Implicating Capital: Examining the Dimensions of Food Security Discourse

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.

Month Two

Pigs Backing the Fuck Up

There Goes Democracy

The death of a nation.

The Coming Storm

What we are seeing already from police and the Integrated Security Unit (ISU) as the G20 meetings in Toronto draw closer, is the widespread manipulation of public sentiment to the effect that protesters are ‘dangerous’, ‘criminal’, and hell-bent on violence and destruction -- the fabrication of a pre-justification for the deployment of future violence by the state.

Effectively using terror to trounce our right to democratic protest and free speech, members of the ISU, in connection with CSIS agents, have repeatedly harassed non-violent activists in a manner more commonly seen in countries with a secret police, public denunciations, and disappearances. The police have publicly advertised the purchase of new weapons to use against protesters, including an LRAD system, new riot gear, and hundreds of new cameras; they have paraded in front of the media in a massively-aggressive show of force; and they have leaked internal communications requesting the services of area doctors and the existence of a converted factory lot that will serve as a makeshift concentration camp for arrested demonstrators. For the police, the summits represent a massive public windfall of both financial and social capital with which to purchase new toys and to openly bend the law.

The police are effectively trying to deter less-committed, less-radical, and first-time activists from ever showing up while simultaneously antagonizing more radical elements by picking a fight they already know they can win. The police and the media are happy to go out of their way to stress how a majority of the 1.2 billion dollars being spent on security for the summits is clearly not to protect a bunch of VIPs from terrorists (who may crash their fancy dinner parties), but rather simply to protect those VIPs from having their precious schmoozing interrupted by informed and angry citizens wishing to express themselves freely outside of the meetings.

Even 9 years ago, when the G8 met in Genoa, Italy, in 2001, putting large fences around international gatherings to create "red zones" was all the rage. It was the height of the anti-globalization movement, pre-9/11, and over 300,000 demonstrators turned out to democratically voice their grievances.

Predictably, the police also turned out in force, viciously attacking and injuring more than 400 unarmed civilians (caught in the wrong place at the wrong time), journalists, and activists with a combination of chemical weapons and less-lethal projectiles. Mass arrests were not yet common police practice, but those 300 or so arrested were subject to verbal intimidation, beatings, and the threat of rape. Genoa also marked the first recorded death of a protestor at a demonstration in the Western world (since the movement gained momentum in Seattle in 1999), when Carlo Giuliani was shot in the head and run-over, twice, by a member of Italy’s military police, the Carabinieri.