Session 194: The Political Economy of Food Security in Asia

Organizer: Shailaja Fennell, Cambridge University

Chair: T. N. Srinivasan, Yale University

Discussant: Susan J. Thompson

Keywords: food security, political economy, trade, rights approach.

In the globalizing world of the 21st century, the militant rallies demanding the ‘right to food’ for the world’s poorest resonates discordantly alongside the strong protests by the richest countries in the world against the dumping of agricultural produce by developing countries. These current contradictions emanate from the ongoing process of dramatic and repeated reconstruction of the term ‘food security’ since the latter decades of the twentieth century. In the 1970s the term denoted the need for food self-sufficiency at the national level, aided and abetted by new international agricultural technologies; in the 1980s, the deficit in endowments and local distributional collapses in a world characterized by trade barriers were emphasized, while in the 1990s it found new meaning in the emergence of social movements around the right to food, seed and sovereignty in a increasingly global yet unequal playing field. The chameleon-like nature of the term "food security" is a consequence of the changing perspectives in the political economy of food production, distribution, consumption and trade in the last quarter century. These perspectives, informed by and emerging from new directions and research findings in the broad field of economics, ranging from trade theory, to agricultural economics and the capabilities approach, have impacted on the global, national and local understandings of "food security."

This panel will bring together economists from across the discipline to analyze the perspectives that are currently informing the research on the multi-faceted arena of "food security." The individual papers will examine the central issues of trade and food security, rights and food security, global political economy and food security and national policy and food security.

The Right to Food in India

S. Mahendra Dev, Centre for Economic and Social Studies, Andhra Pradesh

By now it is known that a rights approach is being advocated at national and international level to achieve food security. The right to food, and the measures that must be taken, are laid out quite clearly in article 11 of the International Covenant on Economic, Social and Cultural rights. Paragraph 1 calls on states to "recognize the right of everyone to an adequate standard of living for himself and his family, including adequate food . . . and the continuous improvement of living conditions." Paragraph 2 is more precise, as it demands that states guarantee the fundamental right of everyone to be free from hunger, and asks them to take "individually and through international co-operation, the measures, including specific programmes."

The objective of this paper is to examine the right to food in an Indian context. The issue of food is approached from the rights perspective. Specifically, the paper addresses the following questions: (a) What are the definitions, contents and obligations of the right to food? (b) How far has India progressed in fulfilling the right to food? (c) What are the programmes and policies India followed in achieving the right to food? (d) What should be done to achieve the right to food to all citizens of India?

Progress is examined in terms of availability and accessibility (physical and economic). Policies and programmes are scrutinized in terms of their obligation to respect, protect, and fulfill (facilitate and provide). In food security discussions, the analysis generally focuses on the supply side. In the rights approach, one has to go beyond the supply side and focus more on the demand side in the political sense.

Food Safety Standards and Processed Food Exports from Developing Countries: Market Access Issues and Policy Options

Prema-chandra Athukorala, Australian National University

The impact of food-safety standards on world trade, and the role of the World Trade Organization (WTO) in averting trade-impeding effects of these standards are at the forefront of the ongoing global trade policy debate. These issues are of particular importance for agricultural-resource rich developing countries. In recent years, processed food exports to developed country markets have emerged as a potentially major source of dynamic export growth for these countries. However, the capacity to penetrate these markets depends critically on the ability to meet the increasingly stringent food safety standards imposed in developed countries. Not only are these standards typically much higher than those prevailing in developing countries, and often difficult and costly to meet, but they are also subject to frequent changes. Some of the changes have provoked strong suspicions that food safety standards are being used as a non-transparent, new form of protection, rather than as a legitimate instrument for the protection of human, plant, and animal health.

The purpose of this paper is to examine the key issues related to the trade effects of food safety standards in the context of the current debates on strengthening the global trade architecture for development. The paper introduces the legal framework set up under the World Trade Organization (WTO) and assesses its achievements in redressing the possible trade-impeding effects of food safety regulation. It presents some preliminary results from an on-going comparative study of India and Thailand on problems encountered by processed food exporting firms in meeting international food-safety standards.

Global Political Economy and Food Security in 21st-Century China

Ganesh K. Trichur, St. Lawrence University

This paper conceptualizes the problem of food security in China in the context of its ‘developmental miracle’ (So 2003). I argue that China’s spectacular post-1978 growth performance is both part of a larger ‘network power’ that has reinstated East Asia into the epicenter of world-scale processes of capital accumulation, and apart from East Asian experiences in that it successfully weathered the multiple crises of the post-1945 Bretton Woods international order. China’s growing demands on world resources of food (and oil and water) raises questions of limits of "expanded reproduction" (Marx) over the longue dureé, in the context of the redefinition of food security that framed the 1986–1994 GATT Uruguay Round. China is part of the South’s transformation into food-dependent spaces through monopolistic control of world grain trade by a few Northern food corporations. This aspect of the neo-liberal ‘globalization project’ (McMichael 2004), creates a space of tension in which the very problematic of Chinese development awaits production. My paper investigates the implications of growing food insecurity on ‘food sovereignty’ and national culture(s) in a China that is part of a new world ‘food regime.’ How does the mushroom growth of special developmental zones and spatio-temporal transformations of structures of everyday life in China affect its long-term capacity to feed and care for its multitudes? I argue that unlike the world-historical experience of ‘market societies’ (Polanyi), China’s historical peculiarities in the global conjuncture opens possibilities for a distinctive world-developmental path.

Does Cereal Production Ensure Food Security? Comparing Recent National Policies in India and China

Shailaja Fennell, Cambridge University

The last decade has heralded a radical shift in national policy on the consequences of agricultural policy for food security. With the growing trend towards liberalizing agriculture, the policy agenda with regard to ‘food security’ is increasingly couched in the language of international trade negotiations and laws.¹ In sharp contrast, policy prescriptions prior to the 1990s centered on the adequate production of food, with cereals regarded as the touchstone that ensured food security for the nation. Consequently policies appeared to advocate autarky, with ‘self-sufficiency’ in cereals becoming a ready measure of ‘food security.’ The response and reaction of official policy to emergent as well as dominant dimensions and directives of ‘food security’ constitute an important arena of political economy.

This paper will focus on the arena of food policy to establish the trajectory of the relation between cereal production and ‘food security.’ In particular, it will examine the impact of national and international initiatives in food policy on the shift from autarky to trade-liberalization policies in cereal production, and its consequences for the conceptualization of ‘food security.’ Through an examination of the very different cereal policies currently adopted by India and China, the paper will show that official responses are not a simple reaction to the existing economic paradigms, but a nuanced process with considerable regard to local and national contexts.