In addition to feminist studies, this book is in conversation with what is often called agrofood studies and science and technology studies. Over the past several decades, agrofood studies have made significant efforts to understand the politics of food and agriculture around the world. Agrofood scholars have examined the political economy of food; the history of the industrialization of agriculture and its geopolitical structure; and the ecological, social, and cultural consequences of a changing agrofood system.19 I share the concerns of many in the field for sustainable and socially just food systems.
One of the key contributions of agrofood studies has been to politicize the understanding of antihunger, antimalnutrition programs and to explore the polit-ical and social structuring of interventions into food systems in the developing world; these interventions are often concealed by humanitarian framing. In her brilliant analysis of historical shifts in the global food system, Harriet Friedmann analyzed food aid to the developing countries as a critical component of what she and Phil McMichael call “the second food regime” (Friedmann and McMichael 1989), which enabled the United States to dispose of surplus grains.20 Pressed to deal with agricultural surpluses accumulated through government purchases that aimed to raise agricultural prices, the US government created Public Law 480 (the Food for Peace program) in 1954 and started dispensing surplus wheat to developing countries.21 Food aid came to constitute a substantial portion of the total world trade in wheat by the 1960s.22 Many developing countries became dependent on it, and people’s dietary patterns also changed to favor wheat prod-ucts (Friedmann 1982).23
Another key pillar in food security measures in the post–World War II era was the Green Revolution. Mainstream development communities may proclaim it as a triumph of modern science that doubled food supplies in twenty-five years (see, e.g., Rosegrant and Hazell 1999), but critics have pointed out negative eco-logical impacts from the intense use of agrochemicals as well as the widening of social inequality as the input-intensive Green Revolution tended to add debt for farmers (Shiva 1991). Displaced peasants constituted a labor reserve for industrial sectors that were privileged over agriculture (McMichael 2005). While the Green
Revolution decreased dependence on US wheat, it increased dependence on industrial inputs such as chemical fertilizers (Friedmann 2005, 243).24 The Green Revolution has also been interpreted as an American Cold War strategy to con-tain Communism by increasing food production (Perkins 1997) while simulta-neously promoting trade and investment for the Western private sector (Brooks 2010; Cullather 2004; Kloppenburg 2004).25
In this book I draw on studies that have critically analyzed interventions to combat food insecurity in developing countries, and I situate the micronutrient turn in the contested narratives of antihunger, antimalnutrition projects that often resulted in utopian technical fixes (Belasco 2006). In particular, agrofood studies’
sensitivity to historical and geopolitical contexts is helpful in understanding inter-ventions into Third World food problems. For instance, food regime theorists have created a thoughtful framework for understanding how postwar food aid acted as a stabilizer for the US agricultural sector by providing an outlet for surplus wheat.
The micronutrient turn ought to be analyzed against the backdrop of neoliberaliza-tion, legitimated through WTO rules and related free trade agreements. McMichael (2005) identifies this as the “corporate food regime,” whose critical component is the privileging of corporate power over the state. It is against a background of such historicized and political understandings of discourses on food insecurity that I analyze the rise of hidden hunger, fortification, and biofortification.
Fortification and biofortification have been analyzed in agrofood studies, but often separately as part of a social and cultural fascination with vitamins, on the one hand, and with agricultural biotechnology, on the other (see, e.g., Levenstein 1993 and Brooks 2005). I believe that their importance in the developing world cannot be understood adequately except as a part of the hidden hunger discourse that became prominent under neoliberalism, which “privatized” food security (McMichael 2005, 279).26 McMichael observes that global trade liberalization and broad neoliberalization reframed the issue of food security as a matter of market relations. The WTO’s Agreement on Agriculture in 1995 epitomized the new belief that hunger should be addressed not by national self-sufficiency but by well-functioning global trade.27 The agreement formally rejected the right to national self-sufficiency by imposing minimum import rules and institu-tionalized the belief in trade as the best mechanism to provide cheap food.28 Developing countries are to concentrate on exporting commodities where they have a “comparative advantage” and importing “cheap” commodities for their own consumption.29 McMichael concludes that “consistent with the neo-classical agenda, ‘food security’ came to be redefined, and institutionalized, in the WTO as an inter-national market-relation” (276).30
This paradigmatic shift in the concept of food security has also manifested itself in nutritional terms. The micronutrient turn in the 1990s was propelled by, and
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simultaneously further justified, the thought that the market (and trade) under-pins food security. Rather than question why the poor in developing countries could not produce and eat nutritious food, solutions to hidden hunger, or micro-nutrient deficiencies, became synonymous with the consumption of micro- nutrient-enriched products offered by the market. This involves a process of abstraction similar to the one that McMichael identifies with the making of “world agricul-ture” (270). Echoing the abstraction of agriculture from its social and ecological contexts, food was reduced to being a vehicle for nutrients. This is where nutrition-ism exerts a powerful yet understudied role in food insecurity discourses. Nutri-tionism naturalizes the logic that the solution to malnutrition is to add nutrients via fortification and biofortification, a supposedly cost-effective and non-market distorting solution that capitalizes on the know-how of agrofood businesses. I ana-lyze this facet of privatized food security, not as a simple manipulation by powerful corporations, but as interlinked relationships among neoliberalization, scientiza-tion, and gendered understandings of body and food in the global South.
