Abstract
This article examines the tension between food security as strategic practice and as the human insecurity of hunger. It makes the case that hunger is a security matter that warrants greater attention from security scholars, but identifies some limitations with state-centric and human security approaches. The article explores Ken Booth’s ‘emancipatory realism’ security project as one avenue for overcoming these limitations and uses Booth’s work to assist in developing a reframing of food security. It proposes redefining food security in terms of securing vulnerable populations from the structural violence of hunger, and argues that such a framing offers both conceptual and practical value for efforts to confront the problem of increasing and widespread hunger.
Keywords
Introduction
This article identifies a conflict that lies at the centre of current food-security scholarship and practice. This conflict is between, on the one hand, the insecurity of hunger that faces around one billion humans and, on the other, the strategies of powerful interests, including states, to secure and maximize their control over food supplies and food-producing resources. This conflict mirrors a tension that has been at the centre of security scholarship for the last three decades: between the strategic practices of states and the insecurity of human beings.
The article makes the case that hunger is a security matter that warrants greater attention from security scholars and practitioners than it currently receives. It sets out to create a new framing for approaching ‘food security’ in terms of hunger, using the ‘emancipatory realism’ security project of Ken Booth and the Welsh School of critical security studies. It does this partly because of limitations identified with state-centric approaches and the broad and narrow conceptions of human security, and partly because there is value to be gained from such an approach. This value is not only for conceptualizing but also for developing pragmatic strategies for tackling the insecurity of hunger in the context of state food-securing activities.
The first section examines the tension between food security and hunger, as well as the co-opting of food-security activity and discourse by powerful interests at the expense of the hungry. It draws the conclusion that current food-security practices are failing – and will continue to fail – to address hunger. It goes on to make the case for why hunger should be considered a security matter and warrants the attention of security scholarship. The second section identifies the limitations of state-centric approaches and the broad and narrow conceptions of human security in addressing the insecurities of hunger. The third section explores the Boothian emancipatory security project as a possible way of overcoming these limitations. Using the principles of emancipatory realism, it proposes reframing food security in terms of securing vulnerable populations from the structural violence of hunger, which, prima facie, offers the prospect of some practical assistance to tackling the considerable issue of hunger. It suggests some ways in which such a framing can be used in the pursuit of practical outcomes and concludes with an exhortation for further research towards such practical goals.
Hunger versus food security
Hunger is a worsening problem. Although some mainstream discourses paint a picture of rising economic prosperity that is reducing poverty and hunger, the last decade has seen statistics indicating an intensification of the problem of hunger. Even though the world produces more food than the total global population requires (FAO, 2002, 2009a), more people than ever suffer hunger (FAO, 2009b,c, 2010), while vast volumes of food go to waste (Gustavsson et al., 2011).
Hunger in the modern world is neither a natural phenomenon nor the product of an unbalanced Malthusian equation. It is a structural problem. The issue lies with the institutional arrangements that dictate who gets what. Simplistically, food is a commodity that is produced and sold for profit. Notwithstanding smallholder farmers, the vast majority of global food trade is controlled by corporations whose primary objective is the generation of profit for shareholders. These tend to prefer to sell relatively expensive and profitable foods to wealthy consumers rather than comparatively cheap, low-profit produce to poorer ones. Of course, there is great complexity in global food-supply chains, and markets and corporations are not the only institutions at work. There are also governments subsidizing agriculture, trade rules and agreements, intellectual-property regimes and commodity speculators, not to mention structures such as wage/income differentials and technical capacity gaps (e.g. lack of transportation and storage that minimize spoilage). These institutional arrangements all play a role in determining the production, price, quantity, quality, distribution and availability of – as well as, ultimately, who gets to consume which portions of – global food production.
Following the work of Sen (1981), who demonstrated that major 20th-century famines were far more the product of social, political and economic relations than they were of exogenous trigger events such as drought, Uvin (1994: 59–68, 102–6) examines this paradigm of states, corporations and multilateral institutions that embody an international food-trading regime he describes as ‘the international organisation of hunger’ (Uvin, 1994: 57), systematically reproducing abundance for the wealthy and dearth for the poor. Shaw’s (2007) critique similarly indicts the major food-security institutions as a considerable part of the continuing problem of hunger. The point is that it is not productive capacity per se but human-constructed economic and political structures that control how food is allocated and result in many going hungry. It is the institutional arrangements that are the source of the problem. A practitioner from Nairobi described some of these institutional arrangements as ‘yet another form of colonialism’, 1 preventing poor agrarian Africans from developing their economic potential and resulting in their continuing vulnerability to hunger. Notwithstanding its pathologies, the international food regime ostensibly seeks the elimination of hunger through the pursuit of sufficient food for ‘all people at all times’ (FAO, 2010).
