Description
For over a decade, the global food system has been in disarray. From the global food crisis of 2007/8 and the Arab Spring of 2011, to the agrarian drivers of climate change and COVID-19, the role of food and agriculture sits at the centre of the crisis of the Liberal International Order (LIO). Yet IR scholars have been reluctant to interrogate the agrarian roots of international (dis)order. As a contribution to IR’s lost history of agricultural development over the long twentieth century, this paper offers a critical Gramscian analysis of the making of the Food and Agriculture Organisation (FAO) and the embattled legacy of global food governance. I aim to disentangle the political and intellectual struggle over the FAO as one centred around two contradictory logics – to nurture cooperation and knowledge-sharing among the world’s farmers on the one hand, and to further the hierarchical and exclusionary logic of capitalist development on the other. In tracing the ideological, institutional, and (geo)political contradictions of the FAO, I aim to contribute to IR’s account of the LIO and its contemporary organic crisis, expressed through a hegemonic/scientific imaginary of universal pretentions, yet without universal answers to the world’s long-standing agrarian questions.
