Ensuring Food Security as a Legal and Technological Problem

Abstract

At the moment, there are several definitions of food security in Russian agricultural and legal science. After analyzing their content, the authors argue that the country’s food security is an integral part of national security. It describes the degree of realization of the human right to food in the country and the achievement of the Sustainable Development Goals. It guarantees the physical and economic availability to citizens of high-quality and safe food in the quantities necessary for a healthy diet. The advantages of this definition are to take into account international recommendations, as well as to avoid a narrow economic perception of the goals and objectives of ensuring food security in the Russian Federation or another country. Ensuring food security is a strategic socio-economic and environmental goal for any State. When solving this problem in Russia, it is necessary to clearly distinguish between “food security” and “food independence”. If the first category characterizes the degree of provision of the population with quantitative and qualitative food, its physical and economic accessibility and security. In the second category, the emphasis is on “import substitution”, that is, the percentage of products produced in the country and imported. In the Russian Federation, the main focus of public authorities is on ensuring food independence to the detriment of the goals and objectives of ensuring food security. Food security is one of the guarantees of sustainable agricultural development and is located at the intersection of three types of national security: economic, social, and environmental. Since Russia is a federal state, the Constitution of the Russian Federation provides not only for the subjects of the jurisdiction of the Russian Federation but also for the institution of joint jurisdiction of the Russian Federation and its subjects. This is a number of important issues of state-building, within which the subjects of the Russian Federation can adopt their legislative acts. One of such areas of legislative regulation in the subjects of the Russian Federation is the issue of ensuring food security. Having studied the relevant laws of the subjects of the Russian Federation, we concluded that there can be no different levels of food security in the state since the Russian Federation is a set of its subjects. It follows from this that the subject of the Russian Federation cannot set food security indicators lower than it is provided for at the federal level. However, the subject has the right to introduce additional indicators (or indicators higher than the federal ones), which are achieved by the forces and means of such a subject of the Russian Federation. In addition, during the analysis of the legislative acts of the subjects of the Russian Federation on food security, we found that there is massive duplication of the text. The text is from the Food Security Doctrine of the Russian Federation in 2020, which is hardly appropriate.