dietary needs and food preferences for an active and healthy life (FAO, 2003).
Burke and Lobell (2010, p.14) highlight the three components of the concept, in a conventional view: (1) food availability; (2) food accessibility; and (3) food utilization. Availability refers to the physical presence of food; accessibility refers to having the means to acquire food through production or purchase; and utilization refers to the food having an adequate nutritional content and to the body’s ability to use it effectively.
However, other interpretations are more comprehensive. Treating food security as a right, Leão and Maluf (2012, p.7) characterize the right to food as a form of regular and permanent access to adequate food for all people, giving attention to the conditions under which it is produced and marketed. The authors explain that this right must be achieved without compromising other rights, such as housing, healthcare, education, income, environment, work, transportation, employment, leisure, freedom and land access and possession.
The divergence noted here is not trivial. It signals a clash of ideas that ultimately reverberates into domestic and international public policies. For example, in the streamlined view of Burke and Lobel (2010), there is no emphasis on the local specificities of food production and trade, which is present in Leão and Maluf (2012). We will not include a conceptual discussion in this introduction, as it can be found in the chapters. For example, in the chapter by Costantino, it is clear that the former view can coexist with increased undernourishment in Argentina, which would be unthinkable for the latter.
From the perspective of human security, food security is a foundation for peace, political stability and sustainability, as structural peace can only be achieved if there is food security. Food insecurity is thus a threat to people and the international system. It is even possible to state that we are not secure if we do not have guarantees to buy food nor the freedom to grow and store it.
It is also essential to understand that conflict damages crop cultivation, animal husbandry and harvesting. It also damages rural resources and disrupts food transportation and distribution systems. The impact that conflicts have on food security can last for long periods of time after the violence has ended; although destruction happens quickly, reconstruction requires time, effort and material, and human and financial resources.
McMichael (2004, p. 4) offers a distinction between the concepts of food security and food sovereignty. He argues that the concept of food security is better associated with the relationship between the nation-state and the international system. In turn, the concept of food sovereignty involves nonstate actors, which would be more closely tied to the political and economic rights of agricultural producers as a precondition for achieving food security. In a way, what McMichael (2004) argues is that each of these concepts represents a type of agricultural production, i.e., food security depends on the agribusiness model, and food sovereignty is based on agroecological relations.
For McMichael (2004), food sovereignty thus emerges as an alternative principle to productivist and quantitative measures of food security, which would be identified with monetary transactions in the capitalist system. Food sovereignty would be premised on an agriculture oriented towards the farmer, small producer and family farm, which for the author would be key to the relationships between environmental and social security and food security. It is important to understand the argument that food sovereignty should be a premise of food security, rather than its antithesis, as McMichael (2004) emphasizes.
To guarantee the food independence and sovereignty of all people, according to La Via Campesina (2001), food must be produced through diversified systems. The organization argues that people have the right to define their own agricultural and food policies, as well as protect and regulate agricultural production and domestic trade in order to achieve sustainability goals, and determine the extent to which they want to be self-sufficient and restrict product dumping on their markets. This requires trade policies and practices that serve people’s rights to safe, healthy and ecologically sustainable production. The protectionist policies adopted primarily by developed countries make it difficult to act on a level playing field in commodities markets. However, there may be a need for protection precisely from the destructive potential of the international commodities market. The idea of food sovereignty therefore implies that communities have the autonomy to decide how to distribute and sell their food.
High commodities prices in 2007/2008 were emblematic of food insecurity caused by jolts in the international market. Ziegler (apud CHADE, 2009, p. 11), a former UN rapporteur on the right to food, emphasized that “in 2008, hunger killed more people than all the wars combined that year.” Chade (2009) argues that the World Bank, the International Monetary Fund (IMF) and the UN itself stopped giving aid to small farmers in poor countries for approximately twenty years, which exacerbated problems when commodities prices increased. In truth, rather than abandonment, it may be possible to talk about a project making food sovereignty more vulnerable.
The idea of food sovereignty advocates for people’s right to healthy and culturally appropriate food, produced ecologically and sustainably, while valuing the role of women. It implies that a community is able to define its own nutrition and agrifood systems, i.e., the effective right to choose what we should eat, where the food comes from and how it should be grown. However, it is important to avoid adopting a romantic approach to food sovereignty, which could hinder an open and creative reflection on the systemic challenges of eliminating hunger worldwide.
4 Agrifood relations: from a local to global capitalist system
Taking food as the central axis of human relations, the chapters in this collection raise and refocus the question of how to feed people in a world divided into nations, states and social classes. Indeed, one dimension common to all the texts is the international theme. This does not mean, however, that the analysis is restricted to the level of state relations. In contrast, the authors in this collection acknowledge that to address the topic of food, it is essential to remember that the biological constitution of the human being tethers us to the need to harvest from nature and eat in order to produce and reproduce. Every single day. How this occurs, however, is socially constructed, from relationships between neighbors to interactions among nations. Each chapter in this collection offers its own vision of how socially constructed aspects affect food and nourishment, never letting us forget that everything could be different. By identifying actors and examining relations, institutions and structures, we come to understand that agrifood relations are always in motion. Few would doubt that there is creative potential for devising a solution to food and nutrition insecurity. The challenge, however, is developing a solution that is politically achievable from the local to the global levels, passing through the international level.
The objective of this book is therefore to deepen the connection between international relations and food. While the texts share a common axis, the angle changes according to the chapters, giving the reader the opportunity to explore the subject through political economy, political science, law and international relations. The contents of the book’s chapters are divided into three groups: i) the humanitarian and ethical importance of solving the problem of hunger; ii) the strategic relevance for states of achieving food security, including via food sovereignty; and iii) the nature of the food security problem in a world where production and distribution are guided by the rationalism of capitalism.
In this sense, the chapter of Praveen Jha, Santosh Verma, Manish Kumar is a great opportunity to start with the analytical chapters of the book, since it covers these dimensions. The authors relate the beginning and deepening of neoliberalism in India with the serious food problems that seem to be getting worse and worse in this country. In fact, they mention that the characteristics that development has had since the neoliberal stage in India have strongly affected the supply of adequate food for the population. Moreover, all this took place while the country lived a stage of strong GDP growth. The drivers the authors mention to explain this are: the orientation of production to exports, the focalization of food distribution policies, the decline in income of the rural and urban population, the expulsion of peasants from the land, the cutback of public expenditures in the agricultural sector.
Dialoguing with the issues mentioned earlier, Ana Carolina Oliveira and Maria Luiza Feitosa emphasize the importance of considering food