The globalization of food security – SAGE

The 2007-2008 food crisis, with "food riots" in more than 40 countries, has transformed deeply the way the world food security's issue is discussed. Beyond the historical framing of the problem as mainly agricultural production and market organization issues, changes have been brought to the definition of food security itself, which now includes the issues of poverty, health and nutrition. The SAGE project proposes to analyze these changes as resulting from a process of globalization of a public problem which is three-fold: a world-scale approach, the participation of heterogeneous stakeholders in the governance of food security, and a transversal dimension.
This project aims to contribute to the sociology of public problems and to provide tools to analyze their globalization. In order to understand the diverse framings and positions on food security, this project proposes a multi-sited collective research, confronting various thematic and localized surveys. The research program presents three research tasks and mobilizes three analytical fields (social mobilizations, scientific controversies studies, and public policy analysis). The first task addresses the issue of knowledge related to food security, and in particular the question of how to measure it. We will study the history of the concept of food security, describe the contemporary competition between different agronomic models aiming at feeding the world, and analyze the making of “scenarios of the future” targeted at 2050. The second task aims to investigate nowadays transformations of international institutions designed at ensuring food security. We will look at recent reforms of multilateral organizations such as the FAO. We will look in particular at their impacts on expert knowledge and on the involvement of civil society in decision-making. Increasingly, food security policies tend to favour private hedging mechanisms; this is the reason why we will also study the contemporary dynamics of agricultural commodities markets and the processes of financialization and globalization of exchanges involved. The third task focuses on social mobilizations regarding food security. By so doing we will provide an accurate description of revolts against hunger and analyze the emergence and the institutionalization of transnational advocacy coalitions in this field (e.g. “food sovereignty).
Such a research project will enable us to take the full measure of the on-going process of reframing of the issue of food security in a context of globalization. Through its original comparative framework, it will contributeto the broader academic discussion on how to conceptualize the globalization of social problems.