Food Security and Social Reproduction: Issues and Contradictions

Abstract

Food security, like development, is a universal ideal. But like development, food security is ultimately a political relationship, with consequences for who decides what is produced for whom and under what conditions. This chapter examines the circumstances under which the food security relation expresses changing conditions of social reproduction, focusing on the tensions arising from the undermining of national provisioning by corporate globalization. The central thesis is that while the patterns of social reproduction of the current neo-liberal regime and its social-democratic predecessor have not been independent of capitalist social relations, they diverge sharply in support of public versus private rights, and structures of public accountability and social sustainability and security.

I thank Stephen Gill for useful suggestions and Alicia Swords for research support.