4 - Food Security in a Globalised Setting

Summary

Introduction

A conference on “Agricultural and Rural Development in Asia: Ideas, Paradigms, and Policies Three Decades After” sounds interesting and indeed it was, as readers of this volume will discover. Three decades after what, the young may ask? The 1976 Conference proceedings edited by Roumasset, Boussard and Singh (1979) into the volume Risk, Uncertainty and Agricultural Development was for me a landmark, and one that I feel strongly has continuing relevance today. The short title for this essay could be “Agricultural and rural development (ARD) is (still) risky business”. Richard Day put it less cryptically and more elegantly in his Foreword to the volume (p. iv): “Nowhere in economic life is choice more fraught with unknown consequences and immediate danger than in agriculture, which, as it still holds the larger part of the world's population, well deserves the special emphasis it receives in deliberations such as the present volume.”

Even in my most immodest moments, I would not have jumped into a topic as broad as Food Security in a Globalised Setting without some compelling excuse. For me it was the prospect of reliving the spirit of the predecessor Conference in Mexico, when luckily I had an easier topic (Anderson 1979), that overcame the inertia of tackling the challenging topic of this session. But as I began to think about it, I was relieved to find that I was not too alone, as indeed one never is in a world of globalised social science knowledge. So let me proceed, with more than a little help from my friends, some of whom are featured in this volume.1 For instance, Runge et al. (2003a) chose as their subtitle “Food Security and Globalisation” so they have (for me, most conveniently) already “written” my paper, and have done so without the saga of Anderson self-citation and other conferee citation that follows, so let me commend that esteemed source as the place to go, notwithstanding my repeated returns to it in what follows. Vern Ruttan (in his back-cover note to that book) says he knows of “no other work that brings the various threads of the food security issue together under one cover”, and I (and clearly others, given its best-seller status) agree that it is also well conceived and executed.