Jamey Essex

Idle Hands Are The Devil's Tools: The Geopolitics and Geoeconomics of Hunger

In current geopolitical and geoeconomic discourses, hunger is understood as both a threat to be contained, resulting in an often severe social and spatial localization of food insecurity, and a humanitarian problem to be solved through diffuse global flows of food and other aid. The resulting scalar tensions demonstrate the potentially contradictory alignment of geopolitics and geoeconomics within processes of globalization and neoliberalization. This article examines the geopolitical and geoeconomic place of hunger and the hungry through a critical analysis of the food-for-work (FFW) approach to combating hunger. FFW programs distribute food aid in exchange for labor and have long been used to plan and deliver food aid. Although debate continues as to whether and under what conditions FFW programs are socially and economically just, governments, international institutions, and nongovernmental organizations tout them as a flexible and efficient way to deliver targeted aid, promote community development, and improve long-term prospects for economic development and food security. In the period since 11 September 2001, FFW programs are also cited as effective deterrents to terrorist recruitment strategies, and development and food security more broadly have been incorporated into national security strategies, especially but not only in the United States. The FFW approach attempts to resolve the scalar contradictions of hunger through the imposition of a labor requirement that disciplines the threat of the hungry while enforcing global connection. Case studies of FFW programs in Bangladesh, Ethiopia, and Indonesia illustrate this contradiction and highlight the development and possible future of approaches to hunger under neoliberal geopolitics.

The ‘Global Food Crisis’ and the Geopolitics of Food Security

Growing anxieties over food security have recently brought sharp geopolitical overtones to debates about the agro-food sector. Contending that this ‘geopolitical moment’ highlights the mutually constitutive nature of geopolitics and political economies of food, we examine how dominant geopolitical framings of food security extend and deepen neoliberal models of agro-food provisioning, and highlight the need for further attention to these dynamics from political geographers. We develop a preliminary research agenda for further work in the field, focusing on the recent spate of global farmland acquisitions, questions of agro-food governance, the securitisation of hunger and obesity, and the environmental impacts of dominant agro-food systems. Throughout, we highlight the value of a counter-geopolitics of food security for re-situating agro-food politics outside hegemonic policies and institutions, and of the alter-geopolitics of food pursued by communities embodying concrete alternative food production and consumption systems.

Biotechnology, Sound Science, and the Foreign Agricultural Service: A Case Study in Neoliberal Rollout

This paper addresses the ways in which policy coordination, and technical assistance and training programs operated by the United States Department of Agricultures Foreign Agricultural Service (FAS) have helped produce, internationalize, and enforce a neoliberal approach to the regulation of biotechnology, genetically modified crops, and food safety, through the reductionist discourse of sound science. The internationalization of US standards forms a major component of US agrofood trade strategies, while the contentious nature of biotechnology within international trade makes standards harmonization an important political battleground within ongoing processes of neoliberalization. Relying on appeals to sound science that posit US regulations as scientific and objective, and therefore superior to other regulatory models, FAS facilitates the rollout of neoliberal institutions within both the US state and in developing and post-Communist countries to harmonize biotechnology and food safety standards in line with US-led neoliberalization and capitalist internationalization. I examine the political and scientific contours of the sound science discourse, and offer two examples through which FAS has incorporated and deployed sound science in undertaking neoliberal rollout—first by creating a new internal Biotechnology Group, and second through focusing aspects of its Cochran Fellowship Program, a longstanding development and training program for foreign regulators, on biotechnology issues.

Introduction: Global Food Crisis

This special issue of Geopolitics focuses on recent shifts in the geopolitics of agro-food systems linked to debates around a new ‘Global Food Crisis’ and its implications for (trans)national political agendas. Spurred since 2006 by rising food prices, large-scale farmland acquisitions, and growing public protests, these concerns have motivated new streams of development assistance and reforms to global governance processes, as well as strengthened activism by agrarian social movements. While governments and civil society organisations have struggled with how best to address the realities of worsening food insecurity, the discourse of crisis has simultaneously helped to actively reposition food security as an object of urgent geopolitical calculation and strategy. The stubborn grip of continuing poverty and hunger has prompted many observers to envision a future in which chronic food insecurity and associated political and economic disorder are the new normal. In line with the aims of the journal, our approach in this special issue is to eschew a ‘classical’ perspective on the shifting political spaces of global agro-food systems in favour of a focus on the power relations involved in representing the crisis and shaping responses to it: how anxieties of food insecurity both feed on and reproduce geopolitical framings, how evolving processes of global agro-food governance have worked to challenge and consolidate certain of these framings over others, and how recent changes in the control of global farmland and associated agricultural practices help to similarly advance or trouble particular geopolitical objectives or understandings. The special issue brings together three sets of papers dealing respectively with the framing of the crisis, responses by international organisations, and specific regional case studies, which combine to highlight the

From the Global Food Crisis to the Age of Austerity: The Anxious Geopolitics of Global Food Security

The impacts of recent food, financial, and energy crises have reinvigorated a geopolitical enframing of global food security that makes foreign development assistance a primary component of national security strategies. This centres elite fears of hunger and underdevelopment and strongly shapes policies and strategies adopted in response. Geopolitical fears of hungry and food insecure populations are compounded by the politics of austerity and cuts to foreign aid budgets and social spending. This paper examines the geopolitics of food security, fear, and austerity as expressed in the rhetoric and strategies of major aid donor governments, especially the US and UK, and proposes an alternative geopolitics that builds from the affective dimensions of hunger, food insecurity, and vulnerability as experienced by the hungry and poor. The example of farmer suicides and agrarian political mobilisation in India demonstrates how this affective alternative geopolitics may be constructed and examined.

Geopolitics, geoeconomics, and further developments at USAID

discourses and practices. Clearly, then, I do not think that capitalism is the only extratextual context to consider. But even from a straightforward Marxist position, I think the geopolitical social and geoeconomic social confuse too much. If we really want to come to historical and geographical terms with how geostrategic discourse relates to the coevolution of capitalism, I think we have to address (following David Harvey) how the oscillating emphases on geopolitical conflict and geoeconomic integration relate back to underlying tensions between spatial fixity and spatial expansion at the heart of uneven capitalist development. This seems more useful to me than arguing that geopolitics is dead but dominant, and it is all the more pressing as we start to watch the US ‘pivot to Asia’ and China’s economic growth and military selfassertion setoff new geopolitical disputes across the Western Pacific. The New Silk Road geoeconomics that Essex addresses at the start of Chapter 5 may well be diverted by these new geopolitical maneuvers. But his parallel points about the geostrategic discourses instantiated in Rajiv Shah’s speech at West Point remain no less telling. Shah had said that: ‘It is our responsibility as members of the military, as development professionals, as students of a globalized world—to remind our country that . . . [every] dollar spent abroad is actually [an] investment in their national security and national values’. Making great sense of this speech, the policies it enables, and the self-presentation to which I suggested it was tied at the start of this review, Essex as a critical student of globalization offers us the best formulation of geopolitics and geoeconomics I have yet read: