Food, Crime, Justice and Security: (Food) Security for Whom?

Abstract

This paper explores food and food crime in the context(s) of the increasingly powerful discourse(s) of security and securitization. Because food has long been tied to conflict, we recognize it as a material need that frequently contributes to or drives conflict. In the post-9/11 world, however, food is taking on new discursive and material roles and dynamics in global conflicts. Critical security scholars have noted the ways that political and cultural calls for increased security lead to problematic processes of securitization that often serve to enlarge the power of elite state and corporate actors. As climate change continues to impact agriculture and access to food, calls for increased food security from within “northern” nation-states have become louder and more common, and are likely to be answered by the exercise of both military power and intensified “commercial colonialism” in “southern” and non-western contexts, as with examples of “land grabbing” in various parts of the world. Importantly, it should not be forgotten that although the context of accelerating climate change is new, colonial food expropriation and land appropriation are not. Demands for food security require that we ask important questions: What exactly is being secured? From whom/what is it being secured? For whom is it being secured? This paper draws on green criminology and security studies to pose these questions and provide possible insight to their answers. It begins with a discussion of different conceptions of “food security” and “food insecurity” and then considers relationships between food, crime, justice and security.