2. Changing Discourses of Food Security

Abstract

Food security has been a key concept in defining the conditions of food provisioning in modern market economies. Despite its widespread use, food security remains a somewhat confusing concept, with multiple definitions. This paper examines the evolution of food security as a discourse that legitimizes institutional practices and the social consequences of the food system. By reviewing changes in the social and political organization of modern capitalist societies and corresponding changes in the food system in the 20th Century, the paper argues that shifts in definitions of food security reflect changing priorities in the global economy and the incorporation of elements from contesting discourses into the food security discourse.

I – Introduction

Food security is defined as a condition “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” (Food and Agriculture Organization [FAO], 2001). Despite its widespread use, food security remains a complex concept with multiple definitions that highlight different priorities and continue to evolve over time. By the early 1990s, one study had already catalogued nearly 200 competing definitions of food security (Smith et al., 1992). These differences highlight ideological divides between hegemonic and counter-hegemonic social forces, as well as contested interpretations of the optimal conditions for food provisioning in market economies. By examining changes in the food system in the post-World War II era, this paper suggests that the confusion is functional rather than accidental and reflects shifting priorities in the global economy, as well as the contested nature of food provisioning in market economies.

This paper identifies food security as a discourse and examines the socioeconomic and political context in which it has evolved since its first formulation. Lessa (2006) defines discourse as “systems of thoughts composed of ideas, attitudes, courses of action, beliefs and practices that systematically construct the subject and the worlds of which they speak” (p. 285). As such, discourses are contested ways of understanding realities that preoccupy public awareness. Discourses change, evolve, and eventually disappear when they no longer capture the public’s attention. They reflect historical processes, public discussions, and interpretations of these processes by various social forces and ideologies. Food security as a discourse refers to ideas, attitudes, courses of action, beliefs, and practices that define the conditions of food provisioning in modern society.

In its conventional usage, the discourse of food security has served as a practical argument that legitimizes market relations, suggesting that food security can be achieved within the capitalist agri-food system. Rocha (2007) reframes food insecurity as a market failure rooted in economic, social, and policy systems rather than a shortage of food produced or distributed. At the same time, the threat of food insecurity serves as a tool for disciplining the public, ensuring that subordinate populations comply under the threat of hunger. A notable example of using food insecurity as a disciplining tool can be seen in trade embargoes or sieges during wars, which punish entire populations, as in North Korea, Cuba, Venezuela, Iraq, and Palestine, in the name of pressuring their governments.

II – The Modern Agri-Food System and Food Security

The most important socio-economic factor shaping modern agri-food systems has been the development of a capitalist world economy. The expansion of the capitalist economy has led to the commodification of food, the erosion of traditional rural livelihoods, urbanization, industrialization, and globalization.

The capitalist economy is characterized by private ownership of the means of production and widespread commodity relations. In earlier societies, the primary goal of producing and distributing goods was to satisfy basic human needs; however, under capitalism, profit maximization became the main aim. As capitalism spread globally, it transformed all prior forms of production. Natural elements, such as land, water, forests, and minerals, along with human labour, were viewed as commodities that could be bought and sold in the marketplace and as resources to be exploited for profit. As a result, many subsistence-based agricultural producers lost access to land and the ability to produce their food. Moving to urban areas, they were forced to become workers in capitalist industries, selling their labour power to those who own the means of production in exchange for a wage. Like labour power, food and most other necessities of life were transformed into commodities that people could obtain only through market relations (Magdoff, 2012; Vivero-Pol, 2017).

Competition among individual producers to maximize profit requires each enterprise to find ways to increase labour productivity by modernizing its production process. These competitive pressures threaten the system’s stability by leading to periodic crises of overproduction and declining profit rates. Attempts to seek profits elsewhere have led to the global expansion of capitalism.

