Food Security: A Course Reader

Abstract

This course aims at unpacking the deeper structural causes of food insecurity and malnutrition by analysing economic, social and gendered power asymmetries that underlie global and local food systems. Students will become familiar with the conceptual, political and institutional differences between food security and food sovereignty and further link it to global politics. For instance, by observing the ways in which these concepts contribute to reach the Millennium Development Goals, or the whys and whereof of the hierarchies of knowledge in development practice. They will be introduced to food regime analysis, to value chain analysis, to the food systems approach as well as to feminist political ecology and thereby improve their skills to critically reflect environmental concerns and diverse power asymmetries in agrifood development. Students will be familiarized with current institutions and actors of food security governance and will be introduced to alternative food movements at international and local levels, their ideas about food sovereignty and questions of inequalities.