The ‘Global Food Crisis’ and the Geopolitics of Food Security

Growing anxieties over food security have recently brought sharp geopolitical overtones to debates about the agro-food sector. Contending that this ‘geopolitical moment’ highlights the mutually constitutive nature of geopolitics and political economies of food, we examine how dominant geopolitical framings of food security extend and deepen neoliberal models of agro-food provisioning, and highlight the need for further attention to these dynamics from political geographers. We develop a preliminary research agenda for further work in the field, focusing on the recent spate of global farmland acquisitions, questions of agro-food governance, the securitisation of hunger and obesity, and the environmental impacts of dominant agro-food systems. Throughout, we highlight the value of a counter-geopolitics of food security for re-situating agro-food politics outside hegemonic policies and institutions, and of the alter-geopolitics of food pursued by communities embodying concrete alternative food production and consumption systems.