Across the phases of global capitalist expansion, the dynamics of capitalist accumulation, economic development strategies, class relations, patterns of political conflict, and dominant ideologies and discourses have varied significantly (Koç, 2013). Each stage, while reflecting the general laws of motion of capitalist accumulation, has revealed unique arrangements for the organization of production and distribution, labour regimes, and socio-political structures and state regulations. Several observers, such as Friedmann and McMichael (1989) and McMichael (2009), have identified similar patterns of regulation in the food system, labelled “food regimes.”

Post-World War II Hegemonic Order

Although the term “food security” was initially introduced at the World Food Conference in 1974, the discussion on food security developed within the international institutional environment following World War II. From the beginning, the focus was on modernizing and rationalizing production and removing barriers to global trade. This focus reflected the technological determinism that has dominated in Western countries since the Enlightenment and the Industrial Revolution. The growth of productive capacity and trade was seen as the most effective way to address hunger and many social issues. As early as 1941, the Atlantic Charter, an agreement between the US and British governments, included “freedom from want,” “lowering of trade barriers,” and “global economic cooperation and advancement of social welfare” (Cépède, 1984). John Boyd Orr, who would become the first Director-General of the FAO, argued for increasing food production, expanding the global economy to give everyone purchasing power, and controlling the world’s food supply (Orr, 1943, pp. 34-36).

Another key focus of the post-war food security discourse was the strategic use of surplus food as international food aid. Food aid became an important political tool for supporting friendly regimes and encouraging former colonies to shift from subsistence-based peasant agriculture to specialized commodity production for international trade. In 1954, the U.S. Agricultural Trade, Development and Assistance Act (Food for Peace) was enacted to provide U.S. food aid to support emerging nations in the global South. In 1961, the World Food Programme (WFP) was established to leverage food aid for social and economic development.

The 1950s and 1960s marked the golden age of consumerism in North America. The Fordist growth model drove this era, emphasizing mass production for mass consumption, increased output through efficiency and standardization, and technological innovation as a key driver of change, alongside centralization and control through specific practices and technologies (Albritton, 2009). Notable examples of Fordist efforts to efficiently provide affordable food to the masses include the fast-food revolution, which Ritzer (1996) calls McDonaldization, and its agricultural counterpart, the Green Revolution (Bonanno & Constance, 2001). Fordist and Taylorist production systems introduced assembly-line technology into fast-food manufacturing. With an emphasis on efficiency, calculability, predictability, and control, production rationalization in the fast-food sector soon influenced other major parts of the value chain, including meat processing, frozen fruits, and vegetables (Ritzer, 1996; Schlosser, 2001). In its quest for high profits, the fast-food industry aimed to cut production costs by employing unskilled, non-union workers, automating processes, and prioritizing quantity over quality.

The Green Revolution, which began in the 1940s and continued into the 1960s and 1970s, spurred further modernization of agriculture in many developing countries (Pingali, 2012). It depended on intensive agricultural methods, using high-yield hybrid seeds and farm inputs such as fertilizers, herbicides, and pesticides. Supported by irrigation and mechanization, it led to significant increases in grain yields. However, these technologies were inaccessible to poor rural families, concentrating production among mechanized farmers and pushing millions of impoverished peasants into cities (Rosset et al., 2000). Urban populations grew dramatically after World War II. In 1950, only 30 percent of the world’s population lived in cities. By 2025, this figure had risen to about 58 percent (United Nations [UN], 2025).

Food Security Discourse as a Response to the Crises of the 1970s

The excitement of the Green Revolution was dampened by the 1974 Bangladesh famine and the 1973 oil crisis. A large grain trade agreement between the US and the Soviet Union also influenced grain prices on global markets (Friedmann, 1993). For developing countries, rising energy and grain prices worsened their trade deficits, prompting borrowing from foreign lenders and causing significant debt problems in the Third World (Bjornlund et al., 2022).

Three international conferences were held in 1974: the World Population Conference (19-30 August, Bucharest); the Cocoyoc Symposium on Patterns of Resource Use, Environment and Development Strategies (8-12 October); and the World Food Conference (5-16 November, Rome). These conferences set a new tone for international cooperation and a new North-South conflict over solutions.

