Agriculture Reference
In-Depth Information
Puting this another way, the most profound insight of the OFPS was recognition
of the extent to whih once marginal or radical ideas related to feeding the world
have crept into the mainstream. his encroahment further raised doubts about the
wisdom of our overall global policy direction towards hunger and the role of market-
driven countries suh as New Zealand. his development was fostered by the con-
ference format whih provided a forum for addressing some uncomfortable political
realities that remain unthinkable in a highly neoliberalized country like New Zea-
land. The conversations that emerged centred on the need for serious transforma-
tions of the neoliberal, market-driven model for providing solutions to world hunger
(whih we have referred to throughout this topic as the 'business-as-usual' model).
As a training opportunity for the new intake of New Zealand's government offi-
cials, diplomats, and policy specialists, the OFPS did not represent the typical meet-
ing place of the coalition of interests (including academics, NGOs, a broad coali-
tion of groups across the Developing World, and a range of other critics of the neo-
liberal project) that have long questioned the potential of market-solutions to solve
key hallenges suh as world hunger. It was the discourse emerging from the former
group that would probably leave the remaining apostles of neoliberalizm with the
greatest cause for concern. The OFPS enabled a broad coalition of potentially influ-
ential political actors in New Zealand to think the unthinkable: was the neoliberal
model broken and, if so, what replaces it? It was the importance of that question that
led the editors of this volume to draw together the insights (and responses) of the
signiicant group of experts who had atended the 44th OFPS.
In this concluding hapter, we will briely summarize the case made both at the
OFPS and in this topic for why the current food crisis was not a blip, but an import-
ant signifier that the business-as-usual model is unravelling. We will then address
the range of answers that have been proposed for reorienting the global food system
in light of the apparent failure of the neoliberal model. We aknowledge the potential
of these recommendations to contribute to the global capacity of agriculture to meet
increasing food demand, but also hallenge the transformative potential of practice,
tehnologies and policies that fail to address underlying systemic problems of food
security. In the inal part of the hapter we return to the concept of utopias raised by
Stok and Carolan in the irst section of the topic, arguing that any shit to a more
just and flexible food system will require a new framework for engaging with global
food. What does an ideal global food system look like? How do we imagine the bal-
ancing of extremely diverse expectations? Suh a framework cannot rely solely on