CETRI
Enhancing vulnerability
The New Geopolitics of Food. Navigating policies for resilient self-reliance argues that international food systems have been profoundly transformed by the geopolitical changes of the last four decades.
Geopolitics – referring to political sanctions, trade disputes, military conflicts, multilateral challenges, aid cuts, planetary heating, and corporate interests – is affecting food availability worldwide.
Corporate interests have increasingly reshaped food systems over the last half-century – promoting selective trade liberalisation, deregulation, privatisation, financialization and cost reductions, ostensibly to improve food security efficiently.
Prioritising cost and fiscal savings led to the neglect and closure of buffer stocks. Food systems became more vulnerable as price volatility worsened.
Just-in-time supply chains have also been more susceptible to geopolitical shocks, planetary heating, and market manipulation.
World Bank structural adjustment programmes made developing countries more reliant on food and input imports. Tariffs and sanctions have disrupted food supplies worldwide.
Supplies have become more vulnerable to disruption, whether due to poor harvests or political sanctions. Price volatility has also worsened food insecurity, even in large countries.
Wars in Ukraine, Iran and elsewhere have disrupted supplies, spiking prices, and have most hit poor food-importing countries. Powerful governments have also weaponised food supplies for political reasons, as against Cuba.
Major donor countries have cut aid, with lethal consequences for the most vulnerable, as in Sudan, Palestine, Afghanistan, and the Democratic Republic of Congo.
The legitimacy and capacity of multilateral institutions – such as the UN, World Trade Organization (WTO) and World Health Organization (WHO) – have been deliberately undermined by superpowers abusing international arrangements for their own advantage.
Food prices have been much higher since 2020, following the COVID-19 pandemic, the Ukraine and Iran wars, and other major disruptions. For instance, the Hormuz fertiliser disruptions will hurt food supply for some time to come.
Import bills have risen sharply, worsening debt burdens in poor food-importing countries. Food inflation has hurt low-income communities most, especially when governments juggle imports with debt servicing.
Corporate concentration has also worsened fertiliser and food supply and price volatility, especially hurting smaller producers. Powerful interests have also abused food crises for profit.
Geopolitics has also worsened environmental crises, as planetary heating intensifies extreme weather events, hurting crop yields and food availability.
Managing markets
To enhance food security, governments must effectively influence markets with appropriate policy instruments.
The report proposes adapting policy tools once widely used before corporate-inspired neoliberal reforms, to improve contemporary market management, supply resilience and price stability.
Public stockholdings (PSHs) involve government procurement, storage, and timely release of stocks to enhance food security, including by stabilising prices. PSHs can thus help smallholdings while improving emergency preparations.
Using minimum support prices with its Targeted Public Distribution System, India subsidises grain for two-thirds of its people, while insulating national food prices from international volatility.
Meanwhile, the Economic Community of West African States (ECOWAS) has established a Regional Food Security Reserve to pool members’ stocks and collectively respond to crises.
Supply management
Other supply management mechanisms include production quotas, marketing boards, and import controls.
Market management has also supported other policy goals aimed at improving rural vitality, equity, food sovereignty, environmental sustainability, and democratic participation.
Thus, unlike in the US, Canada’s dairy, poultry, and egg production is subject to quotas and negotiated minimum prices to limit price volatility and stabilise farm incomes.
But policy implementation remains challenging. PSH programmes are often complex and costly, and risk leakage, corruption, and inefficiency.
Government commitments, such as trade agreements, limit policy options. Supply management measures may also raise consumer prices and favour wealthier farmers, as neoliberal critics have been quick to exaggerate.
But these policy tools can also support small-scale producers, reduce waste, strengthen national supply chains, and mitigate risks posed by highly centralised industrial agriculture.
Resilient Self-Reliance
The report promotes resilient self-reliance, requiring appropriate market management to stabilise food supplies and improve equity, sustainability, and food sovereignty.
Resilient self-reliance combines resilience (the ability to withstand and recover from shocks) with food self-reliance (the capacity to meet food needs with domestic production and cooperative trade).
The report recommends innovative trade partnerships, including international buffer stocks and cooperative regionalism, citing CARICOM’s regional food strategy.
Resilient self-reliance upholds food sovereignty norms, emphasising farmer rights, agroecology, territorial markets, and democratic governance, stressing equity, diversity, ecological balance, and flexibility.
Managing markets can also support agroecological transitions, culturally appropriate food diversity, territorial markets, and strategic reserves to cushion shocks.
Vulnerable countries, often due to earlier neoliberal reforms, typically try to reduce their susceptibility to international market volatility, but are usually less able to do so.
Market management mechanisms, agroecological practices, territorial markets, and cooperative trade arrangements can help ensure more stable and equitable food systems.
Stressing the urgent need for policy reform, the authors argue that recent geopolitics not only threatens crises but also offers new opportunities to reform food systems for greater equity, solidarity and sustainability.
For instance, the Hormuz crisis may spur developing economies to accelerate transitions to more renewable energy, thereby reducing their vulnerability to fossil fuel and other energy imports.
