The Political Economy of Food Security: US vs. Brazil

 

Food security

Food security has resurfaced as a major worldwide issue over the last decade, as it has become evident that the ability to obtain adequate food is remarkably unevenly distributed, both within and between governments. However, scientists and policymakers disagree on the reasons for the world's continued uneven distribution of hunger and malnutrition. This article is part of a larger effort investigating the role of law during the last two centuries in establishing an international economic order that allows individuals and businesses to benefit from human reliance on food while an increasing number of people worldwide are malnourished. The project's goal is to investigate why food security is still so unevenly distributed in the twenty-first century, and whether these patterns of vulnerability are related to international law and colonial legacies.

The project's immediate motivation came from the disturbance to the global agricultural system caused by the 2006 food price crisis. Food shortages and a dramatic rise in food prices resulted in a significant increase in the number of undernourished people worldwide that year, either because they could not produce enough food for themselves and their families or because they could not afford enough food for an adequate diet.1 Food shortages and rising food prices triggered political instability and resulted in food riots in at least thirty nations, including Bangladesh, Egypt, Haiti, India, Indonesia, Mexico, Morocco, Senegal, and Somalia.2 In 2009, the Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations (FAO) estimated that "more than a billion people, one in every six human beings, may be suffering from under-nourishment."3 Food prices surged globally again in 2010 as a result of a series of crop failures caused by harsh weather, which were exacerbated when Russia imposed a wheat export ban.

The definition of food security

The definition of food security widely used by international organizations is that agreed by the World Food Summit in Rome in 1996 and reaffirmed in the Declaration of the World Summit on Food Security in Rome in 2009. "Food security exists when all people have physical, social, and economic access to adequate, safe, and nutritious food to suit their dietary needs and food preferences for an active and healthy life. Food security consists on four pillars: availability, access, usage, and stability. The nutritional factor is essential to the concept of food security": Declaration of the World Summit on Food Security (WSFS), Rome, November 16-18, 2009. 2009/2. Individual food security refers to people's physical and economic access to sufficient quantities of safe and nutritious food to meet their dietary needs and food preferences on a consistent basis, whereas state food security refers to the state's ability to ensure adequate food supplies to feed its population, whether through domestic production, food imports, or food aid.

2. FAO, "Price surges in food markets: How should organized futures markets be regulated?" Economic and Social Perspectives Policy Brief (9 June 2010); Walden Bello, The Food Wars (London, Verso, 2009). [Bello].

3. FAO Committee on World Food Security, 35th session, Reform of the Committee on World Food Security, CFS: 2009/2Rev.1, October 2009 (Howse and Josling).

Thirteen people were killed amid protests in Mozambique sparked by the consequent increase in bread prices.

The FAO Food Price Index reached new highs in December 2010 and February 2011, surpassing those experienced during the 2006-8 crisis. In reaction to these trends, the United Nations Conference on Trade and Development (UNCTAD) urged nations to "wake up before it is too late."5 UNCTAD's 2013 Trade and Environment report noted the ongoing concerns about food security caused by high and volatile international food prices, which have been fueled in large part by climate change, food price speculation, and the direct link between fuel and food prices created by the growth of the biofuel industry. The authors of the paper believe that the agricultural problem "may well turn out to be one of the biggest challenges, including for international security, of the 21st century."6

To understand the past and present role of international law in the formation of the global food economy, the broader project on which this article is based is structured around five concepts that have been central to debates over the constitution of transnational food regimes since the late eighteenth century: free trade, investment, population control, intervention, and rights. Each of these principles has been established, codified, and argued in legal texts during the last two centuries, and they are all inextricably linked. While debates about free trade and investment can have an abstract and rationally compelling air, the systems proposed are based on controlling people and land. Since the nineteenth century, attempts to establish a market-oriented agricultural order have been plagued by the question of what to do with "surplus," "redundant," or internally displaced populations, as well as how to secure foreign investments and ensure the free movement of goods and people required to generate profits. The language of rights is used to defend and argue territorial acquisition and peoples' dispossession. In the broader project, I explore the movement and transformation of these interconnected concepts, as they travel from intellectual treatises, campaigning speeches, political rhetoric, official reports, treaties, commission reports, and legislative reforms in the nineteenth century, to collaborative projects developed by international lawyers, economists, sociologists, and historians turning their minds to how the colonial system might peacefully change during the interwar period.