Food, Justice, and Land - The Oxford Topic of Food, Politics, and Society - page 251

Chapter 10
Food, Justice, and Land
Saturnino M. Borras Jr. and
Jennifer C. Franco
Introduction: Revisiting the
Food-land Nexus
Food politics is closely linked to land politics: “who controls what land, how and for
how long, and for what purposes”? One of the brutal realities brought to light by the
2007-2008 global food price spike is the existence of one billion people living in hunger
(Sahn, this volume; Stein, this volume). They were, they are, hungry not because there is
not enough food in the world, but because they do not have access to enough food, pri-
marily because they cannot afford to buy. The productivist narrative on food scarcity—
that we need to double food production by 2050 if we are to “feed the world”—is one
of the most important contemporary global questions, as political positions precipitate
around it. But whatever aggregate questions confront an imagined global community,
the persistent food-politics questions are inescapable: “what is to be produced, where,
how much and how, by whom, and with what patterns of distribution and consump-
tion”? Answers to these questions differentially privilege state or market, but inevitably
raise issues of politics, power and social justice.
The countryside is where the bulk of the world's food is produced, but, ironically, it is
also where the bulk of hungry people live: Up to 75% of those who suffer hunger live in
the rural areas of developing countries (IFAD 2011). Though more people now live and
work in urban spaces than in the countryside, the absolute number of those who live
in the countryside remains staggering: more than 3 billion people a majority of whom
depend on land for their livelihood. They depend on a wide-range of livelihoods: farm-
ing, forest product gathering, pastoralism, small-scale fishing, animal husbandry, and
related activities. For those directly dependent on land-based production, food vulner-
ability is obvious. Their dependence on land for their livelihood does not only mean
being able to cultivate land for agricultural purposes. For some plantation workers, they