Editorial: People not Commodities: The political challenge of food Security
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Development. Copyright © 2001 The Society for International Development. SAGE Publications (London, Thousand Oaks, CA and New Delhi), 1011-6370 (200112) 44:4; 3–5; 020138.
Upfront
Editorial People not Commodities: The political challenge of food security WENDY HARCOURT AND ELENA M A N C U S I - M AT E R I We conclude volume 44 with a focus on food security and livelihoods. After opening with a look at health and poverty, women’s rights and child rights and violence against women, we turn to the most basic issue of body politics – the need to nourish and sustain food security. As with health, child rights and gender violence, it seems almost gratuitous to state that food security and the livelihoods required for food self-sufficiency of an individual and community should be at the core of any development that works towards social justice. Unfortunately, once more, we see that food security, the basic right to livelihood, is not of priority to today’s global actors. Food security is rarely perceived as a vital political issue, a ‘hot’ issue, but marginalized as a concern for the dwindling sources of development aid, a concern for charity not solidarity, not the real battle. The message in this issue is loud and clear. Food security and livelihoods is a political issue, and part of a vital battle for thousands of millions of people today. It is an issue that, like health, like rights and like gender security, is critical for strategies of social and economic transformation of poor communities around the world. And again as with the other issues in this volume, it is a concern that is being taken up strongly by civil society, often in defiance of the more technical traditional approaches. In their approach, food security and livelihoods is deeply embedded in the complex array of political, economic and institutional concerns of today’s globalized development arenas. This journal issue comes at a particular historical moment of the international food security debate – with the upcoming ‘World Food Summit, five years later’ (commonly known as the WFS/fyl) and the increasing calls from civil society to link commitments of this forum to the international trends and deliberations on trade, intellectual property rights, gender, environment and
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Development 44(4): Upfront
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debt. The issue also comes at a turning point in the food security work of the Society for International Development (SID) with the completion of the Food Security and Sustainable Livelihoods initiative in 28 countries of the South. In this respect, the journal issue illustrates some of the messages emerging from the SID experience in Africa, Asia, the Middle East, Central and Latin America – as well as discussing the main issues encountered in the food security international advocacy debate. The starting point for this issue is that food security is about people, not commodities, and about access and entitlements rather than availability. The journal looks at food security as que
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