Living with insecurity: Food security, resilience, and the World Food Programme (WFP)

Abstract

As the world’s largest humanitarian organization fighting hunger, and primary expositor of food insecurity in sub-Saharan Africa, the World Food Programme’s (WFP) activities offer a unique opportunity to examine the contemporary food-security nexus. In this article, we examine the ‘turn’ toward resilience in the practices and policies of the WFP. Our analysis emphasizes that resilience is one of a family of security strategies through which the WFP seeks to govern food security. As such, it is impossible to claim, as some have, that resilience is displacing security as the dominant logic for governing insecurity. Nevertheless, resilience is a cornerstone of the WFPs’ current activities. Whereas more familiar strategies of security attempt to pre-empt or contain disruptive events – in the context of food crises – resilience is a style of thinking that assumes the inevitability of unpredictable, high-impact events and aims to foster the capability for systems and people to adapt, absorb, and bounce back from their effects. Resilience, while championed as part of an overall solution to a range of ills afflicting human populations today, aims only to equip people and populations with the capacity to live with the instabilities of a neoliberal food system without questioning, destabilizing, or resisting the very sources of socio-economic and political instability.

In and beyond the camp

“…Resilience is generally understood as the capacity of a system, organism, individual, or collective to withstand or adapt to sudden shocks or stresses. From its origins in the 1970s in systems ecology, resilience has since become a "pervasive idiom of global governance" (Walker and Cooper 2011, 144) and "quasi-universal answer" (Aradau 2014, 73) to all manner of challenges across fields as diverse as emergency management, international development, climate change, food security, and financial markets (see Methmann and Oels 2015, O'Connor et al 2017, Haldrup and Rosén 2017. In the context of refugee management, the UNHCR defines resilience as "the ability of individuals, households, communities, national institutions and systems to prevent, absorb and recover from shocks, while continuing to function and adapt in a way that supports long-term prospects for sustainable development, peace and security, and the attainment of human rights" (UNHCR 2017b, 3).…”

A Multi-Criteria Approach for Assessing the Economic Resilience of Agriculture: The Case of Lithuania

“…The outbreak of pandemic in 2020 disrupted supply chains and various countries started to search for the ways of strengthening the food security and self-sufficiency trying to avoid a risk of food shortages [15]. One of the best ways to increase food security and to foster the supply of local food within the country is to increase the resilience of its agricultural sector [16].…”

Challenges and Opportunities for Agribusiness Development: Lesson from Indonesia

“…The availability of food in sufficient quantities, adequate quality, and affordable prices by the population are some of the targets to be achieved in the formulation of national food policies. Food supply instability, volatile food prices (rice) in Indonesia have been proven to trigger social instability (O'connor et al, 2017;Wildana & Alhabshi, 2018). Food security is a condition of fulfilling food for households, which is reflected in the availability of sufficient food, both in quantity and quality, safe, equitable, and affordable.…”