The World Population Plan of Action established that population growth and development are closely linked and that population policies must be integrated into broader development planning rather than treated as a standalone concern. The Cocoyoc Declaration recognized that every person has basic needs — food, shelter, clothing, health, education — and that any development that fails to meet these or actively disrupts them is not real development at all (Galtung, 2010).

The World Food Conference identified food security as an international goal by emphasizing food supply, expansion of consumption, and market stability.  Food security was defined as “availability at all times of adequate world food supplies of basic foodstuffs to sustain a steady expansion of food consumption and to offset fluctuations in production and prices” (UN, 1975, p. 3). The declaration adopted a rights-based understanding at the end of the conference, recognizing that “[e]very man, woman and child has the inalienable right to be free from hunger and malnutrition to develop fully and maintain their physical and mental faculties.” The conference adopted the International Undertaking on World Food Security, which explicitly recognized that “world food security was a common responsibility of all members of the international community” and called on all FAO member states to cooperate in achieving it (UN, 1975, p. 12).

Critics argued that the issue was neither food scarcity nor overpopulation. The real cause of food insecurity was closely linked to colonial legacies, dependency relations between the North and the South, and unequal access to land and other resources (George, 1976; Lappé & Lappé, 2002; Mamdani, 1972). In response to these critiques, the FAO adopted a broader definition of food security in 1983 that went beyond the 1974 version and emphasized access: “Ensuring that all people at all times have both physical and economic access to the basic food that they need” (FAO, 1986).

This shift in the conceptualization of food security may reflect how dominant institutional actors, such as the FAO and the World Bank, adopted their opponents’ language and incorporated certain insights from their criticisms. However, we also need to recognize the fact that these changes were neither threatening to the dominant institutional arrangements of the food system nor to the regimes of accumulation. They also did not contradict the emerging neo-liberal paradigm that emphasized individualism, market liberalism, and the shrinking role of the state in the economy (Duncan, 2015; Fairbairn, 2010; Jarosz, 2009; McMichael, 2005).

Neoliberal Discourse of Food Security

In the 1980s, neoliberalism arose as a new developmental discourse and public policy advocating for the free movement of goods and services across borders, the reduction of the state’s role in the economy, the dismantling of social programs, and modifications in working conditions worldwide (Friedland, 2004; McMichael, 2005; Moreira, 2004). Neoliberal reforms implemented by many governments aimed to dismantle state-run social programs and led to changes in public policies, programs, and institutions such as minimum wage laws, trade union regulations, environmental protection acts, unemployment insurance, public healthcare, marketing boards, supply management, and cooperative structures (Bonanno, 2004; Burch & Goss, 1999).

The neoliberal restructuring of the food system focused on branding, product diversification, placement strategies, advertising, targeted marketing, centralized ordering, information technology, and flexible specialization. Another notable aspect of this period was growing corporate concentration and control, alongside a decline in the influence of nation-states. Supranational bodies and international treaties such as the General Agreement on Tariffs and Trade (GATT), the World Trade Organization (WTO), the International Monetary Fund (IMF), and the World Bank have become increasingly significant in shaping the flow of financial, commercial, and productive capital. Meanwhile, nation-states established the boundaries of interconnected global markets and regulated or restricted labour mobility.

New strategic alliances, mergers, takeovers, and both vertical and horizontal integration strategies have enabled global transnational corporations (TNCs) to control various segments of production, marketing, service, and financial functions. Agri-food TNCs often combine productionist, commercial, and speculative strategies, gaining control over broader market segments (Moreira, 2004). Vertical integration, which links different production, processing, and retail segments, allows firms to own their upstream suppliers and downstream buyers, effectively creating virtual monopolies.

Neoliberal restructuring led to a decline in well-paying unionized manufacturing jobs, a rise in service-sector employment, and an increase in precarious and part-time work. In rural areas, proletarianization or marginalization was unavoidable for the dispossessed. Even small family farmers struggled to survive on the land in a market dominated by large corporations. While feeding the world, many farmers in the North and South recognized that market forces continued to erode their capacity to feed their own families (Qualman, 2001; Wiebe, 2021). The decline in social programs made the situation worse, resulting in higher rates of poverty and food insecurity.

