Food Insecurity

A Matter of Justice, Sovereignty, and Survival

Tamar Mayer, Molly D. Anderson

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2020
• ISBN:
  9780429783920
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Philosophy
• Subtopic: Ethics & Moral Philosophy

This book explores the experiences, causes, and consequences of food insecurity in different geographical regions and historical eras. It highlights collective and political actions aimed at food sovereignty as solutions to mitigate suffering.

Despite global efforts to end hunger, it persists and has even increased in some regions. This book provides interdisciplinary and historical perspectives on the manifestations of food insecurity, with case studies illustrating how people coped with violations of their rights during the war-time deprivation in France; the neoliberal incursions on food supply in Turkey, Greece, and Nicaragua; as well as the consequences of radioactive contamination of farmland in Japan. This edited collection adopts an analytical approach to understanding food insecurity by examining how the historical and political situations in different countries have resulted in an unfolding dialectic of food insecurity and resistance, with the most marginalized people—immigrants, those in refugee camps, poor peasants, and so forth—consistently suffering the worst effects, yet still maintaining agency to fight back.

The book tackles food insecurity on a local as well as a global scale and will thus be useful for a broad range of audiences, including students, scholars, and the general public interested in studying food crises, globalization, and current global issues.

1Food insecurity in context

Molly D. Anderson and Tamar Mayer

After decades of steady decline, the trend in world hunger … reverted in 2015, remaining virtually unchanged in the past three years at a level slightly below 11 percent. Meanwhile, the number of people who suffer from hunger has slowly increased. As a result, more than 820 million people in the world were still hungry in 2018, underscoring the immense challenge of achieving the Zero Hunger target by 2030.

(FAO, IFAD, UNICEF, WFP, and WHO 2019: xiv)

Despite the goal to end hunger in the world, as set forth in 2015 in the UN Sustainable Development Goals, hunger remains a significant problem worldwide. Severe food insecurity was worse in 2018 than it was in 2014 in every region of the world except North America and Europe. While Middle and Eastern Africa have the highest prevalence of undernourishment (26.5% and 30.8% respectively), Asia has the largest number of chronically malnourished people; and the situation is worsening in Latin America, the Caribbean, other regions of Africa, and Western Asia. The number of undernourished people in sub-Saharan Africa rose from 181 million in 2010 to 239 million in 2018, and in Africa as a continent, almost 20 percent of the population (more than 256 million) is chronically undernourished. The decreasing trend in undernourishment that characterized Asia until recently seems to be slowing down significantly; 514 million people there were chronically undernourished in 2018. Several countries in Southeast Asia have been affected by climate conditions that have worsened food availability and prices, while countries in Western Asia have been affected by prolonged armed conflicts. Countries encountering economic downturns and slowdowns have also shown worsening hunger and food insecurity (Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO), International Fund for Agricultural Development (IFAD), United Nations Children’s Fund (UNICEF), World Food Program (WFP), and World Health Organization (WHO) 2019).

The primary metric used to estimate severe food insecurity in the annual State of Food Insecurity and Nutrition in the World (SOFI; previously the State of Food Insecurity in the World) is Prevalence of Undernourishment (PoU), although serious issues with its accuracy have been identified by several scholars (Lappé et al. 2013). PoU has been supplemented in the more recent SOFIs with five other metrics, including the Food Insecurity Experience Scale (FIES), the first globally applied self-reported metric of food insecurity. According to the FIES, moderate or severe food insecurity was reported by 57.7 percent of surveyed respondents in sub-Saharan Africa in 2018, contrasting with a PoU of 22.8 percent. If health problems associated with micronutrient deficiencies, obesity, and overweight are included in the tally, over one-third of the world’s population is inadequately nourished. The global number of obese people surpassed the global number of undernourished people in 2016. In 2018, childhood overweight affected 40.1 million children under five worldwide; and in 2016, nearly two in five adults (38.9 percent) were overweight, representing 2 billion adults worldwide. The prevalence of overweight is increasing in all age groups and in all regions (FAO, IFAD, UNICEF, WFP, and WHO 2019).

Poor access to healthy food affects all age groups, but particularly women and children. They cannot develop to their full mental and physical potential, and they face increased threats from disease, a decreased quality of life, and shortened lifespans. Mothers who are food insecure during pregnancy can pass along epigenetic metabolic markers that result in obesity and poor health for their children; early malnutrition in children has similar results (Landeker 2011). Compromised access to food often results in tensions within families; and as some adults migrate in search of better livelihoods, communities further erode, and families are negatively affected. As global regimes determine the agricultural landscape and new geopolitics of food are established, old food cultures disappear, and communities plant fewer traditional crops, with negative consequences for their nutritional status.

