No follow on, Europe doesn’t care about food insecurity

Does agriculture indeed no longer have any place in national defense strategies? If the European and OECD examples encourage an affirmative answer, the counter-example comes from the United States of America, which considers agriculture and food issues as an integral part of national security. In the US defense doctrine, food security not only concerns the food industry, but it also concerns all areas of security. Agriculture seems, a priori, to be off of the agenda when it comes to building a strategy or a security and defense system. The latter is mostly attached to military structures. The only area where agriculture is combined with security is that of food security, which many countries keep as a virtually independent sector from the national defense system. Even when it comes to power factors, farming is rarely mentioned. Europe provides the example of separation between agriculture, and security and defense strategies. Indeed the documents that layout the main defense policies for most countries make no reference to the food issue, and therefore to agriculture . Food security is only mentioned in European countries’ security doctrines in terms of a source of conflict that may affect the neighborhood, and not in terms of a direct threat to Europe’s security. The Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD) follows the same approach as European countries. Thus, in its booklet on agriculture, OECD claims that: "The objective which was to produce sufficient food for a reasonable price in order to feed a growing urban population in a society in the process of industrialization has now lost its relevance in OECD countries." When China recently proposed to acquire the agrochemical group Syngenta headquartered in Basel,2 some US senators asked the Treasury Department to study this Chinese proposal in order to detect "potential consequences for US national security and the American food system."3 In the letter to the Treasury Secretary by US senators, the food system is directly related to national security. In addition, in the American defense doctrine, stability and world peace are dependent on global food security. For the USA, the issues of agriculture and food impact both domestic policy and foreign policy.