Although there are a plethora of definitions of ‘food security’ and its meaning has evolved over time (see Shaw, 2007; Spring, 2009), today, the major food-security institutions – including governments, multilateral organizations and transnational food corporations – nearly all follow the definition used by the Food and Agriculture Organization, which does not mention hunger at all. According to the current version of this definition,
Food security exists when all people, at all times, have physical, social and economic access to sufficient, safe and nutritious food that meets their dietary needs and food preferences for an active and healthy life. (FAO, 2010: 8)
There are a number of problems with this. First, this definition is absolute. Food security is only achieved when ‘all people at all times’ have enough to eat. This is doubtless a noble – and indeed the ultimate – goal, but it is difficult to use this definition to provide a framework within which to evaluate current situations, assess proposed strategies or measure the success of policy projects, especially ones that seek to address the problem of hunger as a product of complex structural arrangements. Second, the framing is passive and lacks actors. There are no actors with agency that might be responsible for providing food security, nor calls to action to do so. Nor are there actors (other than the elusive ‘all people’) who might be experiencing, or at risk of, hunger and should be the beneficiaries of food-security analysis, strategies, policies or actions.
A more serious failing of the definition is that it frames food security as primarily an economic problem: one of supply (of sufficient, nutritious food), demand (to meet the dietary needs of all people at all times) and making supply meet demand (by physical, social and economic means of access). It is based on availability of food and is essentially about the challenge of procuring, and distributing, scarce resources among the world’s population. This tends to curtail the breadth of strategies that can be discussed in relation to food security, especially those that fall outside orthodox economic discourse. For example, forms of protectionism and alternatives to free-market models are largely excluded from consideration.
Co-opting of food security
A consequence of casting food security as an availability problem is that actors use food-security language to legitimize competition over increasingly scarce food-production resources. The underlying implication is that controlling or hoarding of resources must be good; however, control and hoarding by some invariably implies exclusion and deprivation for others. Food-security language has become widely employed as a way of pursuing particular agendas and legitimizing particular actions, especially those of powerful actors, but at the expense of others. Food-security language is used to legitimize the securing of rights over agricultural lands (Alshareef, 2009; People’s Republic of China, 2008), which one African scholars described as ‘a dubious way to solve the food security conundrum in Ethiopia’, noting that it seems
paradoxical that one of the most vulnerable countries in the world is handing over vast land and water resources to foreign investors to help food security efforts of their home countries.
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It is used by transnational agribusiness corporations in the legitimization of their profit-generating activities (ArcherDanielsMidland, 2010; Cargill, 2010; Monsanto, 2010), which range from the corporatization and amalgamation of farmlands – sometimes pushing small- and medium-sized landholders off their farms – to the pursuit of revenues from patented inputs that have been argued to be detrimental to poor farmers in developing countries (Holt-Giminez, 2011; Patel, 2007; Shiva, 2002, 2005, 2007). It is used to justify the pursuit of speculative profit by wealthy investors (Emerging Asset Management, 2010). It is also used in the pursuit of political agendas – for example, in concert with the subsidizing of electorally sensitive rural constituencies (USDA, 2010; Philpott, 2006) or, contrarily, providing an argument for the reduction of trade barriers in the quest for greater access to foreign markets. For example, the official Australian food-security policy position is that developing countries must reduce trade barriers in preference to supporting local food producers. 3 This privileges Australia’s major agricultural exporters over the agrarian poor in the developing countries. In such ways, the current paradigm of food security is used to privilege the interests of certain actors, often at the expense of others, including those at risk from the inability to access adequate food.
The commandeering of food-security language helps explain the contradiction that, while it is ostensibly about hunger (achieving sufficient food for ‘all people at all times’), food security has instead become a game for powerful actors competing for advantage (profit or scarce resources such as agricultural land) in an increasingly resource-constrained world.
One response to this has been the idea of food sovereignty, promulgated by grassroots organizations such as La Via Campesina, which argues that people should have the right to take control of their own choices over food and its provenance. Food sovereignty has been put forward as a central element of attempts to frame food ‘as a new human and livelihood security challenge’ (Spring, 2009: 471). A core strength of the concept is its emphasis on the democratization and localization of food-producing resources and distribution of production, however a substantial weakness is that the concept is equally open to usurpation by powerful players in the global food regime. Governments are now starting to use food-sovereignty language to legitimize their efforts to secure control over food supplies and food-producing resources. In recent meetings with the author, for example, policymakers from several Gulf Cooperation Council member-states referred to ‘food sovereignty’ as the rationale behind their respective governments’ efforts to pursue certain food-security strategies. 4
Strategies to address the problem of hunger should discourage this kind of co-opting and instead attempt to challenge such actors to engage in the process of tackling the fundamental issues. Moreover, given the rise of neo-Malthusian fears, the inability of existing food-security strategies to address hunger should prompt a search for alternatives. Indeed, even if the insecurity of hunger had been adequately addressed in the past, that would not mean that the same strategies would continue to be adequate for a high-population future. 5 Commentators are already flagging stress and potential conflict as a result of increasingly tight global food supplies (IISS, 2011). It is a reasonable premise that if the world cannot overcome the problem of widespread hunger when there is surplus production capacity, then finding solutions will become increasingly fraught as constraints become tighter, the desire to resort to competitive ‘securing’ of food resources increases and risks of violent conflict over food resources intensify.
