The rise and fall of the New Alliance for Food Security and Nutrition: a tale of two discourses

Abstract

The New Alliance for Food Security and Nutrition (NAFSN) was launched in 2012 by the G7 countries as a major initiative to fight hunger in Africa. It promised to raise 50 million people out of poverty over the next 10 years by brokering pro-market reforms and flows of private capital to African agriculture. However, it failed to fulfil its promises and disappeared quietly from the public arena before the end of the 10-year period. This article applies critical discourse analysis to official US and French documents to examine the rise and fall of the initiative by confronting the discourses of the NAFSN and food security in the official US and French documents. The USA was the leading country, whereas France was a reluctant supporter and withdrew in 2018. The US discourse strongly promoted the neo-productivist food security paradigm embedded in techno-optimist and neoliberal solutions. By contrast, French framing leaned towards the agroecology paradigm, admittedly combined with the smallholder commercialisation perspective, which is itself remarkable for discourse at such a high policy level. We relate these divergences to the dialectical contradictions in the current global food system in terms of the tensions within the corporate/neoliberal food regime. Supplemental data for this article is available online at https://doi.org/10.1080/01436597.2021.1917355 .