Recent geopolitical trends threaten more food crises, especially in developing countries. A new IPES-Food report urges a strategy of ‘resilient self-reliance’, proposing available opportunities to improve equity, sustainability and solidarity.

Jomo Kwame Sundaram

Geopolitics – referring to political sanctions, trade disputes, military conflicts, multilateral challenges, aid cuts, planetary heating, and corporate interests – is affecting food availability worldwide.

Corporate interests have increasingly reshaped food systems over the last half-century – promoting selective trade liberalisation, deregulation, privatisation, financialization and cost reductions, ostensibly to improve food security efficiently.

Prioritising cost and fiscal savings led to the neglect and closure of buffer stocks. Food systems became more vulnerable as price volatility worsened.

Just-in-time supply chains have also been more susceptible to geopolitical shocks, planetary heating, and market manipulation.

World Bank structural adjustment programmes made developing countries more reliant on food and input imports. Tariffs and sanctions have disrupted food supplies worldwide.

Felice Noelle Rodriguez

Wars in Ukraine, Iran and elsewhere have disrupted supplies, spiking prices, and have most hit poor food-importing countries. Powerful governments have also weaponised food supplies for political reasons, as against Cuba.

Major donor countries have cut aid, with lethal consequences for the most vulnerable, as in Sudan, Palestine, Afghanistan, and the Democratic Republic of Congo.

The legitimacy and capacity of multilateral institutions – such as the UN, World Trade Organization (WTO) and World Health Organization (WHO) – have been deliberately undermined by superpowers abusing international arrangements for their own advantage.

Food prices have been much higher since 2020, following the COVID-19 pandemic, the Ukraine and Iran wars, and other major disruptions. For instance, the Hormuz fertiliser disruptions will hurt food supply for some time to come.

Import bills have risen sharply, worsening debt burdens in poor food-importing countries. Food inflation has hurt low-income communities most, especially when governments juggle imports with debt servicing.

Corporate concentration has also worsened fertiliser and food supply and price volatility, especially hurting smaller producers. Powerful interests have also abused food crises for profit.

Geopolitics has also worsened environmental crises, as planetary heating intensifies extreme weather events, hurting crop yields and food availability.

Managing markets
To enhance food security, governments must effectively influence markets with appropriate policy instruments.

The report proposes adapting policy tools once widely used before corporate-inspired neoliberal reforms, to improve contemporary market management, supply resilience and price stability.

Public stockholdings (PSHs) involve government procurement, storage, and timely release of stocks to enhance food security, including by stabilising prices. PSHs can thus help smallholdings while improving emergency preparations.

Using minimum support prices with its Targeted Public Distribution System, India subsidises grain for two-thirds of its people, while insulating national food prices from international volatility.

Meanwhile, the Economic Community of West African States (ECOWAS) has established a Regional Food Security Reserve to pool members’ stocks and collectively respond to crises.

Supply management
Other supply management mechanisms include production quotas, marketing boards, and import controls.

Market management has also supported other policy goals aimed at improving rural vitality, equity, food sovereignty, environmental sustainability, and democratic participation.

Thus, unlike in the US, Canada’s dairy, poultry, and egg production is subject to quotas and negotiated minimum prices to limit price volatility and stabilise farm incomes.

But policy implementation remains challenging. PSH programmes are often complex and costly, and risk leakage, corruption, and inefficiency.

Government commitments, such as trade agreements, limit policy options. Supply management measures may also raise consumer prices and favour wealthier farmers, as neoliberal critics have been quick to exaggerate.

But these policy tools can also support small-scale producers, reduce waste, strengthen national supply chains, and mitigate risks posed by highly centralised industrial agriculture.

Resilient Self-Reliance
The report promotes resilient self-reliance, requiring appropriate market management to stabilise food supplies and improve equity, sustainability, and food sovereignty.

Resilient self-reliance combines resilience (the ability to withstand and recover from shocks) with food self-reliance (the capacity to meet food needs with domestic production and cooperative trade).

