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“Setting the Global Dinner Table: Exploring the Limits of the
Marketization of Food Security.” In Jennifer Clapp and Marc J.
Cohen, eds., The Global Food Crisis: Governance Challenges
and Opportunities. (Waterloo: Wilfrid Laurier University
Press, 2009).
Abstract
The current global food crisis
rekindles concerns about the future of food security. Before the
ascendency of global neoliberalism in the 1980s, the state
played a central role in the provision of food security, as
grain reserves, public agricultural investment, and extension
services were viewed as the central elements of national food
security strategies. Since the 1980s, however, food security has
increasingly been subject to the discipline of the market.
Countries were advised to specialize in production for export
markets, taking advantage of niche products, and using their
comparative advantage to specialize. Food security, it was felt,
could be guaranteed through global food markets rather than
national grain reserves.
As a technology-based strategy
for expanding agricultural production, biotechnology builds on
the nearly three-decade old trend towards marketization of food
security. Unlike the Green Revolution, which was largely
directed by the public sector and financed by non-governmental
organizations, the current “gene revolution” is almost
exclusively a privately-funded and directed affair.
Nevertheless, proponents of agricultural biotechnology (agbiotech)
point to the current global food crisis as a prima facie case
illustrating the necessity of the agbiotech fix. Evoking the
specter of neomaltusian horrors, they argue that only
agricultural biotechnology can feed the world’s growing
population, and raising questions about the wisdom or necessity
of the technology is akin to condemning the world’s poor to a
Hobbesian existence.
In this paper, I argue that
the discursive construction of agricultural biotechnology as a
panacea for the problems of hunger, malnutrition, and
underdevelopment is fundamentally misguided. Indeed, the roots
of the global food crisis undermine the applicability of a
simple technical solution. Based on the recognition that the
current crisis is social, political, and perhaps above all
economic in nature, I argue that any effective response to the
crisis must be similarly broad in scope. Although it may be part
of the solution, agricultural biotechnology alone cannot resolve
the current crisis. What is needed is more than a simple
technical fix, but a fundamental reconsideration of the
marketization of food security guided by the state. |