Neoliberal food security discourse shifted from rights-based language to market-oriented language that defined food as a commodity and reduced food insecurity to insufficient income to purchase food or to a form of market failure. A World Bank document (1994) clearly reflected this shift:

In practice, however, food is a commodity. Access largely depends on income and asset distribution, as well as the functioning (or malfunctioning) of food production and marketing systems. From this perspective, access to food is governed by the same factors that govern access to any other commodity (Serageldin & Landell-Mills, 1994)

Another important change in the food security discourse during the neo-liberal era was a shift from a state-centric model to market liberalism, and from national-level to household-level food security objectives. As World Bank experts suggested, “food security is achieved only if all households have the ability to buy food. There is no necessary link between self-sufficiency [at the national level] and food security” (Jarosz, 2011, p. 125).

These changes were paralleled by a new emphasis on decentralization of the state (regional and local governance) and on civil society organizations, such as community-based organizations, NGOs, and charities, in service delivery to fill the gap left by the shrinking of the nation-state (Koç, 1994; Moreira, 2004).

In this environment, driven mostly by market priorities, civil society organizations (CSOs) have sought to be the voice of the marginalized and to defend the priorities of social justice and development. Governments and industry representatives have invited CSO representatives to consultative meetings to gather feedback on various issues related to international and domestic policy. Civil society representatives have often criticized these so-called consultations as lip service, serving only to legitimize existing structures rather than being a transparent, participatory, and democratic process (Hodgson, 2004).

The Rome Declaration and the Emergence of Food Sovereignty and Community Food Security Discourses

As national social programs shrank or were offloaded onto provincial and local governments, the burden of care often fell on families and CSOs. Philanthropic organizations, such as food banks, started filling the gap left by government-run social programs. However, unlike the state, which has legitimate political authority, civil society organizations lack the legitimacy conferred by electoral power. Civil society organizations have often been dismissed as self-serving interest groups, operating with limited financial resources and competing among themselves, yet expected to replace the eroding functions of the welfare state. Moving from project to project, they faced constant pressure to secure funding, rely on volunteer labour, and manage high labour turnover (Koç & Bas, 2012; Koç et al., 2008).

By the 1990s, food insecurity was increasing not only in underdeveloped countries but also in advanced industrial nations such as Canada (Riches & Silvasti, 2014). According to FAO estimates, around 800 million people worldwide experienced hunger and malnutrition at the turn of the century (FAO, 2001). In response to growing public criticism, the FAO convened the World Food Summit in Rome in 1996 to develop a global food security plan. The Rome Declaration on World Food Security (WFS) and the WFS Plan of Action, adopted in 1996, called on each nation to create and implement action plans to achieve food security both domestically and internationally. A commitment was made “to eradicate hunger in all countries with the target of reducing by half the number of undernourished people by no later than 2015.” (FAO, 1996). FAO identified availability, access, and utility as the pillars of food security. Stability was added later as the fourth pillar in 2009.

A parallel civil society meeting at the WFS, led by the transnational peasant movement La Vía Campesina, strongly criticized corporate concentration, global trade policies, and social inequality. Via Campesina defined food sovereignty as “the right of each nation to maintain and develop its own capacity to produce its basic foods respecting cultural and productive diversity” (La Vía Campesina, 1996), a definition later broadened at the 2007 Nyéléni Forum to “the right of peoples to healthy and culturally appropriate food produced through ecologically sound and sustainable methods, and their right to define their own food and agriculture systems” (Claeys, 2015; Nyéléni, 2007; Rocha & Liberato, 2013).

