Eve Fouilleux

‘Feeding 9 billion people’: global food security debates and the productionist trap

ABSTRACT Food security, a long-established item on the international agenda, raises many issues including production, consumption, poverty, inequalities, healthcare and conflicts. However, in 2007/2008 the global food security debate was relaunched with a single dominant focus which continues to the present day: increasing agricultural production. This paper explains this productionist bias – which may translate into inadequate policies – by combining insights from institutionalist and cognitive analyses. We show that, despite recent reforms, the global food security field remains dominated by macro- and micro-institutions that put food availability and agricultural production at the heart of the problem and solutions. The political and discursive strategies developed by transnational corporations and private foundations to promote their productivist interests are also key, along with the demands of dominant farmers’ unions in exporting countries. Although advocating opposite development patterns, civil society actors implicitly reinforce the productionist perspective through their focus on family agriculture.

Sustainable Development and Tropical Agri-chains

The year 2015 led to a renewed and ambitious global framework for action towards sustainable development with the Adoption of the 17 Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) and of the universal agreement on climate. With a view to contributing towards implementing the SDGs, this book links the issues surrounding tropical agri- chains – with which CIRAD and AFD have been involved for many decades – to that of sustainable development. In a globalized context marked by intensified commercial and financial flows, increasing sanitary risks and rapid consumer behavior evolutions, profound technical, economic and social transformations take place in world agricultural systems and agri-chains. Increased environmental and social concerns urge agri-chain actors and development practitioners to propose methods and tools to improve sustainability, and public and private actors to invent new regulations in connection with agri-chains. CIRAD and its researchers together with Southern partners, and AFD and its officers are witnesses and stewards of the technical, biological and institutional changes that take place in agri-chains. Building upon their findings and experiences, this book examines the different roles of agri-chains with regard to sustainable development: as vectors of development, as spaces of innovation, as objects of evaluation, and as arenas of regulation. Linking agricultural production with the other economic sectors, agri- chains are key spaces where local and global challenges to sustainability meet and where local and global actors experiment interlinked or common solutions. They provide arenas where multistakeholder partnerships are defined and the implementation of the SDGs constructed and negotiated. This book is intended for researchers, teachers and students as well as the international development community and for a wider audience concerned with environment and development challenges.