Schanbacer, William D: The Politics of Food: The Global Conflict Between Food Security and Food Sovereignty (original) (raw)
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Food security is the main policy objective of food systems. FAO (2013) defines food security as a situation when 'all people, at all times, have physical, social and economic access to sufficient, safe and nutritious food that meets their dietary needs and food preferences for an active and healthy life'. Despite of the increasing importance of food security and food politics, ethical discourse in the field has been scarce. Even more this is the case concerning the first world food security.
From world hunger to food sovereignty: food ethics and human development
The role of Amartya Sen’s early work on famine notwithstanding, food security is generally seen as but one capability among many for scholars writing in development ethics. The early literature on the ethics of hunger is summarized to show how Sen’s Poverty and Famines was written in response to debates of past decades, and a brief discussion of food security as a capability follows. However, Sen’s characterization of smallholder food security also supports the development of agency in both a political and an economic sense. Economic agency is discussed and tied to longstanding literatures on the moral significance of farming within political economy. Finally, while the newly emergent literature on food sovereignty includes many themes, it is shown to be re-articulating arguments that stress smallholder’s economic agency as a development goal. This pattern of argument thus provides a way to reconcile at least some of the claims being advanced under the banner of food sovereignty with the human development approach, while also restoring food ethics to a more central place in the overall discourse of development ethics
Agriculture and Human Values, 2012
The emerging concept of food sovereignty refers to the right of communities, peoples, and states to independently determine their own food and agricultural policies. It raises the question of which type of food production, agriculture and rural development should be pursued to guarantee food security for the world population. Social movements and non-governmental organizations have readily integrated the concept into their terminology. The concept is also beginning to find its way into the debates and policies of UN organizations and national governments in both developing and industrialized countries. Beyond its relation to civil society movements little academic attention has been paid to the concept of food sovereignty and its appropriateness for international development policies aimed at reducing hunger and poverty, especially in comparison to the human right to adequate food (RtAF). We analyze, on the basis of an extensive literature review, the concept of food sovereignty with regard to its ability to contribute to hunger and poverty reduction worldwide as well as the challenges attached to this concept. Then, we compare the concept of food sovereignty with the RtAF and discuss the appropriateness of both concepts for national public sector policy makers and international development policies. We conclude that the impact on global food security is likely to be much greater if the RtAF approach predominated public policies. While the concept of food sovereignty may be appropriate for civil society movements, we recommend that the RtAF should obtain highest priority in national and international agricultural, trade and development policies.
The paper focuses on the problem of hunger. Hunger can be challenged, and the outcome of this challenge depends a great deal on domestic policies targeted at food security. Consequently, the role of international law in facilitating and spurring this process through the affirmation of the human right to food is examined. The right to food has developed from the formal expression embodied in the United Nations International Covenant on Economics, Social and Cultural Rights to a substantive, well-built and comprehensive legal concept also enshrined in customary norm. Its prescriptive reach spans the conduct of States in their national and international affairs; of international organizations; of transnational corporations; of individuals in their official and private capacity. A synopsis of some issues arising at the national and international level relating to agriculture and development – the principal means, in my view, for the realization of the right to food – is provided. Finally, the enforcement mechanisms for ensuring the right to food are assessed.
Food security and food sovereignty
Dialogues in Human Geography, 2014
The terms food security and food sovereignty originally emerged as separate terms to describe different things. The former is a concept that describes a condition regarding access to adequate food, while the latter is more explicitly a political agenda for how to address inadequate access to food and land rights. Over the past decade, the critical food studies literature has increasingly referred to these terms as being oppositional to each rather than relational to one another. This commentary reflects on the emergence and rationale behind this binary and argues that the current oppositional frame within the literature is problematic in several ways. First, critics of food security have inserted a rival normative agenda into what was originally a much more open-ended concept. Second, the grounds on which that normative agenda is assigned to food security are shaky on several points. Given these problems, the commentary argues that the juxtaposition of food security and food soverei...
The International Political Economy of the Right to Food
Human Rights and Global Governance , 2020
Although it falls within the purview of the human rights enterprise, the right to food is better understood as part of the global politics of food and the socio-economy of growing, gathering, hunting, and herding. Relatively recently, the food sovereignty movement has activated the right to food in novel ways. Since 1993, people have taken up and wielded the right to food as a tool intended to fundamentally uproot the authority of international institutions such as the World Trade Organization (WTO). People have also used it to engage with and infiltrate other institutions like the Food & Agriculture Organization (FAO). I provide a historical account of the FAO as a trade and development institution. I additionally highlight how the FAO has always been the principal international institution providing legal meaning and political power to the right to food. My corollary argument is that one cannot understand the right to food today without understanding the history of the FAO. This historical account is what leads me to think that the right to food narrative does not fit within any study human rights as a general concept or movement. This is a story about an economic/social/cultural right that is not defined by human rights institutions ultimately accountable to the UN General Assembly in Geneva. It is instead under the auspices of the food institutions and food diplomats based in Rome.