Hunger is a security problem
In the light of the food price hikes of 2007 and 2008 that were followed by protests, riots and violence in as many as thirty countries and led to political upheaval in Haiti and Madagascar (BBC, 2008a,b, 2009a,b; Nicoll, 2008), some states have started paying increased attention to ‘food security’ and have initiated actions to secure themselves against the risk of future supply shocks. Strategies include grain stockpiling, market interventions and agricultural land acquisitions in other – often less-developed – countries (Alshareef, 2009; People’s Republic of China, 2008; State of Qatar, 2011). Such actions suggest that surety of food supplies is seen by some governments as a strategic imperative. These actions also have international repercussions. Nevertheless, they are not usually studied as part of the (international) security practices of states. These actions also ignore the problem of hunger.
Given the scale of hunger in the world, there are at least five reasons why hunger warrants greater attention from security scholars, notwithstanding the divergent views of what constitutes a security problem. First, as the deprivation of food, hunger is far more of a threat to life and a far greater source of physical harm on a massive scale than deprivation of land, income, capital, political voice or basic dignities. About one billion people regularly go hungry (FAO, 2009b,c, 2010). Many hundreds of millions more live in poverty and have little capacity to avoid the risk of future hunger in the face of exogenous shock, such as even a small rise in the price of staple foods. For many of these people, hunger is an existential threat. They risk early death from lack of nutrition or from lack of resilience to injury, infection or disease, and hunger dramatically curtails the physical and cognitive development of their children. For the remainder, hunger and malnourishment erode their livelihoods and limit their capacity as human beings. To paraphrase Booth (1997: 111), regardless of whether or not this is labelled a security issue for and by the elites who define security agendas, it is an existential threat for those one billion people.
Second, by allowing this physical harm to continue, elites are failing in their self-assigned role as protectors and guarantors of security. In theory at least, this can be seen as a significant undermining of political legitimacy and the legitimization of security practices. Third, and more practically, vulnerability to hunger is a possible antecedent to conflict. Risks of deprivation conflicts and associated political violence could conceivably be mitigated if the underlying pressures were addressed. Fourth, pervasive hunger is demonstrative of a substantial lack of capacity not only for the individuals but also for the communities and states that carry its burden. Finally, as this article intends to demonstrate, despite some limitations in existing security frameworks, there is significant value, both practical and conceptual, to be gained from approaching the problem of hunger with the tools of security scholarship.
Limitations
The dual nature of food security as hunger and as security practice suggests both state-centric and human security worldviews can shed light on aspects of the problem, but that perhaps neither can adequately illuminate the whole.
State-centric approaches
Conventionally, international security has been thought about in terms of the assurance of the survival of the state, combined with either competition to maintain (or improve) its relative position within the international system (neorealism) or the pursuit of absolute gains for the state through either competition or mutual cooperation (neoliberal institutionalism). Security studies has traditionally focused on military capability as the machinery for sustaining state survival, so neither food supply nor hunger have had much place within traditional security literature. Nonetheless, there are peripheral relationships: hunger is frequently a consequence of war and conflict; wars have long been fought over fertile lands, especially to capture resources to feed a growing empire; and the deprivation of food and water was the essence of medieval siege warfare. The potential role of food as a weapon also had a very minor role in the literature during the Cold War (Paarlberg, 1982; Tarrant, 1981). Even though there is growing interest among security scholars in political violence linked to the deprivation of food, say from sudden price rises or production calamities, or where the prospect of interstate violence looms over food-producing resources (Dupont, 2001: 106), state-centric scholarship on food security and hunger is scarce.
Waltz’s (1979: 126) systemic theory of international politics states that ‘in anarchy [the international system], security is the highest end’, and that ‘only if survival is assured can states safely seek other goals such as tranquillity, profit and power’. This effectively defines security in terms of survival of the state. However, Waltz continues by arguing that, in the pursuit of security, the ‘first concern of states is … to maintain their positions in the system’. He implies that security is more than just the condition of survival but also includes the state’s behaviour within the competitive paradigm of the international system. Food-security strategies that pursue one state’s interests at the expense of another – such as a wealthy country’s acquisition of farmland in countries with large hungry populations – can fit this view of state behaviour, just not in military terms.
However, it is not states per se who fear losing their positions, but those states’ regimes. For many of the regimes taking actions to secure their food supplies, such as China and the states of the Arabian Gulf, their continued power is, in part, predicated on the provision of economic prosperity for their constituents, of which cheap and plentiful food is a fundamental component. Similarly, the regimes of poorer states whose agricultural lands and fisheries are being targeted facilitate (or at least acquiesce to) the actions of the more powerful states in pursuit of self-interested objectives. The poorer states’ regimes seek to balance the imperative of regime survival with the pursuit of individual gain. This suggests that these regimes are working to a security praxis that is willing to accept a level of domestic instability in return for a flow of benefits to the regime or individuals within it. These dynamics fall outside state-centric security thinking, even though they revolve around a fundamental security concern for the state – domestic stability – and occur when the drivers of instability arise from external sources. They present a challenge to state-centric approaches that see states as unitary actors in competition with each other. These situations see the developing countries’ elites allied with foreign interests against groups of their own constituents.
