatory and inclusive ways. Ostensibly, examples such as providing
ownership over the research agenda to primary stakeholders and including women
in the discussion are actually the antithesis of global market logic. However,
because these research methods tend to be conducted within a larger policy and
funding framework which conceptualizes hunger as being intimately tied to
economic development, ‘good governance’, and is tied to international
development theory and practice, a strong distinction needs to be drawn between
what are generally democratic and progressive research methods and mainstream
outcomes which judge successes in improving individual, household, and
community food security in terms of how much projects and policies successfully
integrate stakeholders into the market. “This paradox does not mean that a
focus upon the poorest and most vulnerable is not effective, but indicates that
as international food security policy places an increasing emphasis upon the
individuated acquisition of food in the global market as the desired response
to hunger, socioeconomic inequality within and among nations is increasing.”
Conclusion
There should not be much dispute
that the global food distribution and production system needs to be relocated –
away from profit, away from commodification, away from environmental
degradation and heavy industrial, chemical and financial inputs. Reforming the
food system in this way would go a long way towards improving rural and urban
livelihoods by ensuring better forms of investment (i.e., in human capital, not
financial capital), more democratic decision-making (i.e., local, grassroots,
community-based consensus decision-making instead of the type of
decision-making that takes place thousands of miles away in corporate board
rooms), and by encouraging and rewarding
alternative agricultural practices which have already been proven to be both
environmentally responsible and more productive.
There is also no doubt that food
security research needs to be conducted in an open, democratic, and radical manner
in order to effectively challenge the assumptions of free market orthodoxy. It
needs to incorporate issues of class, gender, and race. Research should be
conducted with a local focus on the poor and most marginalized members of
society. Shared ownership over the research agenda, a livelihoods framework,
and an equally inclusive method of evaluation are all essential. Research with
a strong focus on local sustainability can help counteract the growth-based
logic of neoliberal ‘solutions’ to hunger. However, all of these preconditions
for truly radical food security research can still be made to work in favour of
capital if they are not also firmly supported by an equally radical critique of
macroeconomic realities and systems. After all, hunger exists within developed
economies governed by neoliberal technocrats just as surely as it exists in
Sub-Saharan Africa.
That hunger is common to all nations
is a reality that global elites and their champions of neoliberal economic
theory would rather be ignored.
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