Tiina Silvasti

Hunger in the Rich World: Food Aid and Right to Food Perspectives

The relationship between food poverty and food charity in developed countries was initially explored in the book First World Hunger: Food Security and Welfare Politics (1997), the first cross-national study of the development of food aid and the charitable food bank movement from the early 1980s to the mid 1990s. It examined the rise of food banks as community and philanthropic responses to the growing issue of food insecurity in five residual welfare states: Australia, Canada, New Zealand, the UK and the USA. It revealed a growing reliance on the collection and redistribution of surplus and wasted food to feed hungry people. During this period of neo-liberal welfare reform publicly funded social safety nets were being dismantled and government obligations to ensure the adequacy of social benefits sufficient to both pay the rent and feed oneself and one’s family, even during times of strong economic growth, were increasingly neglected. These residual approaches to hunger and poverty turned out to be highly problematic particularly in the short term and pointed to food banks as symptoms and symbols of welfare states in decline if not in crisis. The book anticipated the international growth of charitable food banking in the North as a system comparable to emergency food aid in the South. It argued for right to food approaches and strategies for public action including the importance of inter-sectoral collaboration and a stronger advocacy role for civil society.

Food Aid – Normalising the Abnormal in Finland

In Finland, food banks and bread lines emerged for the first time during the deep recession in the mid-1990s and, since then, have become permanent. This was partly an outcome of cutting or freezing social security costs during the economic slump, but there has also been an increasingly explicit transformation in national social policy. However, the emergence and persistence of food aid cannot be explained purely as a social and poverty policy issue. This article examines charity food aid as a solution to the hunger problem within the Nordic welfare regime and traces connections linking the establishment of food charity to the prevailing food system. This article focuses on different policy actions and economic developments that took place independently during the 1990s, producing, apparently accidently and without conscious co-ordination, entrenchment of charitable food aid in Finland.

Hunger and Food Charity in Rich Societies: What Hope for the Right to Food?

First World Hunger: Food Security and Welfare Politics (Riches, 1997a) offered the first cross-national study of the emergence and entrenchment of food aid and charitable food banking from the early 1980s to the mid-1990s. It consists of five case studies from advanced industrial countries with developed ‘liberal’ welfare states: Australia, Canada, New Zealand, the UK and the USA. All of the countries were food exporters and food secure through national production and imports, suggesting that domestic hunger could not be caused by the failure to provide sufficient food and nutrition, but rather was a matter of distributional justice and human rights — that is a fundamentally political issue.

Hunger in a Nordic Welfare State: Finland

During the 1970s and 1980s people in Finland became used to the idea that the welfare state would satisfy the basic needs of all citizens. Under these circumstances, hunger or food insecurity as a social evil was unthinkable. The deep economic recession at the beginning of the 1990s, however, revealed holes in the social security safety net that affected the most vulnerable. News of the ‘hunger problem’ was initially made public by activists working in different relief organizations (Hanninen and Karjalainen, 1994, p. 274). Finally, in 1993, a survey published by the Ministry of Social Affairs and Health (MSAH) estimated that approximately 100,000 Finnish people wanted for food — in other words were food insecure — at some point during the period 1992–1993 (Kontula and Koskela, 1993). It was at this time that charitable food aid emerged, and has since become a fixed feature of the poverty policy landscape.

The Precarization Effect

What’s in the name ‘precarization’? Such a question can always be asked when we are dealing with a highly contestable concept (Gallie, 1956) or a family of concepts — as is definitely the case here, where it is also customary to speak about ‘precariousness’, ‘precarity’, and even ‘precariat’. This is a family of concepts or terms that has been defined in so many different and often incompatible ways that the answer to the question seems to greatly depend on the perspective or approach adopted. This is not as big a problem in the case of ‘precariousness’, which can be used to describe a variety of situations and events quite generally; but it makes all the difference when one refers to ‘precariat’ as a particular group or class of people (Standing, 2011). However, even if we prefer using the terms ‘precarization’ and ‘precarity’ here, this problem does not disappear. In fact, this struggle over the concepts ‘precarization’ and ‘precarity’ is an expression of the discursive, and often ideological, controversies taking place between different schools of thought and their different theories, methods, motives, interests, and desires. There are, for example, those who emphasize the significance of precarization as the historical sign of the transformation of capitalism (Fumagalli & Mezzadra, 2010; Holmes, 2010; Marazzi, 2010), and there are those who want to challenge the self-evidence of the notion of precarization (Doogan, 2009) or its unwarranted generalization (Munck, 2013).

Insights into food system exposure, coping capacity and adaptive capacity

Purpose The purpose of this paper is to consider the concepts of exposure, coping capacity and adaptive capacity as a multiple structure of vulnerability in order to distinguish and interpret short-term coping responses and long-term strategic responses to food system vulnerability. Design/methodology/approach This paper applies an abductive approach for qualitative analysis of data, which were collected through 18 semi-structured interviews among Finnish food system actors. Findings The findings suggest that coping capacity and adaptive capacity are indeed two different concepts, which both need to be addressed in the examination of food system vulnerability. Public and private food system governance and related decision-making processes seem to focus on building short-term coping capacity rather than strategic adaptive capacity. In fact, conservative and protective policies can be counterproductive in terms of building genuine adaptive capacity in the food system, highlighting institutional and policy failures as limiting adaptive capacity and affecting future vulnerability. Originality/value This paper is the first to provide evidence on the multiple structure of food system vulnerability. It simultaneously considers the external aspect (vulnerability drivers) and internal factors, including short term coping capacity and more strategic adaptive capacity, as key determinants of vulnerability.

Giving up Farming as a Precarious Decision

‘Precarity’ is a novel noun that is widely recognized and applied in timely political discourses and socioeconomic diagnoses of the present. It refers to fixed-term, temporary, low-paid, insecure, unpredictable, and often risky work. The occupational position of precarious people has been characterized as flexible or flexploitative, informal, casual, intermittent, non-standard, exceptional, often outsourced, or subcontracted. ‘Precarity’ is typically seen to characterize young people, women, immigrants, and service sector workers; but particular segments of creative and immaterial ‘new labour’ are also identified with the ‘precariat’. However, in spite of all these groupings, lists, and clusters, the ‘precariat’ remains a contestable and polyvalent term, giving rise to and reason for endless definitional debates and classificatory clashes.

The Making and Unmaking of Precarity: Some Concluding Remarks

We live in societies in which the making and unmaking of precarity has a structuring power. In the labour market, precarity is created through laws and practices that reduce protections and benefits; but the labour market itself is also the place where precarity can be unmade through (at least partial) de-commodification and re-regulation. Precarity also penetrates people’s lives and mechanisms of identification, with practices of producing stigma but also of resisting it. Not by chance, the making and unmaking of precarity has become a central focus for contentious politics through the definition of the new subject of the precariat, and the struggles against precarity as a stripping of fundamental rights (Sassen, 2006).