From a structural systems perspective, this situation fits the World Systems Theory model (see, for example, Hopkins and Wallerstein, 1982) of the world economy split into a core and a periphery more neatly than Waltz’s states as balls-on-a-billiard-table. Indeed, some Asian and African scholars have pointed out the ‘core’ role of developing-country regimes as abusers of agricultural resources (Un and So, 2010) and agents of hunger and famine (Salih, 2009). Furthermore, foreign activities like land acquisition or market manipulation (leading to food price hikes) can create domestic conditions of deprivation and risks of internal conflict 6 that are not effectively accounted for by state-centric approaches.
‘Critical’ critiques of state-centric security point out how security agendas seek to secure the interests of those defining the agenda (Dalby, 1997; Wyn Jones, 1999). This extends to consideration of hunger as a security matter. For security elites, hunger is distant, easily excusable and unthreatening. Acknowledging the insecurity of hunger would necessitate the prioritization of hunger as an issue for elites and require the dedication of substantial efforts and resources to addressing it. Not only is there little benefit to elites in allowing this to happen, but it potentially risks challenges to institutional arrangements that underpin existing power structures. Hunger is also easy for elites to dismiss. First, hunger is continual, not an extraordinary threat. Although state-centric security has become tolerant of non-military sources of threat, hunger is not considered one (nor, usually, are possible interruptions to food supplies). Unlike the prospect of, say, unrealized nuclear exchange that threatens hundreds of thousands of deaths and widespread physical harm in an extraordinary moment, deaths from hunger are just another daily reality. Second, hunger is widely excused as being a natural phenomenon, not the product of human agency and therefore not within the remit of security scholars and practitioners. Consequently, third, the threat of hunger does not come from an enemy that is personalizable in the way that it suits elites to portray security threats – for example, in terms of ‘communists’ or ‘terrorists’. None of these reasons offer sound justification for the exclusion of hunger as a security consideration. Moreover, the exclusion of hunger is unjustifiable when state-centric security defines itself in terms of the state’s role in protecting the state – and by extension its constituents – from physical harm or the threat of physical harm arising from external others, particularly when those threats are of an extraordinary and/or existential nature. Hunger is such a form of harm, but one that confronts the periphery, not the core.
Human security approaches
Although state-centric security thinking still holds considerable sway, it has been profoundly contested from many angles. One of the major contestations has been the privileging of the human being over the state. This has opened a wide domain of approaches under the ‘human security’ banner. More than many other forms of human insecurity, excepting personally directed violence, hunger threatens actual physical harm and, in extreme cases, death. This suggests that hunger specifically should be a central focus of human security concern. Certainly, the shifting of the referent object of security from the state to the individual has turned the attention of security scholars and practitioners toward confronting the challenge of hunger as widespread insecurity. However, despite drawing attention to hunger as an insecurity, human security approaches have tended to allow hunger to be conflated with a multitude of rights, freedoms and insecurities. Hunger frequently remains largely undifferentiated from other, less damaging, human insecurities and deprivations. For example, work on food security as human security by Spring (2009, 2011), Thomas (2007) and Raymundo (2006) is embedded into broader environmental or developmental security collections. From its inception in 2005 until the end of 2011, the Journal of Human Security had published only one article dedicated to food security (written by Siegenbeek van Heukelom, 2011).
Much broader human security theorizing is built upon the ideas of ‘freedom from fear’ and ‘freedom from want’. One of the major criticisms of this is the conflation of many problems faced by humans as security threats. In its broader conceptions, the human security worldview argues that deprivation is a form of insecurity in and of itself. The question for human security scholars, and one that frequently leads to contestation, is at what point such deprivation becomes a security problem and why. The broadest conception of human security, after the multi-page definition developed in the United Nations Development Programme’s Human Development Report 1994, includes ‘safety from such chronic threats as hunger, disease and repression. And … protection from sudden and hurtful disruptions in the pattern of daily life’ (UNDP, 1994: 23). The critique made is that such conceptualization is analytically useless:
A concept that lumps together threats as diverse as genocide and affronts to personal dignity may be useful for advocacy, but it has limited utility for policy analysis. It is no accident that the broad conception of human security articulated by the UN Development Programme in its much-cited 1994 Human Development Report has rarely been used to guide research programs. (Human Security Centre, 2005: viii)
Perhaps more to the point is the inability, or failure, to prioritize insecurities when human security is so broadly conceived. Although addressing such diverse threats to human well-being as lack of education and healthcare, worsening pollution and environmental degradation, and denial of political voice is important if people are to fulfil their human potential, most of these become inconsequential in the face of the threat of immediate physical harm, such as from hunger.
