The Global Food Security Act of 2016
Terrorist attacks and a related rash of populist political uprisings in this hot and hungry El Nino season of mid-2016 pushed at least one event off the headlines it should rightly have occupied. This was the passage of the United States Government’s ‘Global Food Security Act of 2016’, signed by President Obama in July. The Bill, designed to bolster US-supported food security programmes worldwide, wrote the Feed the Future initiative into US law, authorized over USD 7bn to international food programmes, and directed the President to ‘develop and implement a Global Food Security Strategy to promote global food security, resilience, and nutrition’ with close attention to smallholder farmers, particularly women, and particularly in Africa. The Act is highly significant, although to date not so much analysed as it has been celebrated by hunger advocacy NGOs and praised by UN agencies with a food security mandate.
Food security as security against terror?
The political significance of the Act is that it treats hunger as a genuinely global problem – it matters to everyone if people are hungry, and so nothing short of the eradication of hunger is the goal. Much remains to be said about the substance of the Act, including that it further entrenches a role for Big Food in global nutrition programming (Coke has to date given USD150 million to Feed the Future for work on nutrition, a bit like the National Rifle Association paying gunshot victims’ medical costs). It also does little to reform food aid although it does make emergency aid easier to pass. But what is most striking, in a polity that can barely stomach state spending on public goods the rest of the rich world takes for granted is the powerful political consensus behind it: the Act was passed with uncharacteristically strong bipartisan support slap-bang in the middle of possibly the most divisive electoral season the US has ever seen. How did American politicians muster the political will to finance the hungry poor in places so far away and so electorally irrelevant? The Enrolled Bill version of the Act offers up the answers immediately and without preamble, citing the 2014 Worldwide Threat Assessment of the US Intelligence Community:
(A) the “[l]ack of adequate food will be a destabilizing factor in countries important to US national security that do not have the financial or technical abilities to solve their internal food security problems”; and
(B) “[f]ood and nutrition insecurity in weakly governed countries might also provide opportunities for insurgent groups to capitalize on poor conditions, exploit international food aid, and discredit governments for their inability to address basic needs”.
If food insecurity destabilizes and ‘discredits’ regimes that cannot address their own food crises and so encourages insurgency, it is a short step to arguing that global hunger breeds global terrorism. This is plainly the sub-text of the Act. And such thinking is well-placed. As Naomi Klein argued in her recent London Review of Books lecture Let Them Drown, more and more evidence supports the argument that violent conflict is closely associated with drought and other ill-effects of climate change. The impacts on food security are presumably not far behind. [1]
Lifeboat ethics vs. Feed the Future
What seems new and noteworthy about the political rationale for the Global Food Security Act of 2016 is the short straight line drawn between national security in the rich world and food security in the poor. In other words, ‘their’ hunger matters for ‘our’ wellbeing. This is quite possibly an important political-ethical step in the global politics of provisions, even if it is not yet quite clear why or how.
What we do know is that the last time we had a major world food crisis, the so-called OPEC crisis of oil price inflation-fuelled commodity price spikes in 1973-4, there was little urgency about hunger in far-off places. Instead, the crisis was seized as an opportunity to push recalcitrant developing world governments to take on US-preferred economic, social (particularly population control) and agricultural and food policies – including importing subsidized US grains. In fact, far from urgency, the spectre of mass hunger was arguably welcomed in certain Washington DC circles as an opportunity for a gruesome kind of experiment with the Malthusian ideas of ‘triage theory’ and ‘lifeboat ethics’ that did the rounds in the 1970s. In their alarmist text Famine 1975! America’s Decision: Who Will Survive? (1967) the Paddocks predicted (accurately enough) a major world food crisis, arguing that poor hungry populations should receive US food aid if (and only if) they showed signs of being able to help themselves – largely by adopting Green Revolution-type industrial food production methods. Those with too large and helpless a hungry population and no disposition to follow US agrofood policy prescriptions should be left to twist in the wind.
As Emma Rothschild recorded in her seminal essay on the political uses of US Public Law 480 food aid at this time, these were not merely ideas, but ideological figleaves to cover the entwining of cold war politics with the politics of food aid: US public policy used hunger and starvation to meet its objectives. In the then-new nation of Bangladesh alone, around one and a half million people perished during the 1974 famine, a disaster usually credited to the US withholding food aid as punishment for trading with Communist Cuba. (Notably, having used PL 480 food aid to bring Bangladesh to heel over its economic, social and agrofood policies, the Feed the Future programme in contemporary Bangladesh emphasizes its strong potential with only a whiff of Malthusian concern about it being the ‘most densely populated country in the world’.) There is no longer any political justification for the neglect of the ‘basket cases’ – everyone must be fed, everyone must be developed. It is in everyone’s interests.
One difference between the food crisis of 1974 and that of 2008 is the absence of important political and agrofood policy misalignments: 2008 was the moment of peak globalization, a time when the globalized corporate food regime was arguably at its most integrated. And so unlike in 1974, a food crisis in one part of the world became a test of global public policy more generally: did the way the world economy was being run enable the most basic provisioning? The wave of food riots around the world in 2007-08, and a second wave when food prices spiked again in 2010-11 signaled that it did not.
