GGR107H1 Chap.8 Food Security, Trade and Geopolitics
Food Security, Trade and Geopolitics
Trade as geopolitics
Week 8 links food trade to geopolitics and introduces food security and food sovereignty.
The reading is a chapter from Jane Harrigan's book on Arab food sovereignty, on how food security strategies in the Arab world have evolved.
Keeping three ideas apart
Food security asks whether people can reliably get enough food; food sovereignty asks who controls how it is produced and traded; self-sufficiency asks how much is grown at home.
Exam answers lose marks when these are treated as one idea.
Using the week in the team project
If your team's food is imported, the politics of the trade it travels on is one of the social issues in its chain.
Week 8's tutorial is a library session, and the preparation exercise asks each team to have chosen its commodity and begun tracing where it is grown, so the week's ideas and your research run side by side.
Reading the Harrigan chapter
The chapter comes from an academic book and traces how food security strategies in the Arab world have changed over time.
Read it with the critical reading routine: identify its central claims about those strategies, note the kinds of evidence it uses, and ask what a food sovereignty lens would add to its account.
What this chapter covers
- 01
Food trade and geopolitics
- 02
Food security
- 03
Food sovereignty
- 04
Self-sufficiency and import dependence
- 05
Food security strategies that evolve
- 06
Library research for the team project
Worked example · free
Compute and interpret an import share
- 1Total supply is 3 + 2 = 5 million tonnes.
- 1Import share is 2 / 5 = 40%, so 60% is produced at home.
- 1The share measures dependence on trade, not whether every household can get enough food.
Key terms
- Food Security
- The condition in which people can reliably get enough food.
- Food Sovereignty
- Control over how food is produced, traded and distributed, and whose interests those choices serve.
- Self-sufficiency
- The share of a country's food that it produces at home.
- Import Dependence
- The share of a country's food supply that comes from other countries, which exposes it to the politics of trade.
Food Security, Trade and Geopolitics FAQ
How are food security and food sovereignty different?
Food security concerns whether people can reliably get enough food. Food sovereignty concerns control: who decides how food is produced, traded and distributed, and whose interests those decisions serve. A country could achieve one without the other, which is why the course pairs them.
How does food trade become a geopolitical issue?
A country that imports much of its food depends on exporting states and world markets. Conflict, policy changes or price swings beyond its control can then affect its food supply, so food becomes part of its relations with other states, the theme of the Week 8 lecture.
What happens in the Week 8 tutorial?
It is a library research tutorial with drop-in help for the team project. Before it, each team submits rough notes showing it has picked a food commodity and begun working out where that food is grown, how, and by whom.
Can a country be self-sufficient and still food insecure?
Yes. Growing most of its own food does not guarantee that every household can afford or reach enough of it. Self-sufficiency describes where food comes from, while food security describes whether people can reliably get it, so the two must be argued with separate evidence.
Why does the course pair food security with food sovereignty?
Because the two can pull apart. Policies that keep food supplies steady may still leave decisions about land, seed and trade with a few powerful actors, while sovereignty asks who holds that control. Putting the ideas side by side lets you judge a policy on both counts.
Exam move
Write one sentence each defining food security, food sovereignty and self-sufficiency, then take one invented country and describe a policy that improves one of them while weakening another. Finally, practise a three-sentence answer that uses each of the three terms once, correctly, about a single invented country.
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