This book is also informed by science and technology studies, locating nutri-tionism as an instance of what Foucault called “biopower.”31 Foucault observed a critical shift from sovereign power over life and death to biopower over the welfare of the population. This biopower promotes “the management of life in the name of the well-being of the population as a vital order and of each of its living subjects” (Rose 2007, 52) and is intimately bound up with the rise of modern sciences. The Third World’s food insecurity exemplifies the need for the
“management of life,” and Foucault’s work is useful in analyzing the processes involved in governing the Third World through food insecurity. Hence I focus on the role of scientific and technical expertise. Drawing on Foucault’s concept of problematization, I analyze how the power of science, at the very basic level, socially and culturally creates the Third World food problem.
Contrary to conventional understandings, science’s role is not only to provide tools to diagnose and rectify problems. In a profound way, science, in a complex relationship with other institutions, often creates the problem itself. This is what Foucault called “problematization,” a situation in which there is a “development of a given into a question” and the “transformation of a group of obstacles and difficulties into problems to which the diverse solutions will attempt to pro-duce a response” (Foucault and Rabinow 1984, 388). With this concept, Fou-cault made explicit science’s power in achieving “a modal change from seeing a situation not only as ‘a given’ but as ‘a question’ ” (Rabinow 2003, 131) and in making “something into an object of knowledge” (Deacon 2000). Problematiza-tion keys our attenProblematiza-tion to the dynamic relaProblematiza-tionship between reality and scientific knowledge. Food problems do not arise automatically from “reality.” Although there is a material reality that is undeniable, there are many ways to slice reality.
The emergence of the varying definitions of the “food problem” in the past sev-eral decades attests to such representational politics. The naming of the problem is significant because it creates a space for intervention. To use Foucault’s terms, what is to be known (“effects of verdiction”) is intimately tied to what is to be done (“effects of jurisdiction”) (1991, 75). Once something is couched as a prob-lem, interventions seem natural and expected, causing less opposition and resis-tance. “Problems” even invoke ethical obligations for intervention in the name of a specified target population.32 Hence, to think about the concept of problema-tization is not to dwell on semantics but to consider the openings it enables for interventions with real material consequences.
This analytic move invites an exploration of the apparatus of problematiza-tion. The apparatus describes the historical processes of creating an object for knowledge; such processes include discourses, institutions, regulations, policies, and scientific writings, among others. What kind of apparatus enabled a particu-lar representation of the food problem at a particuparticu-lar historical juncture? This book’s narratives unpack the apparatus of food insecurity policies—the social, economic, and scientific institutions that control and manage the representation of food insecurity at a given time.
The concept of problematization will seem excessively abstract, if you think that we know exactly what the problems of the Third World poor are. Do they have enough food? Are people malnourished? What do the hungry in developing countries need? Indeed, for something like nutrition, it may seem that we should know exactly what the problem is. If nutritional problems are seen as located in the realm of hard science, and not as a social problem, then nutritional science should provide definitions unproblematically. Even social scientists who point out multiple layers of human “needs” and culturally constructed understandings of social problems (e.g., Maslow 1943) tend to exempt nutritional issues from such social understandings, and are willing to delegate authority on the subject to nutritional scientists (Douglas et al. 1998).33 Yet contrary to the public face of nutritional science, even nutritional scientists do not have absolute certainty about “what to eat,” to borrow the title of a popular book by Marion Nestle, in which she confesses that “like any kind of science, nutritional science is more a matter of probabilities than of absolutes and is, therefore, subject to interpreta-tion. Interpretation, in turn, depends on point of view” (2002, 28).
Such candid remarks by nutritional experts are rare. Instead, scientists and experts are often in a privileged position to define the problem. Conventional demarcations between science and nonscience are a powerful obstacle to non-experts challenging diagnoses by non-experts (Fraser 1989; Haney 2002).34 It is even more difficult when the problem is said to be beyond the direct percep-tion and recognipercep-tion of lay people. As the common nickname for micronutrient
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deficiency, hidden hunger, suggests, it purports to be invisible to the lay person’s eye or even to hungry people themselves. If the deleterious effects of hunger are invisible and knowable only by experts, by way of scientific measurement, people lose the foundation on which to ground their experience and the possibility of critiquing official interventions. When problems are supposedly unrecognizable without scientific expertise, the contestation between expertise and experience is even more asymmetrical. There is an urgent need to scrutinize what kinds of problems are constructed and promulgated by experts.
Criticism of the scientization of food insecurity is not to deny various contri-butions of science. Instead, my point—and this is informed by the growing litera-ture on the relationship between science and democracy—is the need to explore the tension between democracy and scientific expertise (Callon, Lascoumes, and Barthe 2009).35 Some might argue that science is inherently undemocratic (Brooks and Johnson 1991; Perhac 1996). But for issues like hunger and malnutrition that are complex—historically rooted and locally specific while simultaneously involv-ing global factors, and encompassinvolv-ing social, natural, and human sciences—the need for democratic discussion is compelling. Food regime theorists have pointed out that we need to be aware of the historic specificity of our time. They have noted that the current food regime is increasingly controlled by the private sector, unlike the nation-state–based regime of the 1940s through 1970s. The growing power of the private sector is also reflected in technical and scientific fields. The private sector is now a major source of financial resources and intellectual prop-erty in scientific research, and even research by public research institutions is often done in “partnership” with corporations and/or dependent on information and materials that are the property of the private sector (Brooks 2005).36 How could private corporations have come to dominate the research agenda and the way the results are disseminated and used? Private firms are not accountable to citizens in the same way that public institutions are. The scientization of food insecurity, particularly in the context of growing corporate power in science and technology, demands that we question its implications for democracy and governance.37