The Political Economy of “Food Security” and Trade: Uneven and Combined Dependency

Abstract

This article critiques the notion of food security through trade promoted by suprastate organizations like the United Nations Food and Agriculture Organization, the World Bank, and the World Trade Organization. We use and refine the food‐regime perspective to contest this unwritten rule of the neoliberal food regime. Rather than “mutual dependency” in food between “North” and “South,” as argued by Philip McMichael, however, we show that food dependency has been stronger on basic foods in developing countries, while advanced capitalist countries' dependency has been mostly on luxury foods. Also, the more that developing countries become dependent on food imports and exports, the more they will be importing the “world food price” for the relevant commodities. Food‐price inflation will more adversely affect their working classes, which spend larger shares of their household budgets on food. Our empirical focus is on food dependency in emerging nations—Brazil, China, India, Mexico, and Turkey—in comparison with long‐standing agricultural exporting powerhouses, the United States and Canada. Using longitudinal data from FAOSTAT, we show that food security in the neoliberal food regime can best be characterized as “uneven and combined dependency.”

The neoliberal diet and inequality in the United States

“…Ideological assumptions that free trade in agriculture and food would guarantee food security (McMichael, 2009) have faced increasing counter-pressures from the food sovereignty perspective (Wittman et al, 2010), particularly in the face of the dramatic impact on the poor resulting from the 2007 food-price crisis. A nation's increase in dependence on agricultural exports also increases its people's vulnerability to international price fluctuations in food, as the country must internalize the "world price" for the relevant crops (Otero et al, 2013). Thus we crafted our index of food-import dependency for the food sources that constitute each country's top 80 per cent of caloric intake.…”

“…It also selectively practices trade protectionism for some of its sectors and industries, including some agricultural products (McMichael, 2009;Otero et al, 2013). Neoliberal capitalism has represented a frontal attack on working class rights in the market, e.g., by undermining unions and citizenship rights of even the market-dependent, liberal welfare states characteristic of Anglo-American nations until the 1980s (Coburn, 2004:44).…”

“…Upperincome groups have growing access to higher quality and/or higher value-added foods like meats, imported fresh fruits and vegetables, wines and other alcoholic beverages (Otero et al, 2013), while the diets of low-to-middle-income classes are heavily focused on the energy-dense pseudo foods associated with the proliferation of obesity in the United States. The neoliberal diet is the nutritional expression of what Otero (2008, 2010) have called the neoliberal food regime.…”

Review of Philip McMichael's Food Regimes and Agrarian Questions

“…Neoliberal globalization, he claims, reverses the order of the second food regime: "States now serve markets" (47). We have discussed our disagreements with McMichael's naming and characterization of the third food regime elsewhere (Pechlaner and Otero 2010;Otero 2012;Otero et al 2013). …”

“…Many scholars have endorsed this movement, and the fact is that its constituent organizations are predicated on acting upon their domestic states, not merely on the global sphere (Otero et al 2013;Gürcan 2014). Yet,…”