The aff’s food wars never come and can never be solve in their world. The underlying praxis of the aff’s biopolitics just displaces the famine.

Unfolding before us today is a massive realignment of human, animal and bacterial life in order to facilitate the reproduction of capital. In place of the old liberal order we have a neoliberal consensus celebrating the modernising powers of marketbased reforms on seemingly backward agricultural systems. The neoliberal truth regime presents global markets, agrarian biotechnologies and multinational corporate initiatives as the structural preconditions for alleviating world hunger. This discussion invariably ignores Amartya Sen’s (1981, 154; Roberts 2008, 263; WFP 2009, 17) classic point that the volume and availability of food alone is not a sufficient explanation for the persistence of hunger. Indeed, it is well established that enough food exists to feed in excess of the world’s current population (OECD 2009, 21). The conviction that further production gains will seamlessly translate into more calories for the poor is empirically shaky and ideologically driven. So long as the world’s hungry remain poor consumers, they are unlikely to reap the benefits of a food system hinged on the cash nexus. Calories will continue to flow up the food chain, reappearing as meat or fuel, available at a price.

This paper has sought to historically contextualise this crisis and the power structures that underwrite it. Much of what seems current has in fact a long genealogy. In the mercantile period, for instance, fears of scarcity led to the production of political pamphlets attacking hoarders and private speculators for driving up food prices (Rashid 1980, 493), but by the 18th century a vocal coterie of free-trade theorists were able to turn these fears on their head by arguing that market forces were the most effective means to prevent food scarcity. In their view, a liberalised food system would increase competition, depress prices and eradicate hunger. In Europe the gradual commercialisation of provisioning cultures represented a ‘great transformation’ (Polanyi 2001) between peasants and their environment. In the colonies, however, the destruction of pre-existing anti-scarcity programmes was rapid and severe as market mechanisms were frequently permitted to operate unchecked and with devastating consequences.

The regulation of scarcity, therefore, does not signal the end of hunger so much as its displacement in space and time. Indeed, a careful consideration of the biopolitics of food provisioning shows that abundance and scarcity need to be theorised as interdependent phenomena (Cooper 2008, 49). It is commonly claimed that agro-fuels will reduce dependency on Middle Eastern oil (and address ‘future risks’ associated with climate change), but this supposed ‘abundance’ masks the real suffering of others forced to go hungry or endure higher prices for basic commodities because of ‘cost-push effects’ (World Food Programme 2009, 32). Likewise the burden of food surpluses – encouraged by subsidy regimes – can be suppressed by encouraging meat-based diets that enable companies to retail low-cost grain to consumers at a higher price. However, this very action re-imposes scarcity – as land and resources are diverted to meet the demands of more affluent consumers – and abundance, as obesogenic diets transform the human body into an accumulation strategy (Guthman and Du Puis 2006; Harvey 1998).

The spectre of hunger in a world of plenty seems set to continue into the 21st century. It bears repeating that this is not the failure of the modern food regime (Edkins 2000), but the logical expression of its central paradoxes, particularly its reliance on over-production in some places and under-production in others. To think seriously about global hunger means addressing the legal, institutional and biotechnical mechanisms – including trade tariffs, agricultural subsidies, enforcement of intellectual property rights and the privatisation of public provisioning systems – that directly restrict certain people’s ability to subsist. Thinking about global hunger also means getting behind the biopolitical practices designed to ‘help the poor’ (Pogge 2002, 23) to address the routine violence that sustains the global food economy making those curative interventions necessary in the first place. In short, the spatial paradoxes of the global food system require new mappings that show how scarcity and abundance, privilege and suffering, and life and death are mutually constituted. Such mappings would form the first steps toward building and preserving alternative provisioning cultures that are socially just and humane.