The ‘too many threats’ argument against considering hunger as a security matter facilitates the convenient exclusion of it and other seemingly intractable problems from security practice, despite some scholarly attention. This exclusion highlights that issues like hunger need to compete for a position on the agenda of the security organs of the state. This exclusion in turn reflects the limitations of the competitive, zero-sum security ontology in which even security threats have to battle it out for primacy. There are two points to be drawn from this. First is the paucity of an ontology that allows an important problem to go under-addressed. Second is the co-option of human security agendas by the predominant paradigm. This can be seen in food-security work that takes a human security approach but effectively follows the corporatized and competitive food-availability framing of food security and sidelines the central problem of hunger (e.g. Kuntjoro and Jamil, 2008).
An alternative, narrower, conception of human security as proposed by the Human Security Report 2005 limits human security only to protecting people from violent armed conflict. The logic for the report’s authors is that:
There are already several annual reports that describe and analyse trends in global poverty, disease, malnutrition and ecological devastation: the threats embraced by the broad concept of human security. There would be little point in duplicating the data and analysis that such reports provide. (Human Security Centre, 2005: viii)
While this logic might justify the narrow focus of the report, it is inadequate to justify the exclusion of physical harm that is caused by humans to other humans but that does not manifest in the form of violent armed conflict. The scale of death arising from armed conflict pales next to that arising from hunger as a source of harm. For example, Figure 2.4 of the Human Security Report 2005 states that there were 27,314 reported deaths from political violence in 2003 (Human Security Centre, 2005: 73). 7 This compares to an estimated 5.3 million children dying from malnutrition each year (Unicef, 2006:1). Every one of these deaths – from both armed and structural violence – is equally important and similarly avoidable. Indeed, deaths from hunger may arguably be more easily avoidable. Yet, the narrow conception of human security has not provided an adequate argument why they should not be treated as equivalent security problems.
The critiques of the narrow conceptualization of human security extend beyond the inability of its proponents to offer a rationale for excluding other forms of physical harm. Grayson (2008: 384) argues that the narrowing of human security thinking reflects the subsuming of human security principles into security orthodoxy, ‘facilitat[ing] the incorporation of human security as a variable central to governmental calculations’. Chandler (2008) is more critical, arguing that human security so defined is less about protecting humans from violence than about protecting the core from instabilities, violence, unrest and alienation in the periphery. Duffield and Waddell (2006) takes this critique still further to argue that this framing of human security has become a tool of Westphalian neocolonialism, legitimizing the Western model of the powerful state and facilitating the intervention of powerful actors from the core into the lives of those at the periphery. The point to be drawn from these critiques is the susceptibility of the human security idea to co-opting by elites, ultimately leading to the continued exclusion of hunger from consideration as a security matter.
All this suggests that a balance needs to be struck between recognizing physically harmful insecurities for human beings such as hunger and conflating any number of bad situations with security threats. Hunger is a harbinger of deprivation and a source of widespread physical harm, and it undermines individual, community and state capacity. The insecurity of hunger begs a challenge to inadequate frames of security that elide it, not the continued marginalization of the problem.
A critical security studies approach
Booth’s emancipatory realism security project
The ‘emancipatory realism’ security project of Ken Booth and the Welsh School of critical security studies offers one possible approach to penetrating the contradiction between food security as the elimination of hunger and as the re-production of hunger by existing food-security structures and strategies. It also offers some scaffolding upon which to build a framework for rethinking food security and constructing a new, alternative approach to the insecurity of increasing and widespread hunger. This article has sought to follow Booth’s exhortation for students of security to begin their own critical explorations of problems of world politics and ‘stand outside prevailing structures, processes, ideologies and orthodoxies … with a view to developing more promising ideas by which to overcome structural and contingent human wrongs’ (2005: 15–16). Laid out in its entirety in Theory of World Security (Booth, 2007), the Boothian project owes much to the tradition of the Frankfurt School of critical theory. Like that of Habermas, Booth’s work is founded on a ‘consciousness of crisis’ (Kompridis, 2006: 3) and wrestles with the need to break the malignant patterns of domination of the present. Two of the Frankfurt School’s core principles are central to the work of Booth and his associates. One is the ‘self-conscious’ critique of existing social paradigms, which Booth (2007: 43) describes as that of ‘reflective, self-knowing theorists, shaped by the circumstances in which they find themselves’. The other is an optimistic eschatology – in the secular sense of a destiny for humanity – of social emancipation. In Booth’s (2007: 43) words, this is ‘theorising that seeks to struggle against the injustices of the world’. Together, these are defining characteristics of the emancipatory security project, distinguishing it from other strands of critical theorizing and the rest of the broad church that wears labels of critical security studies (e.g. the various contributions in Krause and Williams, 1997).
