Security or Sovereignty?: Institutional and Critical Approaches to the Global Food Crisis

Concerns over rising food costs and lack of access to food loom at the forefront of discussions of climate change, sociopolitical unrest, and population growth for the coming decades. How far can technological fixes and stopgap aid programs take us in ensuring the availability, sustainability, and biodiversity of food resources for future generations? What are the long-term consequences of increasing the productivity of industrial agriculture systems to be developed under vastly different economic and ecological conditions than those faced by contemporary producers and consumers? Will policies that regulate the current food regime be sufficient to avert future food crises, or is a more comprehensive change—one that fosters the development of smaller-scale, local food economies in place of transnational corporate agriculture—a viable option for building a more sustainable and just global food system? The books reviewed in this essay take varied approaches in addressing these questions about food production, access, and regulation. Although all three highlight the unsustainability and insecurity of the global food system, the causes they identify, and solutions they recommend vary.

Food security was defined at the 1996 World Food Summit as the conditions under which “all people at all times have access to sufficient, safe, nutritious food.”¹ This concept considered the physical and economic ability of populations to access food that fulfills both nutritional need and cultural preferences, emphasizing the responsibility of institutions in providing solutions to food crises. At the same time, alternative ideas about the sources of global food crises and their potential solutions were emerging within transnational social movements. In 1996, the transnational peasant movement La Vía Campesina defined the concept of food sovereignty as “the right of peoples to healthy and culturally appropriate food produced through sustainable methods and their right to define their own food and agriculture systems.”² At issue is the degree to which food crises can be ameliorated or avoided under the existing institutions and policies that govern the global food economy. Whereas food security focuses on policy fixes that are achievable given the structure of food economies under globalization, food sovereignty articulates collective action goals aimed at promoting indigenous and civil society alternatives to the status quo.

Because of its deep connections to culture, food holds significance far beyond its nutritional necessity: food insecurity threatens not only the ability of a population to thrive, but also the traditions and values upon which it functions. Christopher B. Barrett’s edited volume Food Security and Sociopolitical Stability presents an expansive review of the interactions among sociopolitical contexts and food availability, access to food, and utilization of food resources. Written in the wake of food price spikes and related riots surrounding the 2008–2009 global recession, the chapters in this book address the “stressors” and contexts under which food insecurity can lead to social and political unrest.

The core argument of the volume is that while sociopolitical instability threatens food security, food-related risks also lead to the very conditions that exacerbate internal conflict, social uprisings, and state violence. For example, in their chapter on climate changes in the coming decade, Mark A. Cane and Dong Eun Lee emphasize that sociopolitical conditions, rather than climate and weather events alone, contribute to food insecurity or social unrest. Instead, they argue that “while climate events will lead to the worst [food security] outcomes in places where the society is internally vulnerable, external climate variation can also push such societies over the edge” (p.88).

Several chapters of the book cover economic aspects of food security including food prices, labor migration, transnational trade policies, and land demand. Later chapters discuss environment- and industry-related issues including freshwater availability and...