Summary

The doctoral thesis, written by Dr Jiayi Zhou a former PhD student in the Mistra Geopolitics Research School, examines how food has increasingly also been articulated as a matter of security, focusing on the understanding of food security in the policy spaces of the Russian Federation and the UN Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO), respectively.

The study suggests that food security holds no essential meaning besides that which is attributed to it in specific settings, by and for someone. Therefore, understandings of food security are both reflective but also (re-) productive of different ways of conducting international politics more generally.

Key messages

• The human-centered food security understanding focuses on how insufficient food is an existential threat to “all people”. This conceptualization developed from the 1943 United Nations Food and Agriculture Conference (the Hot Springs Conference) and the 1974 World Food Conference.
• Even though human-centered food security discourse was widely adopted in UN circles, it competed with more exclusionary understandings in the form of a state-centered “we,” vis-à-vis people in “other” countries, such when the UK and the US rejected proposals to establish a World Food Board in 1946. By late 1990s, the state-centric discourse of food security became dominant in the Russian Federation, using arguments for food security as “food independence”. Tensions between the securitization of food at a universalist level and at national level persist today.
• The study shows how international efforts to address global hunger in a coordinated way by organisations such as FAO can be limited by governmental policies that prioritise national self-sufficiency. Maximizing national agricultural production and extensive land use, as is the case in the Russian Federation, is a strategy also present in other countries. However, Russia plays an important role as global wheat exporter, and the government’s stated ambitions to expand the Russian share of the international food market could “further exacerbate more competitive, even weaponized forms of global food relations in the name of that parochially-defined state referent.”

Conclusion

By analysing the concept of food security in contexts such as the Russian Federation and the UN Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO), the thesis outlines how the nature of food is not purely material, but also political, and examines communication around which type of security concept is put forward by social actors, legitimized and institutionalized in policy.

Citation 

Zhou, J. (2022). Producing Food, Security, and the Geopolitical Subject. Linköping University Electronic Press, p. 124. Linköping Studies in Arts and Sciences, ISSN 0282-9800; 833. https://doi.org/10.3384/9789179292836