These principles provide the foundational logic of the Boothian project – first, by establishing the nature and process of enquiry as critiquing and contesting the existing orthodoxies, paradigms and structures (in essence, human social, political and economic institutional arrangements) that have given rise to today’s society with all its manifest flaws, hazards and malignity; and, second, by framing the sole objective of security theorizing and practice as the emancipation of humankind from the flaws, hazards and malignity of today’s human-constructed society.
Theory of World Security has been criticized for the wide-ranging eclecticism – ‘perlenfischerei’ (Booth, 2007: 39) – in Booth’s theorizing.
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It is suggested that this lets him down partly because he ignores, forgets or dismisses some noteworthy pearls in stringing together his theoretical necklace (Mutimer, 2008: 429; Van Munster, 2008: 438) and partly because the practical and functional connection between Booth’s ‘building blocks’ (the string between the pearls?) was ‘not always clear’ and, on occasion, contestable (Van Munster, 2008: 438). Mutimer’s indictment is harsher, suggesting that the perlenfischerei approach ‘does not provide a systematic way to think about the state of the world as much as [being] a series of ideas that animate a progressive politics’ (Mutimer, 2008: 430, emphasis added). This criticism is slightly imprecise: the alleged weakness of the approach is less a problem for thinking about the state of the world – throughout Theory of World Security, Booth provides insightful commentary applying his pearls to contemporary insecurities in the world – but more a problem for systematically thinking about how to do something about these myriad issues. In his own defence, Booth (2008: 441) has argued that
Theory of World Security is prescriptive but not a prescription. It does not seek to claim to represent absolute truth about what is real, what we know, or how we should act. But it does try and offer historical anchorages for thinking progressively about these things. In this way, its aim is to attempt to contribute to creating the conditions for the pursuit of what it might be to be emancipated human beings, as opposed to being merely human animals shaped by ideas that once seemed plausible but which are now millstones around our collective necks.
And, more concisely, that ‘it is simply not possible to provide a political recipe for all concrete situations’ (Booth, 2008: 440). While these defences are valid, they do not quite address the issue of needing a systematic approach not only to think about but to also do something about these millstones. While embracing the spirit of Booth’s emancipatory security project, this article engages with this latter criticism by embarking on a process – one whose scope is considerably greater than that of the present article alone – that seeks to develop a pragmatic, but heterodox, approach to the problems of hunger and food security. It does not seek to apply every Boothian idea-pearl to the problem, but responds to his Habermasian provocation to defy orthodox frameworks for thinking about food security in the light of paradigmatic failures, and proposes a reframing that seeks to open alternative strategies for thinking, and doing something, about the insecurity of hunger.
At the heart of the contestation between food security as political strategy and as hunger is the relationship between the state and the citizen. For Booth (2007: 257), the emancipatory security project is about ‘creating conditions for the pursuit of what it might be to be a human being, as opposed to merely being human’. ‘Creating conditions’ necessitates the engagement of systemic and empowered actors – especially states but also others – at the same time as privileging individuals. Booth (2007: 205) refuses to privilege the state, but recognizes the role of states in the emancipatory security project as ‘necessary but flawed institutions’ that ‘will remain for an indefinite future’ and must ‘despite their failings and challenges … [continue] to provide the frameworks for public institutions’.
The relationship between the citizen and the state is a key component of the historical foundation of the idea of security. The nature of this relationship is derived in significant part from Hobbes’ Leviathan ([1651] 1994) and Rousseau’s Social Contract ([1762] 1968). The Leviathan is the protector – provider of security – of the citizen from the violence of the Hobbesian state of nature, while the social contract is the deal made between the citizen and the state for the sacrificing of natural freedoms – such as the freedom to use violence in the pursuit of a basic human need such as food – in return for security from violence by others. This provides the somewhat paradoxical civil freedoms to live a long, safe and fruitful life. The security from violence by others is the crux of the social contract – whether the protection is from internal violence (crime) or external violence (security threat) – and the lynchpin on which conventional security justifications – the state’s monopoly on the use of violence, the regime’s claims to sovereignty and the legitimacy of its government – rest. But, as Hobbes also realized, at the same time as being the guarantor of security, the Leviathan is a major source of insecurity to its citizens. The question arises as to what are citizens’ legitimate expectations of the security protection to be provided by the state under the social contract (and thus what the state must deliver if it is to be accepted by the citizens as legitimate). 9 Foremost and uncontested among these is the provision of security from violence by others, including violence by the state itself. However, the violence of armed conflict is not the only form of violence inflicted on humans by others, and while the social contract continues to form the basis for legitimization of power, participants in the social contract (citizens) are entitled to expect the same protection from all kinds of violence, real and threatened, as they are from armed violence.