What distinguished the food sovereignty thesis from the food security thesis was, first, its return to the rights-based language that had been present in the 1974 Universal Declaration on the Eradication of Hunger and Malnutrition — and, before that, in the Universal Declaration of Human Rights (1948) and the International Covenant on Economic, Social and Cultural Rights (1966) — but had been progressively stripped out of the food security discourse during the neoliberal era. Where the World Bank’s formulation reduced food to “a commodity” and food insecurity to a problem of household purchasing power, food sovereignty re-politicized the question: it asked not whether people were fed, but who decided how, by whom, and on whose terms, food was produced. Food security, in this sense, describes a condition without a clear means of achieving it, and can be claimed equally by agribusiness, trade negotiators, and development agencies. Food sovereignty, by contrast, names a relation of power. This agnostic stance about means made food security a legitimizing discourse, and the refusal of that agnosticism made food sovereignty a counter-hegemonic one (Fairbairn, 2010; Patel, 2009).

Second, the food sovereignty thesis articulated the grievances of peasant and small-farmer organizations, rural communities, and developing countries that found that formal national sovereignty no longer protected them. The Uruguay Round Agreement on Agriculture (1995) obliged Southern states to open their markets to imports while permitting continued subsidization of Northern agriculture, exposing peasant producers to dumped commodities priced below their production costs. TRIPS extended intellectual property claims over seeds and genetic resources that farming communities had developed collectively over generations. Structural adjustment programs had already dismantled marketing boards, input subsidies, and price supports. In this context, “sovereignty” meant demanding policy space for peoples and states to protect domestic food production, pursue agrarian reform, and regulate corporate power (McMichael, 2005; Wittman et al., 2010). The choice of the word was thus neither rhetorical nor accidental: it located the cause of food insecurity in the institutional architecture of the global food regime rather than in deficits of production, income, or technology.

The food sovereignty thesis achieved notable discursive victories. Ecuador (2008), Bolivia, Venezuela, Nepal, Mali, and Senegal incorporated food sovereignty into constitutions or framework laws; the reformed Committee on World Food Security (2009) opened a formal Civil Society Mechanism that gave peasant organizations a seat in global food governance (McKeon, 2015); and the UN Declaration on the Rights of Peasants and Other People Working in Rural Areas (2018) codified much of Via Campesina’s rights agenda in international soft law (Claeys, 2015).

Yet food sovereignty is not without its own difficulties. Critics have noted its definitional instability (sovereignty of whom: the nation, the people, the community, the household?) and the tensions between defending national policy space and empowering peasants against their own states (Edelman, 2014; Agarwal, 2014). Others question whether small-scale agroecological production can provision a majority-urban world and warn against romanticizing a unitary “peasantry” divided internally by class, gender, and generation (Bernstein, 2016). More significant for our purposes, however, is that food sovereignty is also vulnerable to the same dynamics that food security discourse had faced. Governments adopted the language of food sovereignty without redistributing land or curbing agribusiness.

Community food security was a framework informed by the food sovereignty thesis and, many observers noted, a progressive alternative (Bellows & Hamm, 2003; Mooney & Hunt, 2009; Slater, 2007; Winne et al., 1997). However, it also needs to be contextualized within neoliberal reform, which shrank the welfare state by shifting the burden of care to families, communities, and civil society organizations. While one cannot dismiss the contributions of community food security initiatives, community food security was not a serious challenge to the institutional practices of the global food system and neoliberal policies. In fact, by seeking funding from state agencies or corporate donors, these initiatives were tied to their funders’ support.

The follow-up meeting to the WFS was scheduled to be held in Rome in November 2001, but was cancelled due to security concerns following the September 11 attacks in the US that year. Shortly after the summit, FAO’s World Agriculture: Towards 2015/2030 projected that the number of hungry would fall only to about 440 million by 2030 — meaning the WFS target would not be met even fifteen years later.

Food Security During the “Interregnum”

In the Prison Notebooks, Antonio Gramsci referred to the transition period between two hegemonic eras in the capitalist world system as an interregnum: “The crisis consists precisely in the fact that the old is dying and the new cannot be born; in this interregnum a great variety of morbid symptoms appear” (Gramsci, 1971, p. 276). Historians may call the first half of the 21st century an interregnum, as it represents the deepening crisis of the post-WWII hegemony of Pax Americana and a challenge it faced from the European Union and BRICS states, especially China.

