Description
Despite major attempts of international organizations, humanitarian actors and national agencies to end hunger in the world, food insecurity and malnutrition are widespread and had increased even before the Corona pandemic. It appears that the manifold new social protection programs in African countries have so far not been able to disrupt that trajectory, nor has the reliance on global value chains for equitable food distribution proven justified. In this paper, we want to address the place of food policies in the world. We do that by sketching the genealogy of “food security”, a concept that has gained importance in global developmental discourses of the past decades. We will connect the evolution of food security ideas and models to the historically grown practices of tackling the food question in colonial empires and independent African states.
Based on our research project on the history of social policies in six African countries, we discuss historical processes like the transformations of African agriculture, the scientization of the social, and divergent state formations. We conclude by debating what our findings tell us about legitimate moral orders in contemporary international politics and about the place of the global in predominant IR discourses.