As one of the ‘major milestones’ in overcoming violence, Booth (2007: 68) identifies ‘Galtung’s invention of the notion of structural violence’. Galtung (1969) distinguished between personal violence and structural violence, where the former is physical harm directed by other humans, such as an attack by a person or persons against others, and the latter physical harm to humans by other humans but caused by institutional or systemic, rather than personal, forces. Structural violence is routinely excluded from consideration when the state is determining its own security agendas. So, although hunger results in actual physical harm, inflicted on humans by others, because it stems from structural forces it is excluded from state-centric security scholarship. This is unsurprising. The Leviathan both determines security agendas and is the central (but not the only) systemic actor in the creation and perpetuation of institutional arrangements that give rise to structural violence against humans. It is to be expected that empowered elites will avoid subjecting their own power structures to scrutiny and challenge. However, the exclusion of structural violence from a theoretical perspective is problematic. For security approaches legitimized by the social contract (including state-centric and some human security approaches, such as that of Kaldor [2007: 187]), elites are failing in their self-assigned role as guarantors of security and protectors from physical and existential harm. The state’s legitimacy is, in theory, undermined when an entire class of human-caused lethal violence is excluded from its obligations under the social contract.
As with the problem of human security conflating security threats, the case has been made that structural violence should not be regarded as a security problem because it turns too many things into security problems, and that if there are too many security problems the concept of security becomes worse than useless (Thomas, 2010). It is logical that conflating security issues together can limit the ability to deal with each individual problem effectively. However, defining security in ways that exclude insecurities – especially sources of physical harm – simply because there are too many of them is weak and difficult to justify.
Hunger is both a structural problem and a source of violence in that it does physical harm. Widespread sources of physical harm like hunger need to be treated as the insecurities they are. To confront such insecurity requires a process of ‘stand[ing] outside prevailing structures, processes, ideologies and orthodoxies … with a view to developing more promising ideas by which to overcome structural and contingent human wrongs’ (Booth, 2005: 15).
Rethinking food security
The assignment Booth gives us is to challenge the conventional framing of food security and to rethink it in emancipatory terms, in terms of the hungry, as opposed to terms that suit or are readily co-opted by global and systemic actors. For Booth (2007: 112), ‘emancipation seeks the securing of people from those oppressions that stop them carrying out what they would freely choose to do, compatible with the freedom of others’. Hunger is one of the most basic oppressions that people must be secured against. In this light, food security can be framed in terms of securing vulnerable populations from the structural violence of hunger.
Thinking about food security in this way de-privileges currently privileged actors in order to centralize the needs of those who must be the central focus of food-security strategies: human beings experiencing or vulnerable to hunger. It centralizes the hungry and those at risk of hunger as the focus of food-security activity. This framing also seeks to place an onus on institutional and systemic actors of agency. That onus is first to assess their own agency in securing the vulnerable from malign structures and second to challenge the agency of others. This is fundamental to creating the conditions of human emancipation.
In pursuit of these conditions, it is crucial that this new framing offers some practical purchase in terms of guiding strategic and tactical decisionmaking for any actor engaging with a ‘food security’ problem. Certainly it provides a basis for designing, implementing and evaluating practical and measurable strategies, policies and actions for creating food security. (It should be easier to plan a project and measure its success on the basis of identifying and taking appropriate actions to help secure a group from its vulnerabilities to hunger than on the basis of guaranteeing that ‘all people at all times’ will have adequate food.)
Moreover, this framing is active. By adopting this framing, an actor with agency – one with capacity to analyse, influence, modify, reshape or halt existing, malignant institutional arrangements – must be ready to act, and to be challenged by others, in terms of how its policies, behaviours or actions assist in this ultimate objective of securing those going hungry or vulnerable to hunger. The challenge by others is crucial. This framing provides a normative position that can (must) be used by actors to validate and evaluate the actions of others. Actors need to be able to be held to account for their ‘food security’ policies and actions and how they are securing the vulnerable against hunger. By facilitating actor accountability, this framing seeks to limit the risk of co-option by self-interested actors and the creation of conditions for human emancipation is sought.
Helping place an onus on actors with agency to secure the vulnerable from malign structures is a major shift from making utopian claims of ‘freedom from hunger’ to making pragmatic improvements in institutional arrangements that perpetuate the structural violence of hunger and poverty. This is an important step in developing a systematic approach, not only for thinking about, but also for acting in response to the insecurity of hunger. It seeks to pursue the emancipation of humans from structural malignity and facilitate practical approaches for making material improvements in reducing hunger. This pragmatic goal is also one of the key reasons for framing food security in terms of structural violence. Because structural violence is the result of institutional arrangements, this definition provides some direct purchase on the tasks of developing and evaluating strategies, policies, actions and behaviours. It forces the questions to be asked of any particular initiative: What are the existing institutional arrangements? What changes are likely to result? And, what impact will they have on, or for, the hungry?
This reframing of food security offers some additional advantages. Shaw (2007: 384) has described the pathologies of the existing global food-security paradigm and concludes that it is shackled by ‘the problem of institutional incoherence’: with ‘so many multilateral, bilateral and non-governmental organizations and international institutions involved, food security has tended to become everybody’s concern and so, in reality, no one’s concern’.
