From the Global Food Crisis to the Age of Austerity: The Anxious Geopolitics of Global Food Security
2014; Taylor & Francis; Volume: 19; Issue: 2 Linguagem: Inglês
10.1080/14650045.2014.896795
ISSN1557-3028
Autores Tópico(s)Agriculture, Land Use, Rural Development
ResumoAbstractThe impacts of recent food, financial, and energy crises have reinvigorated a geopolitical enframing of global food security that makes foreign development assistance a primary component of national security strategies. This centres elite fears of hunger and underdevelopment and strongly shapes policies and strategies adopted in response. Geopolitical fears of hungry and food insecure populations are compounded by the politics of austerity and cuts to foreign aid budgets and social spending. This paper examines the geopolitics of food security, fear, and austerity as expressed in the rhetoric and strategies of major aid donor governments, especially the US and UK, and proposes an alternative geopolitics that builds from the affective dimensions of hunger, food insecurity, and vulnerability as experienced by the hungry and poor. The example of farmer suicides and agrarian political mobilisation in India demonstrates how this affective alternative geopolitics may be constructed and examined. ACKNOWLEDGEMENTSA version of this paper was presented at the conference Food Justice: Interdisciplinary Perspectives, hosted by the Institute for the Humanities at the University of Illinois at Chicago in April 2013. The author would like to thank Linda Vavra and the other conference organisers and attendees, as well as Philippe Le Billon, Melanie Sommerville, and three anonymous referees for their comments and suggestions on the paper. All omissions and mistakes remain those of the author.Notes1. Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations, The State of Food Insecurity in the World: Economic Growth Is Necessary but not Sufficient to Accelerate Reduction of Hunger and Malnutrition (Rome: FAO 2012).2. N. 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