Agriculture Reference
In-Depth Information
14
CONCLUSIONS: TOWARDS A MORE JUST AND
FLEXIBLE GLOBAL FOOD SYSTEM
Christopher Rosin, Paul Stock and Hugh Campbell
Thinking the unthinkable: what kind of crisis is this?
It seems appropriate at this point to once again refer to the title of Tim Lang's (2010)
article: “Crisis? What Crisis?” Despite its beginnings in a conference designed to ex-
amine the global food crisis from a New Zealand perspective, the food crisis as suh
does not play a prominent role in most of this volume's hapters. In atempting to
identify the root causes of the 'Crisis of 2008', the general consensus of the contribut-
ors to the 44th Otago Foreign Policy Shool (OFPS) was that we were facing an ongo-
ing problem caused by the persistent social, political and economic structures whih
limit the capacity of our global society to effectively reduce the incidence of hunger.
Many of our contributors furnished evidence for this in the everyday experiences of
food production in particular places that are subject to diverse local pressures as muh
as global food commodity prices. All of whih raises the issue of whether the food
crisis was a temporary blip or a sign of things to come.
The discussions stimulated by the participants in the OFPS clearly established the
coalescence of new dimensions to the problem of food insecurity. The emergence of
biofuels as a competitor to food crops is an unwelcome new pressure for securing
food provisioning in many countries. The new dynamics of financialization have cre-
ated markets that trade in abstracted food futures (and encourage broader paterns
of unhelpful investment in food-related economic activities). The consequences of the
further development of this process warrant close examination. However, the overall
conclusion of discussions at the OFPS (and the hapters in this volume that have fol-
lowed) is that muh of what we are seeing (in 2008 and now again in 2011) is not a
novel event. Moreover, to call it a crisis actually obscures the long term trajectory that
has led to this current level of failure in parts of the world food system.