The report recommends innovative trade partnerships, including international buffer stocks and cooperative regionalism, citing CARICOM’s regional food strategy.

Resilient self-reliance upholds food sovereignty norms, emphasising farmer rights, agroecology, territorial markets, and democratic governance, stressing equity, diversity, ecological balance, and flexibility.

Managing markets can also support agroecological transitions, culturally appropriate food diversity, territorial markets, and strategic reserves to cushion shocks.

Vulnerable countries, often due to earlier neoliberal reforms, typically try to reduce their susceptibility to international market volatility, but are usually less able to do so.

Market management mechanisms, agroecological practices, territorial markets, and cooperative trade arrangements can help ensure more stable and equitable food systems.

Stressing the urgent need for policy reform, the authors argue that recent geopolitics not only threatens crises but also offers new opportunities to reform food systems for greater equity, solidarity and sustainability.

For instance, the Hormuz crisis may spur developing economies to accelerate transitions to more renewable energy, thereby reducing their vulnerability to fossil fuel and other energy imports.

IPS UN Bureau

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Transnational agribusinesses increasingly shape food policies worldwide. Claiming to best address recent food security concerns, they seek to profit more from innovations in food production, processing, and distribution.

Jomo Kwame Sundaram

The early post-WWII and post-colonial eras saw new emphases on food security, especially following severe food shortages before, during, and after the war.

Many starved as millions experienced acute malnutrition. The wartime Bengal famine in India claimed over three million lives as Churchill prioritised British imperial interests and military priorities.

After WWII, colonial powers weaponised food supplies for counterinsurgency and population control purposes, especially to overcome popular anti-imperialist resistance.

Many who died were not military casualties but victims of deliberate counter-insurgency food deprivation. Unsurprisingly, food security efforts became a popular policy priority after WWII.

Western-controlled research organisations, including the United Nations Food and Agriculture Organisation (FAO), became highly influential, shaping and even developing post-colonial food security policies.

Felice Noelle Rodriguez

The Green Revolution initially focused on increasing yields of wheat, maize, and rice. These efforts increased cereal production unevenly during the 1960s and 1970s.

Malthusian logic held that rising life expectancies meant population growth outstripped the increase in food supply, constrained by limited agricultural land.

As government funding from wealthy nations declined, powerful corporate interests and philanthropies became even more influential. They often promoted their own interests at the expense of farmers, consumers, and the environment.

The International Fund for Agricultural Development (IFAD) was established in the 1970s, channelling a small share of windfall petroleum incomes into food and agricultural development.

Soon after, the US transformed its Public Law (PL) 480 program into the World Food Programme (WFP). Thus, some FAO functions were ceded to donor-controlled UN funds and programmes also set up in Rome.

Embarrassingly, an FAO report found WFP food supplies were withheld from Somalia to avoid being taken by the ‘Islamist’ As-Shabaab militia. Chatham House also estimated two to three hundred thousand deaths as a consequence.

Neoliberalism
The counter-revolution against national development efforts in the 1980s undermined government fiscal capacities, import-substituting industrialisation, and food security efforts.

Neoliberal structural adjustment policies involving economic liberalisation were imposed on heavily indebted developing countries, mainly in Latin America and Sub-Saharan Africa.

The Global North promoted trade liberalisation, undermining earlier protection of and support for food and industrial production.

Powerful food conglomerates sponsored and promoted import-friendly food security indicators, undermining FAO and other civil society research and advocacy efforts.

Countries hardly producing any food were highly ranked, as civil society organisations tried to counter with their own indicators, mainly focused on food sovereignty.

Trump 2.0
A new phase has begun with Donald Trump’s re-election as US president.

Trump 2.0’s weaponisation of economic policies and agreements, including food supplies, has ominous implications for countries trying to assert some independence.