A series of financial crises (2002, 2007-08, and 2020), regional crises such as the European debt crisis, and several country-specific crises destroyed millions of livelihoods, jobs, and welfare. Seemingly win-win solutions such as biofuels, land grabs, and speculation in commodity futures created more social, financial and environmental problems. Between 2004 and 2010, the amount of grain used for biofuel rose from 2 percent to 6.5 percent of global production (Searchinger, 2011). When speculation in global commodity markets and plans to use grains and oilseeds for biofuels raised food prices, riots spread worldwide (Clapp & Cohen, 2009). Deregulation of financial markets enabled some organizations to speculate in futures markets, which contributed to the food price crisis of 2008-11 (Isakson et al., 2023; Kaufman, 2011; McMichael, 2022). Oil-rich countries aiming for long-term food security and investment firms seeking better returns through large-scale grain and oil-seeds production in a world of increasing commodity prices began purchasing or leasing large tracts of land in the South (Subramaniam et al., 2019), destroying the livelihoods of millions of rural producers.

Increasingly, food became a seemingly legitimate tool of punishment or discipline for unfriendly regimes. Sanctions in Iraq, Yugoslavia, North Korea, Palestine, Libya, Zimbabwe and elsewhere included the denial of food and turned into collective punishment for millions of people. Wars in Afghanistan (Khakpour et al., 2023), Iran (WFP, 2026); Iraq (Koç et al., 2007), Palestine (Rotz et al., 2024), Syria (Esin et al., 2024), Ukraine (Lin et al., 2023), Yemen (Perez Duque et al., 2025) along with conflicts in sub-Saharan Africa (Wudil et al., 2022) raised food prices, denied access to land, and destroyed livelihoods, thereby worsening conditions of global food insecurity. Many of these wars, such as those in Ukraine and Iran, also disrupted global supply chains, driving sharp increases in oil, fertilizer, and grain and oilseed prices and affecting people far from the war zones. The COVID-19 pandemic also negatively affected global food security (Vos et al., 2022).

In 2025, FAO reported that an estimated 673 million people experienced chronic hunger in 2023-24 (FAO, 2025). The Global Report on Food Crises 2025 reported that 319 million people across 53 countries faced acute food insecurity, primarily due to war and civil conflict (WFP, 2025). This period is also marked by political uncertainty, unilateralism, a lack of cooperation on fair trade, and declining international assistance for economic development. Given the potential adverse impacts of climate change, armed conflict, inflation, unemployment, financial crisis, and poor global leadership, global food security may deteriorate in the coming decades.

FAO’s Responses to the Worsening Conditions of Food Security

With limited financial resources and in an increasingly hostile political environment toward UN agencies, FAO and other UN agencies have tried their best to avoid making the situation worse. In 2000, the UN established the Special Rapporteur on the Right to Food. Since then, several rapporteurs have repeatedly reported on global inequalities and ongoing violations of this right. However, little progress has been made because powerful states have remained indifferent.

Several new frameworks have been developed to establish principles and rules of conduct, with consequences for the right to food, food security, and sustainable food systems. The Voluntary Guidelines to Support the Progressive Realization of the Right to Adequate Food (VGRtF) in 2004, the Five Rome Principles for Sustainable Global Food Security in 2009, the Voluntary Guidelines on the Responsible Governance of Tenure of Land, Fisheries and Forests (VGGT) in 2012, the Principles for Responsible Investment in Agriculture and Food Systems (RAI) in 2014, the Framework for Action for Food Security and Nutrition in Protracted Crises (FFA) in 2015 aimed to provide guidelines to protect food and nutrition security and the human right to food (Committee on World Food Security [CFS], 2021).