Food riots and food rights: the popular politics of global food security
What did these food riots teach us? In the immediate aftermath of the recent period of acute global food price volatility (2007-12), a group of researchers in Bangladesh, India, Kenya, Mozambique and at the Institute of Development Studies at the University of Sussex set out to make sense of whether and how popular mobilization around food crises had made a difference to how governments tackled the food crisis. Our particular concern was that in a globalized era, the capacities of developing country governments to protect their populations against sudden price rises or food shortages might be constrained due to trade rules or import-dependence, so even governments that wanted to protect their populations against crises of subsistence might have been unable to do so. There had been numerous subsistence-related protests around the world, including in the four countries of our study where people had struggled for fair prices for bread and maize flour, for wage rises to meet higher rice prices, and for eradicating corruption so that food assistance reached those in need. But to what effect?
Having looked closely at events in those four food-insecure countries we concluded that food riots still work in the 21st century: popular protests had effectively shamed and pushed public authorities to intervene to stabilize prices, subsidize food stuffs and protect the hungry throughout world history, and similar subsistence protests (or ‘food rebellions’) play a similar role in the present day. But there is an important difference with E. P. Thompson’s 18th century English crowd: in the 21st century, even people who have to fight for their right to food have a sense of that right as among the rights of nationhood, and (under ideal conditions) the spoils of democracy. Our conclusions:
Democratic transitions offer repeated, fairly regular moments in which to reassert food rights and responsibilities. They also offer opportunities to demonstrate the withdrawal of legitimacy, of assent to rule … electoral power is experienced as a corrective on bad food policies. [2]
In other words, when people face market failures or shortages in their most basic provisions, they turn to their governments for action. The ‘politics of provisions’ as the historian John Bohstedt terms the forceful popular negotiations over policies of subsistence – remain matters of national democratic competition. And this remains true even though the sources of those market failures are now firmly located in the global food system. It is with national politics that people feel they have traction, and so we are left with what Nancy Fraser defines as a problem of scale. If we take seriously the global nature of food systems we need to take seriously the need for a properly global politics of food. This means a world moral economy; an international right to-food movement; a global social protection response to food crises.
Resilience vs. precarity
After 2008, the shiny new watchword in global food security became resilience. Nobody is pretending any more that making the world food secure is going to be easy, so people will need to equipped to cope when prices spike or shortages loom. The Global Food Security Act of 2016 takes resilience very seriously, connecting it to small farmer efficiency and higher incomes, and to integration into value chains and agribusinesses. It is, as was the case in the 1974 World Food Conference, again a policy response concentrated on boosting production, not on protecting against the inevitable downsides of markets.
The problem now is that resilience in the face of food insecurity may not come from integration into food and agricultural markets; in fact, marketization on adverse terms produces precarity, the very opposite of resilience. We know this because some of us from the Food Riots project continued to look closely at how people adjusted to higher and more volatile prices after the food crisis period. Our findings show that the process of adjustment to the changing food system has been one of increased integration into markets as people respond to the squeeze of higher prices. But that integration has been on poor terms.
People have a) ramped up their efforts to earn cash incomes by whatever means necessary and b) squeezed ever more value out of the food they consume, including by eating more processed and industrialized food than in the past.
The relationship between the work people do and the nourishment this affords them has been pulled out of kilter by higher food prices, and people are working harder and longer just to stay fed. And so in the post-food crisis period we find more precarity than resilience, as people on low incomes find they work harder and in riskier, difficult or demeaning occupations, amid growing competition for cash incomes.
Obama’s answer to the threat of food crisis is mainly more markets. But it is increasingly clear that market integration needs to come with greater protections for when those markets (inevitably) fail. This latest wave of the Great Transformation has still not been met by the social protection response it needs, in large part because the emancipation necessary for people to organize to claim such protection against the global economy has not happened. This may be one reason for the sharp rise in populist politics in the rich world, where entire working classes feel they are the long-term losers of globalization, unprotected against the financial and commodity price shocks as well as the long-term wage declines and rising inequality. Now even the organizations at the frontline of neoliberalism are beginning to challenge its wisdom, pointing out that austerity and curbing state spending has been counter-productive and increased inequality.
It is in this light that we need to view the political rationalization of Obama’s Global Food Security Act. People may use riot to hold their national governments to account over subsistence crises, but what can they do when the sources of insecurity in their most basic provisions are globalized? The Global Food Security Act treats the threat of terror as a species of dispersed global food riot, but it is in everyone’s interests that people are protected against food crisis without such acts. What is needed now are the political means to enable people at risk of hunger to lay claim to the kinds of social protection that will protect their right to food from the uncertainties of a globalized food system.
What will that global politics of provisions look like?
References:
[1] Peter Gleick makes the point for Syria, specifically. See http://journals.ametsoc.org/doi/pdf/10.1175/WCAS-D-13-00059.1
[2] Them Belly Full (But We Hungry): Food Rights Struggles in Bangladesh, India, Kenya by Hossain, N. et al, Food Riots and Food Rights project report http://www.ids.ac.uk/publication/them-belly-full-but-we-hungry-food-rights-struggles-in-bangladesh-india-kenya. Pp. 52.
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