Aligning Competing Risks? Global Food Security as a Trade-Offs-Based Approach to Risk and Food Policy

Abstract

Since the 2008 food price crisis, many initiatives have emerged at the intersection between scientific, economic, humanitarian and political fields with a view to ‘feeding 9 billion human beings in 2050’ and to taking up the global food security challenge. Those initiatives have often been criticised for promoting a neo-productivist agenda. By studying the case of the UK Global Food Security programme, this article shows that ‘Global Food Security’ approaches not only re-legitimise production as such, but also looks to invent new ways of confronting production issues with health and/ or environmental issues, and thus of setting priorities. Potentially, this has major consequences for food policy and risk regulation. From this point of view, the UK GFS programme has become part of a movement which goes far beyond food security or agricultural issues as such. This movement includes balancing principles of protection with economic imperatives. Whilst other approaches (such as agroecology) look for integration between these different objectives, this approach is trying to achieve coexistence between objectives perceived to be contradictory. It assumes that sustainability can only be achieved at a global level, and that science must provide the right tools to constantly find the right trade-off between competing objectives. I conclude by discussing how this approach pertains to a re-structuring of capitalism towards an extractive economy, the related forms of regulation and the challenges of this approach for social critique.