Another significant development was the FAO’s adoption of a new methodology for calculating global food insecurity in 2012. FAO released its first World Food Survey in 1946. It was succeeded by reports in 1952, 1963, 1977, 1985, and 1996, which provided global estimates. FAO launched SOFI (The State of Food Insecurity in the World) in 1999 and began publishing annual estimates. In 2009, when the estimated number of people experiencing food insecurity reached 1.02 billion, Jacques Diouf, the Director-General of FAO, mentioned the 2008-2009 financial crisis, stating that “a dangerous mix of the global economic slowdown combined with stubbornly high food prices in many countries has pushed some 100 million more people … into chronic hunger and poverty” (FAO, 2009). Public outrage over rising food insecurity figures led to a petition signed by over 4 million people (Rowling, 2012). FAO responded by delaying the release of estimates until 2012 and revising its methodology. As critics argue, the new SOFI 2012 “increased the estimated number of undernourished at the start of the timeliness series …, while decreasing estimates from 2000 onwards” (Iversen et al., 2023). With the new methodology, the 2015 targets were nearly achievable.

FAO continued to use the four pillars it adopted in 1996: availability, access, utility and stability until the 2020s. In 2020, a report by the Committee on World Food Security High-Level Panel of Experts (HLPE) suggested adding two more indicators, increasing the total to six (HLPE, 2020). The new pillars are sustainability and agency (Clapp et al., 2022; Termine, 2024). They define agency as “the capacity of individuals and groups to exercise a degree of control over their circumstances and provide meaningful input into governance processes. Agency is widely seen today as an important aspect of addressing widening inequities within food systems, including imbalances of power among actors within those systems” (Clapp et al., 2022, p. 3). While updating the existing four-indicator model is a step in the right direction, a more comprehensive evaluation of the previous four-dimensional model is needed, rather than merely adding sustainability and agency. From a critical perspective, what entered the official discourse was agency without sovereignty: the capacity to “provide meaningful input into governance processes” rather than the power to determine their outcomes.

HLPE’s addition of “agency” and “sustainability” to the pillars of food security (HLPE, 2020) moves the proposed model much closer to CSFS’s 5As approach that has been used since the early 2000s. As we discussed in Chapter 1, the 5As model includes cultural and ethical sensitivity (acceptability), nutritional and ecological sensitivity (adequacy), and a focus on the capacity of individuals, groups, or institutions to act independently (agency).

The 5As model used by the CSFS is an advance over FAO’s 4 pillars because it considers cultural and nutritional context, sustainability concerns, and the role of agency. The BC Centre for Disease Control (2022) provides one of the most comprehensive definitions of food security that integrates the 5As of food security, sustainable and resilient food systems, and food sovereignty priorities in a single statement:

Food security means that everyone has equitable access to food that is affordable, culturally preferable, nutritious, and safe; everyone has the agency to participate in, and influence food systems; and that food systems are resilient, ecologically sustainable, socially just, and honour Indigenous food sovereignty.

III – Conclusion

Food security is an essential concept for understanding the conditions of food provisioning in modern market economies. It has been effective in highlighting shortages in this process and in offering policy solutions to improve food availability, accessibility, and utilization. However, it lacks a critical focus on the food system and fails to explain how everyday practices, structures, and institutions in the modern food system have created food insecurity.

Without such critical analysis, food security often served as a legitimizing discourse, with an optimistic outlook that practical approaches could eradicate hunger and malnutrition in capitalist economies through technological innovations to enhance productive capacity, effective storage and transportation mechanisms, and improved government services and policies, as well as food aid or social assistance programs targeting marginalized groups. This optimism was partly justified by the notable progress in productive capacity and poverty reduction during certain periods in the 20th century. However, during crises, most gains tend to vanish, affecting even larger segments of the global population. With shrinking natural resources, the productionist paradigm and reformist food security discourse are unlikely to provide practical solutions for a sustainable and just food system.

The greatest achievement of the food security discourse, and the source of its staying power, has been its capacity to absorb its critics’ language, such as rights, access, agency and sustainability, without disturbing the structures that produce food insecurity.

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