Shaw also struggles with the huge complexity of the food-security problematique, recognizing dimensions that range from nutrition, employment, poverty, education, health, finance, technology, land rights, trade, human rights and gender through to environmental degradation and population. Focusing on the plight of the vulnerable forestalls the ‘nobody’s problem’ and ‘institutional incoherence’ by narrowing food-security activity towards a clear and specific set of outcomes. This framing also manages to avoid excluding any of Shaw’s dimensions of food security and allows the development of responses in terms of any of them. At the same time, the framing of food security as primarily an economic matter is avoided and the co-opting of food-security discourses for the purposes of securing resources by powerful actors is made more difficult.
Three potential criticisms that may be levelled at this framing of food security warrant addressing. First, the choice of language of ‘securing’ might be open to critique as counter to the emancipatory principles of the Boothian project, as being able to be co-opted to legitimize paternalistic (and worse) behaviour by empowered actors towards the weak. Certainly, governments use ‘security’ language to justify repressive behaviours. It is also true that there is always the possibility, even likelihood, that some actors will seek ways to respond to challenges in ways that suit their own interests and disguise the real impacts of their actions. However, it will be harder to justify and legitimize those actions when the framing of the problem, as well as the normative position of other actors who have adopted that framing and who are holding the other actors to account, is focused entirely on the vulnerable. Further, framing action in terms of security does not imply that change will be dictated by the agents. Indeed, to be able to answer challenges to their food-security actions, actors will need the engagement of the populations affected by their actions. All this would be a significant shift from current empowered actors’ behaviour with respect to food security.
Second, proponents of the broader conception of human security might argue for the language of ‘freedom’ over that of security. However, the limitation of the language of ‘freedom’ is that it places less onus, or conditionality of action, on actors of agency. Freedom, even more than security, is ‘one of political theory’s most contested concepts’ (Booth, 2007: 113), and its language less powerful: security is language of priority and proactive action; freedom, rarely so. Moreover, conceptually, it is not possible to free people from the structures that are the nature of the socially constructed world, but it is undoubtedly possible to secure or protect them from malignity in those structures.
A third possible criticism is that this might appear to be an idealistic, utopian project. In response to similar indictments, Booth has argued that laying out objectives to improve the world is no bad thing: ‘societies must have an idea of the ideal’ (Booth, 2007: 130; see also Booth, 2007: 253). Idealism and utopian vision provide ideas of a world that we collectively want to work towards in place of perpetuating an unsatisfactory status quo. Notwithstanding such lofty goals, this reframing of food security is intended to be practical. It provides a definition and normative framing for action in response to the problem of hunger. It does not require universal adoption, nor a widespread normative shift, for it to show promise. Instead, it is conceivable that even a single actor rethinking its commitment to food security in this light and adjusting its behaviour, in its own field – modifying the institutional arrangements within its power – has the ability to make a measurable difference.
Conclusion and next steps
The reframing of food security proposed here has been motivated by pathologies in the existing food-security paradigm and gaps in the state-centric and major human security approaches to contemplating the two sides of the food-security coin: food-security behaviours by empowered actors and hunger as widespread human insecurity. Booth’s emancipatory security project that ‘conceive[s] security as the means and emancipation as the end’ (Booth, 2007: 115, emphasis in original) – coincidentally ‘two sides of the same coin’ – provides a useful framework for rethinking food security to privilege the disempowered and hungry without ignoring the centrality of states, corporations and multilateral actors. The work undertaken here lays down the challenge to develop a proactive heterodox approach to world hunger. It proposes a starting point for future research, analysis and practice.
The next steps are to expand the proposed reframing of food security into a comprehensive set of methodological tools. This would entail using the new definition to generate research questions that are then applied to practical situations. One example of such a situation is the acquisition of land in poor countries by wealthy ones in pursuit of secure food supplies. Another concerns the role of women in developing-country agrarian systems and the possibilities that empowering these women offers in terms of alleviating hunger and delivering emancipatory food security. Research questions grounded in this framing can be used to evaluate existing situations, test claims made by actors and help shape outcomes. For example, to evaluate an existing situation, questions can be posed that seek to uncover what is the nature of the structural violence of poverty and hunger for the vulnerable populations in question? And, what are the existing institutional arrangements giving rise to these situations? For testing claims made by actors, to challenge existing discourses and to evaluate strategies, policies and behaviours, questions should seek to uncover how such institutional arrangements are legitimized and perpetuated? And, to challenge actors benefiting from such institutional arrangements or proposing new policies or strategies, it might be asked how does the proposal improve, perpetuate or worsen the structural violence of hunger for the vulnerable population? Finally, for shaping outcomes – developing policies, projects and programmes – pertinent questions may ask what alternative institutional arrangements can limit/reduce the structural violence of poverty and hunger for the vulnerable population in question? In such ways, a new agenda for food-security research and practice might be pursued that opens up the possibility of overcoming structural pathologies and creating the conditions for human emancipation.