Economic and military threats have been used for diverse ends, including economic, political, and other ‘strategic’ goals. Tariffs and sanctions are now part of a diverse arsenal of such weapons deployed for various purposes.

Governments have even been threatened with tariffs and sanctions for personal reasons. Trump has demanded Brazilian ex-President Jair Bolsonaro’s freedom following his failed coup after losing the last presidential election.

Deploying such economic weapons has worsened the deepening worldwide economic stagflation, as various Trump economic and military policy threats exacerbate contractionary and inflationary pressures.

The US-controlled WFP was long used to provide food aid selectively. But there is little sympathy left in Washington for other nations’ food security concerns.

To cut federal government spending, Trump has ended official development and humanitarian assistance, including food aid, while the US remains the world’s leading food exporter.

Nevertheless, Trump may take unexpected new steps to boost farmers’ earnings to recover electoral support before the November mid-term election.

Weaponisation of food aid took an ominous turn during the Israeli siege of Gaza, by calibrating food access to enable selective ethnic cleansing.

The Gaza Humanitarian Foundation attracted hungry residents to its food centres, causing hungry families desperately seeking food to be shot while seeking food.

Poverty is primarily defined by inadequate access to food, while the FAO considers income the main determinant of food insecurity.

Although World Bank poverty measures have generally continued to decline, FAO indicators suggest a reversal of earlier progress in food security over the last decade.

These contradictory trends not only reflect problems in estimating and understanding poverty and food security but also suggest that resulting policies are poorly informed, if not worse.

Professor Felice Noelle Rodriguez is Director of the Centre for Local History and Culture, Universidad de Zamboanga, Philippines.

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Sculpture of Enrique de Malacca <ahmadfuadosman.com>

By Felice Noelle Rodriguez and Jomo Kwame Sundaram
KUALA LUMPUR, Malaysia, Mar 16 2021 (IPS)

Globalisation’s beginnings are symbolised by Ferdinand Magellan’s near circumnavigation of the world half a millennium ago. But its history is not simply of connection and trade, but also of intolerance, exploitation, slavery, violence, aggression and genocide.

Magalhães, conquistador
The Philippines today struggles with this history. Some Filipinos highlight the warm native reception extended to Magellan’s fleet and the first Catholic mass, reminiscent of American Thanksgiving mythology. For others, native resistance to conquistador aggression, captured by Danilo Madrid Gerona’s biography of Magellan, is more memorable.

In 1494CE, Pope Alexander VI, now of Borgias TV series infamy, united the Iberian Catholic kings behind the Inquisition. His Tordesillas treaty, after Christopher Columbus’ 1492 ‘discovery’ of the New World under Spanish royal auspices, gave the Portuguese rights to Brazil and all lands east of it, with Spain getting the rest of the Americas.

Felice Noelle Rodriguez

Vasco da Gama reached India in 1498 with the help of an Arab trader. In February 1502, he returned to demand that the ruler of Calicut (Kozhikode) expel all Muslims. When rejected, da Gama bombarded the port city and severely maimed those he captured.

Under Portugal’s second Viceroy to the East, Afonso d’Albuquerque, Fernão de Magalhães distinguished himself in several Portuguese naval sieges, attacks and sackings of ports in southern India and beyond.

Portugal had its eyes on Malacca well before arriving there. For the Portuguese chronicler Tome Pires, Malacca then was the greatest port in the world.

Magalhães arrived with the first Portuguese expedition to Malacca in 1509, returning in 1511 with a thousand men under Albuquerque’s command to capture it.

Magalhães was later injured in the 1513 Portuguese invasion of the Maghrib (Morocco). This aggression had begun almost a century earlier under the legendary Prince Henrique, Henry the Navigator. Later, after failing to get what he believed to be his due, Magalhães moved in 1517 to Sevilla, the base of the Spanish Inquisition and navy.