We need to ask why it is that, despite all the efforts made to date, there has been so little progress, and why at least one out of every nine people in the world is still undernourished. Questions of who eats what, when, where, and why are at the center of this volume. The chapters in this volume establish that food insecurity is a matter of justice and survival, regardless of geography and history. They analyze from multiple disciplinary perspectives the experiences of, and responses to, food insecurity at different geographical scales, from the local to the global. Several chapters demonstrate how food sovereignty is emerging in different places as a form of resistance to the persistent injustice of food insecurity.

Justice and survival

Deep-rooted political and economic theories underpin concepts of food justice, which in turn underpin countries’ decisions about how to address food insecurity. The lack of food justice is most apparent in the stark discrepancy in food security and very low food security between countries and regions. Yet every country, even the wealthiest, has populations that suffer from food insecurity. The questions about food justice and its troubling persistence are related to questions about social good that go back to Plato’s Republic, in which he tried to identify the ideals that would lead to a just society.

One of the long-standing debates about justice, with implications for food justice, is whether some people have a right to set the standards of social justice for all, or whether each individual has the freedom to hold alternative views. These debates played out in the writings of Jeremy Bentham and John Stuart Mill, who laid the groundwork for utilitarian political philosophy, and were extended by Adam Smith to the view that the market could best determine the greatest good for all (DuPuis et al. 2013). For others, a market in which each person was driven by individual interest seemed to be the making of a Lord of the Flies society, anticipated early on by Thomas Hobbes in his arguments for the necessity of hierarchies and a social contract. Other philosophers and diplomats developed universal standards, such as the US Declaration of Independence and the UN Universal Declaration of Human Rights. Of course, the “universal” standards that were expressed in high-sounding prose in fact applied, in their enactment, only to a subset of humanity. For example, the Declaration of Independence left out women, slaves, and indigenous peoples.

In A Theory of Justice, John Rawls (1971) advanced the attempt to reconcile competing views of individual liberty and social order created through a social contract. He proposed that justice could be determined by a “veil of ignorance,” such that each individual would choose a society in which the most marginalized people would be served with equity, were they ignorant of the consequences of their choices on themselves. Thus, people would accept inequitable distribution of wealth if they knew that it would benefit people who had the least, given that they might be among “the least” once the veil was lifted.

Melanie DuPuis and colleagues (2013) have suggested that three main perspectives critique the Rawlsian ideal—political economy, communitarian, and cultural—and draw the lines to food justice. They trace the political economy critique to Karl Marx, who saw economic goods as a “fetish” or illusory form of freedom. For Marx, the exploitative relationships of labor and capital are the base of social injustice, and social activists must fight for a radical restructuring of society that allows labor to control the means of production. Communitarians believe in a set of social and cultural values that are widely shared and form the basis of a moral economy. Michael Walzer (1990) and Michael Sandel (1984) are two contemporary communitarians, arguing that communities should have the freedom to establish their own values and rules. These perspectives are shared by indigenous communities and other food sovereignty advocates, who believe that each community (however defined) has a sovereignty that must be respected.

DuPuis and colleagues (2013) go on to describe the cultural perspective as held by feminist, postcolonial, and critical race theorists. Their arguments stand against the political economy theories and communitarian theories in claiming that both universalist and particularist perspectives on justice place the Western white male citizen as the “universal,” and that different groups with different histories of oppression must be able to form their own ideals of the good life and social justice. While DuPuis and colleagues explore how these different perspectives on social justice are manifest in arguments about localism and local food, they have wider connections with food justice.

Views on the distribution of food, one of the key actions associated with food justice, often depend on which theory of food justice one holds. Distributive-justice theories have tended to regard food as just another of the goods to be distributed (Scoville 2015). But food is quite different from cell phones or automobiles; its absence is a literal matter of survival, and its presence is a matter of identity as well as nutrition and health. This can justifiably lead to very different treatment in every agreement from international trade (hence La Via Campesina’s cry to “get agriculture out of the WTO”) to household standards on who eats first when food is limited (Rosset 2006).

While distributive justice has been a primary focus of food justice theory, participatory justice is also extremely important (Dieterle 2015; Moragues-Faus 2017). That is, it matters not only whether people get food but also whether they have agency to advocate for themselves (with positive effects). Ana Moragues-Faus demonstrates, in analyzing narratives of food security, that political and global elements of who is a subject of food injustice (and why) have been largely bypassed in debates about food security. How food security is framed in governmental and intergovernmental forums has significant impacts on the solutions that are adopted; when systemic inequities in political, cultural, and socioeconomic domains are understood as the main cause of food insecurity, the rights of poor and marginalized people to participate in the determination of solutions can be recognized.

