The Will to end Hunger in the Age of Security

Abstract

US food polices, whether operating at international, national, or community scales, reflect historically produced discourses that frame food security largely in terms of agricultural commodity production and its resultant impacts. Recent statements of the US government (Secretary Clinton in the epigraph; see also Vilsack in USDOS 2009b¹), however, would imply that food insecurity is something that is happening somewhere else; not only positioning the United States to do something about it, these statements align food security with a broader agenda, including national security, while concealing the domestic impacts of international US food policies. The twinning of food policy and security at the domestic and international levels in US policy has heretofore been primarily concerned with the movement of food surpluses across boundaries, be they political, economic, or moral. Differences in how food security is theoretically conceptualized and put into practice continue to manifest themselves in the United States, which has historically fashioned itself as the breadbasket of the world. Although the incredible fertility of the Great Plains continues to produce relatively high yields, a number of trends are increasingly apparent. These include a decrease in the number of farmers, an increase in the acreage of farms, high rates of subsidies for commodity crops, increasing technological inputs into agroecosystems, including not only pesticide and herbicide use but also genetically modified organisms.

The question is not whether we can end hunger, it’s whether we will.

—Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton, USDOS 2009a

[W]e should be focusing on the threat that chronic hunger poses not only to the more than one billion people worldwide who directly suffer from chronic hunger, but to governments, societies, and all of the associated problems that arise from that.

—Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton, USDOS 2009b