Magallanes, near circumnavigator
As Ferdinand Magallanes, he persuaded Spanish King Carlos V to sponsor his proposed circumnavigation to get to the Moluccas spice islands in Southeast Asia by sailing west, as allowed by the Tordesillas treaty. The monarch provided him with five ships, crew and provisions for the expedition.

On 16th March 1521, Magallanes’ depleted fleet of three ships arrived in the eastern Visayas in the central Philippines. The ships had sailed through the straits at the southern tip of the Americas which now bears his name. Sailing on to Cebu, he demanded native acceptance of his God and King, plus tribute.

He twice attacked the small neighbouring island of Mactan, where the Cebu airport now is, razing two villages who did not comply. Anticipating the third attack before dawn on 27th April, Lapulapu – a local leader, with the name of a grouper fish species – prepared to resist.

Portrait of the slave circumnavigator <enriquedemalacca.com>

Over-confident and arrogant, Magallanes shunned offers of reinforcements. Lapulapu’s mobilised village defence force greatly outnumbered and prevailed against his. Thus, the 500th anniversary recalls a rare victory for native resistance against the conquistador.

Of the five ships in his original fleet, only the smallest, Victoria eventually returned to Spain in 1522 under Spaniard Juan Sebastian Elcano. Nevertheless, despite the loss of most of his ships and many crew, the King still made a huge profit.

Slave, the first circumnavigator?
But there is another, largely untold story. After the Portuguese conquest of Malacca in 1511, Magalhães left with a captured teenage slave, whose original name no one knows. Perhaps to honour Henry the Navigator, Magellan renamed him ‘anRyk’, probably a Catalan version of the name.

A favourite slave of Magellan, anRyk served as his interpreter and was to be freed upon his death. However, the ship’s captain refused to honour the will. Unsurprisingly, anRyk deserted. Thus, he may well have become the first to circumnavigate Earth, as some claim he returned to live out his life near Malacca, avoiding the Portuguese there.

In 1957, a history teacher in Singapore named Harun Aminurrashid published a novel to inspire children in the newly independent Malaya. The hero was a character loosely based on what was known about anRyk, whom he lionised as Panglima (Commander) Awang.

Thus, we have the heroic figure of Panglima Awang. Almost Spartacus-like, the captured defeated slave becomes the hero. Recent portraits as well as a sculpture of Enrique da Malacca by the Malaysian multimedia artist Ahmad Fuad Osman strengthen this image.

A Man of All Nations
Today, anRyk is claimed by several contemporary Southeast Asian nation states. Some Malaysian historians have reified the fictive Panglima Awang. Thus, Malaysian memorialisation has involved not only making history from fiction, but also creating new myths from history.

Indonesian claims rely on self-appointed Magellan chronicler Antonio Pigafetta’s suggestion that anRyk was from Sumatera; others claim he was from the Moluccas, Maluku today. Some Filipinos insist he stayed there, becoming Filipino before there was even a Philippines. More than anyone else, anRyk symbolises island Southeast Asia, the Nusantara.

In Iberia, in Europe, in the West, there is a subtle debate over personalities and dates. For the Portuguese, the circumnavigation began under Magellan’s leadership in 1519. For their neighbours, the Spaniard Elcano led the Victoria back in 1522. His diverse crew allows pan-European claims, ignoring most slaves, presumably of colour, who were not deemed worthy of mention in the official ship manifests.

Imperialism today is, in many ways, a far cry from what it was five centuries ago. Yet, there are many continuities and parallels, including racisms, cultural, including religious intolerance, exploitations and oppressions of various types despite changing forms, relations and even vocabularies.

The voyages of exploration and conquest were driven by greed. Nonetheless, God, king and country have been readily invoked to legitimise avarice and atrocities. Invoking 21st century intellectual property norms, globalisation today involves vaccine imperialism, apartheid and genocide.

Dr Felice Noelle Rodriguez is a Filipina historian. She is now a Scholar-in-Residence in Kuala Lumpur and Visiting Fellow at the Ateneo de Zamboanga University.

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