All the chapters in this volume make the underlying assumption that food is a right, and that lack of access to safe and healthy food, regardless of reason, is directly related to lack of justice. The right to food has expanded to address healthy food, not just calories. What this right means in practice has been illuminated by several decades of scholarship and publications of the Committee on Economic, Social and Cultural Rights, FAO’s Right to Food Unit, and the UN Special Rapporteur on the Right to Food. Olivier de Schutter, UN Special Rapporteur from 2008 to 2014, was especially forceful and influential in articulating a clear critique of industrial agriculture and expanding the right to food to encompass nutritional security (Sage 2014). The right to food entails procedural approaches, such as full participation by those whose rights have been violated and regular monitoring of progress toward respecting, protecting, and fulfilling the right. (These approaches are detailed in the Voluntary Guidelines on the Progressive Realization of the Right to Adequate Food in the Context of National Food Security, developed by the Committee on World Food Security and adopted by the FAO Council in 2004.) While the right to food and nutrition is a comprehensive scaffolding for achieving food security, scholars turned to the related concepts of food justice and food sovereignty as the failures of governmental and philanthropic attempts to increase food security became more apparent.

Themes that have emerged, particularly since the 1990s, have included a shift from focusing on consumers to focusing on workers, the class- and race-based causes of food injustice, and global manifestations (Herman and Goodman 2018). The specific ways in which populations working within certain sectors of the economy experience food injustice have entered public awareness. The plight of farmworkers, whose exploited labor props up the industrialized food system, was exposed to the US public by authors such as Eric Schlosser (2001) and organizations such as the Coalition of Immokalee Workers, which won seven cases demonstrating enslavement of farmworkers in Florida and launched a successful campaign for “fair food.” Similar abuses were revealed against people catching and processing fish, processing livestock, and working in retail and restaurant industries (McMillan 2012; Genoways 2014; Anderson and Athreya 2015; Food Chain Workers Alliance and Solidarity Cooperative 2016; Environmental Justice Foundation 2019). In the United States and Canada, attention turned to “food apartheid” or the exclusion of people of color from access to healthy food, in addition to a renewed focus on the theft of farmland from black farmers (Gilbert et al. 2002; Alkon and Agyeman 2011; Sbicca 2012; Newkirk 2019). While injustices suffered by African Americans as both producers and consumers of food have received overdue attention (e.g., a cover story in the September 2019 issue of the magazine, The Atlantic), the suffering of indigenous people from land theft, forced removal to inhospitable reservations, lack of access to healthy food, and astronomical rates of diet-related diseases such as diabetes has not yet gotten the public awareness and attention to possible reparations that it deserves (Wiedman 2012).

At a more theoretical level, political economy frameworks and the study of social movements allowed analysts to better understand the role of power and inequality in the food system (Bonanno and Wolf 2018; Sbicca 2018; Anderson et al. 2019). Similarly, focusing on social determinants of health allowed nutritionists and public health experts to comprehend how inequality, poverty, and intersectionality of different forms of discrimination interact in the path from diet to poor health. Inequality between classes and nations largely explains why some people have more than enough to eat while others starve (Patel 2008), although obesity and overweight often coexist with hunger and other forms of undernourishment. The 2019 SOFI examines this paradox, first highlighted in recognition of the “nutrition transition” (Popkin 1993) whereby economic development is accompanied by rising access to cheap foods high in sugar, fat, and salt. This is not a necessary conjunction: corporate food manufacturers, agribusiness, and drug manufacturers have encouraged the overuse of products resulting in malnutrition and food system related health problems, ranging from rising antibiotic resistance due to excessive application in livestock operations to pesticide exposure to obesity and its correlates (Nestle 2002; Patel 2008; IPES-Food 2017).

Food injustice can be a lens for the critique of capitalism, in particular the neoliberal form of capitalism that has spread since the 1980s. Understanding food injustice requires understanding how capitalism works (Holt-Giménez 2017; Clapp and Isakson 2018). This critique leads to imagining post-capitalist food systems that might be more equitable and just. “Commoning” is one such system, in which food and the risks of food production are distrib...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Series Information
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Contents
• List of figures
• List of tables
• Notes on contributors
• Acknowledgments
• 1 Food insecurity in context
• 2 Causes and consequences of njaa (hunger) in the household: Food security and intimate partner violence within an informal settlement in Mombasa, Kenya
• 3 Food is a gift of the earth: Food sovereignty among migrant farmworkers in rural Vermont
• 4 Food insecurity and the struggle for food sovereignty in the time of structural adjustment: The case of Greece
• 5 Food insecurity in the age of neoliberalism in Turkey and its neighbors
• 6 Links between land access, land use, and hunger in today’s neoliberal Nicaragua
• 7 Global water grabbing and food insecurity
• 8 Food security in a premodern agrarian empire: The case of Rome
• 9 The transformation of famine relief regimes in modern China
• 10 Bitter greens and sweet potatoes: Food practice and memories of hunger in rural China
• 11 “Groveling for lentils”: The culture and memory of food scarcity in occupied France
• 12 Coping with food safety risks: Information sources and responses by residents in Japan in the aftermath of the Fukushima nuclear accident
• 13 Framing food insecurity and the GMO “problem” in transatlantic trade
• Index