Food and Security: The Evolution of a Concept

As heightened tensions and security competition come to define international politics, there has been something of an increase in discourse amongst policymakers linking their community’s future with their food, trading, farming, aid, and agriculture infrastructure. Such thinking has commonly carried great political currency in developing economies and multilateral settings, where the concept of ‘food security’ is central. 

Developed economies, however, are not typically given to having as deep or immediate concerns about the interactions between food and security for their own populations. But Brexit, Covid, Russia’s invasion and the war in Ukraine, terrorist attacks on shipping routes, Chinese bullish naval tactics, and chaotic American trade policy, amongst other developments, started to bring home to policymakers in developed economies that different thinking may now need to be applied to these policy areas. 

In a series of essays exploring a range of states currently or recently undertaking new thinking in their food security policy arenas, the twenty-first century’s new conceptualisations of food, security, and food security will be examined for their major themes and insights into international politics today. In this first piece for Europinion, the conceptual parameters of international food security will be traced through recent history.

Following decolonisation in the 1950s and 1960s, farming and agriculture policies for many people in the world became their own affair and subject to their own priorities – in theory at least. Crop yields across the world generally grew as scientific and technical expertise was directed towards agriculture, as were more intensive chemical and mechanical inputs. In what was once called the ‘Green Revolution’, it seemed that a new abundance for all might technically be possible and the likes of the 1943 Bengal famine, in which distant rulers like Churchill or Roosevelt were commonly held to be responsible, would not recur. 

A series of international crises occurred in the early 1970s, however, including famine in Bangladesh – the eventual sovereign state successor to the Bengal region of the British Empire. These generated deep anxieties that the new twentieth century state would still not achieve adequate access to the world’s food resources for its populations, unless they combine efforts in ways that complement their common goals. 

The UN Food and Agriculture Organisation (FAO) published an International Undertaking on World Food Security in 1973 and in 1974 the World Food Conference was held in Rome. Food security was not sharply defined as a policy concept in either the Undertaking or the World Food Conference’s report, which were concerned with less abstract activity such as maintaining reserve grain stocks in strategic locations to fight hunger. Food security required enhanced information systems, the political will of the Undertaking, emergency food stocks, and international cooperation over food aid.

But these efforts did draw attention to a general conception of food security, more as a way of expressing the overall goals of the participants. In the Conference’s adopted Declaration Underpinning all of this, the declaration held that: 

The well-being of the peoples of the world largely depends on the adequate production and distribution of food as well as the establishment of a world food security system which would ensure adequate availability of, and reasonable prices for, food at all times… and should thus facilitate, amongst other things, the development process of developing countries

Increased attention for economic development and food security was consolidated when the World Bank published its 1986 Poverty and Hunger. It deepened the food security concept by differentiating between chronic and transitory food insecurity. The groundbreaking Rio Earth Summit in 1992 brought together a world of people dedicated to addressing environmental and economic development policy issues internationally. Introducing new concepts like sustainable development through its Agenda 21, the summit was followed by the 1996 World Food Summit, from which we still take the four defining pillars of food security today: availability, access, utilisation, and stability of food supply. 

Importantly, the added dimension of nutrition was given a brighter spotlight than before and statespeople began to think seriously not just in terms of food quantity or price, but having enough of the right food at the right time. The definition of a population that has food security was adopted as meaning its people “at all times have physical and economic access to sufficient, safe, and nutritious food that meets their dietary needs and food preferences for an active and healthy life.” 

Since the 2012 Rio Earth Summit the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) have largely subsumed the food security policy agenda for developing economies. Food security remains a crucial issue for policymakers today: it is represented in Goal 2 of the Sustainable Development Goals. But the SDGs now give voice to a food security concept evolved to recognise that “beyond adequate calories intake, proper nutrition has other dimensions that deserve attention, including micronutrient availability and healthy diets.”

As will be seen in essays to follow, we may very well be in another period of reorientation in statespoeples’ thinking about food and security, this time influenced by the food security concerns of what might be called ‘satisfied’ powers for their own populations. Churchill said of postwar reconstruction that “there is no finer investment for any community than putting milk into babies. Healthy citizens are the greatest asset any country can have.” How do his words weigh for policymakers the world over today?  

Image: Flickr/alex.ch

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