Food security and international trade: Unpacking disputed narratives (original) (raw)

Is trade a threat or an opportunity for food security? Longstanding debates over this question remain unresolved. This is understandable when one considers that the agricultural sector serves a range of vital functions in society. It provides food, which is essential for human survival, and it provides a livelihood for approximately 30 percent of the world’s active workforce. At the same time, agricultural exports are a significant source of revenue for some states, and imports are crucial for food security in other states. Agriculture also has deep ecological connections as well as important cultural dimensions. For these various reasons, there has long been concern about the ways in which international trade might improve or hinder society’s ability to balance different social and economic goals as they relate to agriculture and food security. This paper seeks to shed light on this debate by providing an overview of the main opposing narratives and the rationale behind them. It does not seek to advocate one viewpoint over the other. Instead, it seeks to examine the contours of the debate with a view to uncovering why it is so polarized, and how we might move beyond the current impasse in international policymaking. The first section of the paper briefly maps out the historical context of the different understandings of the links between food security and trade. It shows that norms and ideas around the concepts of both food security and trade in agriculture have shifted over time, both independently and in relation to each other. The second and third sections of the paper explain the conceptual basis of two distinct narratives: one that sees trade as an opportunity to enhance food security; and another that sees trade as a threat to food security. These sections examine the arguments put forward in support of these viewpoints and discuss some of the potential limitations and inconsistencies of each approach. Each of these narratives emerges from different scholarly traditions grounded in their own notions of science. The trade as opportunity narrative emerges largely from the discipline of neoclassical economics and relies on the ideas of gains from trade as predicted by trade theory, the practicality of trade in a diverse world, as well as the perceived costs of trade protection. The trade as threat narrative emerges from a range of social science disciplines as well as agroecological science and draws on ideas of the sovereignty of states and communities to determine their own food policy, the multifunctional nature of agriculture in society, and the perceived costs associated with trade liberalization. Each of these approaches raises valid arguments, but each also has weaknesses and inconsistencies. The final section of the paper considers some of the factors that help to explain why this debate has been so polarized in policy settings, and suggests some possible avenues for advancing the policy dialogue. These include asking more open-ended questions, the development of joint language and indicators, and strengthening areas of convergence in institutions of global governance through more collaborative processes. The paper concludes that an assessment of the interplay between food security and international trade benefits from evaluation that draws on multiple disciplinary and methodological perspectives, and it is through such an exercise that common ground in the debate is most likely to be found.