Abstract
Food security is now commonly seen as one of the defining global issues of the century, intertwined with population and consumption shifts, climate change, environmental degradation, water scarcity, and the geopolitics attending globalization. Some analysts suggest that food security threats are so urgent that philosophical scruples must be set aside in order to concentrate all resources on developing and implementing radical strategies to avert a looming civilizational crisis. This article suggests that definitions of food security invoke commitments and have consequences, and that continued critical and conceptual attention to the language employed in food security research and policy is warranted.
Highlights
Food security is commonly seen as one of the defining global issues of the century, intertwined with population and consumption shifts, climate change, environmental degradation, water scarcity, and the geopolitics attending globalization
It does aspire to aid in that identification—but by troubling the process, arguing that the language of food security research, activism, and policy, as generated in institutional and practical settings, shapes problem definition and frames the range and type of acceptable responses, in ways not always self-evident
The payoff might be better awareness of the multidimensionality of food security issues, and a more critical sense of how issue construction could affect choices made in science and policy
Summary
Food sovereignty (a term originating with the international peasant movement La Via Campesina) designates the ability of a people to act autonomously to feed itself or produce its own food; an element of popular sovereignty. It can be defined in nationalist terms: securing a national food supply, or freedom from dependence on extra-national food sources (e.g., Swaminathan 2010: 11). Both definitions invoke forms of agency, the ability of popular or national communities, or states, to act effectively to produce, secure, or access food
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