are currently 38.3 million overweight children in the world: 46% of them are in Asia, and 25% are in Africa. While childhood obesity has remained stable since 2012, adult obesity has increased since 1975. Today, 672 million people worldwide are obese (FAO, 2018). What many people still overlook is that our diets are not simply related to flavor and tradition. They are also the result of international dynamics driven by geopolitical factors, the trajectory of capitalism or other forces.
In the field of international relations, the issue of hunger still lacks prominence. Fortunately, the human security approach has helped bring it to the forefront, reverberating into discussions about rights, public policy and economic arrangements. The human security approach helps make it possible to understand the concept of food security. We will now take a critical look at this topic and the need for a multidimensional analysis of agrifood, as presented in the chapters of this collection.
2 Human Security: people first
The human security approach has a controversial origin. The international relations literature generally locates it within the debate on the expansion of international security studies, with an emphasis on the post-Cold War scenario. It originates, however, in debates among developmental economists. They thought about the humanization of the economy through the concerns raised by new threats to individuals (ROCHA, 2017). Some authors claim that human security was almost exclusively a contribution of the UN, while others argue that the organization was the birthplace of only some of the key insights (OWEN, 2008; MACFARLANE, KHONG, 2006).
In any case, the topic of human security emerges as both an instrument for advocacy and an intellectual device calling for the unification of protection, welfare and rights concerns inherent to individuals. At its core is the guarantee of “social security” (TADJBAKHSH, 2005). There is an attempt to identify threats and ways to mitigate them, focusing on the protection of people and communities, rather than the security of states, thus emphasizing the importance of human rights (KALDOR, 2007). People should be protected regardless of whether threats come from anthropogenic activities or natural events, whether they are within or outside the state, or whether they are direct or structural (THAKUR, 2004). For Thakur (2004), although this approach results in the loss of a certain analytical rigor, it is more important to be inclusive when defining threats (THAKUR, 2004)2.
At the same time, poverty, natural disasters and epidemics are now being discussed as threats to international security itself, which ends up broadly influencing the debate on development and security, particularly as they are vocalized through the UN (ROCHA, 2017). In Brazil, for example, the threat of hunger is considered through the internalization of the human right to adequate food (HRAF) (LOPES, FEITOSA, Ch. 2).
Human security as a policy approach is defined for the first time in the 1994 Human Development Report (HDR) by the United Nations Development Program (UNDP) (UNDP, 1994). The term, however, had previously been used in the 1992 report, An Agenda for Peace, as well as being cited five times in the 1993 HDR, emphasizing the need for a “people-centered development” (UNDP, 1993)3. However, the 1994 HDR was responsible for making the idea more widespread. It sought to influence the debate, as well as international cooperation, on development and security actions among member states and other UN institutions. The report states that:
Human security can be said to have two main aspects. It means, first, safety from such chronic threats as hunger, disease and repression. And second, it means protection from sudden and hurtful disruptions in the patterns of daily life—whether in homes, in jobs or in communities. Such threats can exist at all levels of national income and development. (UNDP, 1994, p. 23)
The Report also states that there should be two components for understanding human security: (i) freedom from fear—freedom from threats that impede access to people’s rights, security and guarantees to life; it is thus essential to be free from the fear of physical violence and fear more broadly; and (ii) freedom from want—individuals free from poverty, for example, through stable access to healthcare and the economy.
All the reports since 1990 have been based on the premise that a nation’s wealth is its people and that it is necessary to broaden the possibilities for their personal fulfillment, rather than solely in terms of the nation’s productivity. This premise is influenced by the conception of broadening the substantive freedoms of individuals (Sen, 2008). In other words, while an increase in income or GDP enables people to expand their freedoms as citizens, having access to healthcare, education or civil and political rights and freedom of expression, for example, are other determinants of freedoms that are equally important to human development. This means that human security can be underpinned by human development.
The HDR also establishes seven pillars for human security: (i) economic security: sufficient remuneration from labor activity or social welfare to guarantee the survival of the individual and their family; (ii) food security: guarantee of both economic and physical access to a basic diet that supplies the minimum daily intake of nutrients required by the individual; (iii) health security: guarantee to an environment free of chronic diseases and the availability of medical care; (iv) environmental security: absence of threats of environmental origin, as well as guarantees to drinking water, clean air and clean rivers, among others; (v) personal security: absence of bodily threats from physical violence, which may be political, ethnic, street, domestic, gender, child abuse, suicide or war, among others; (vi) community security: security guaranteed to people who are part of an ethnic group, for example; and (vii) political security: guarantee to fundamental human rights, such as freedom of political expression (UNDP, 1994). The Report demonstrates that human security should be a universal concern. Its components are interdependent, and the easiest way to guarantee it is through prevention.
The 1995 World Summit for Social Development in Copenhagen, however, did not adopt human security. States were skeptical, believing that the idea would lead to violations of state sovereignty. The most concrete step towards human security only occurs in 1997, with the signing of the Ottawa Convention, followed by the Rome Statute in 19984. The Convention prohibits the use, stockpiling, production and transfer of anti-personnel landmines and requires their destruction (ACA, 2018), while the Statute creates the International Criminal Court (ICC), the first international court that judges individuals rather than states, i.e., the international community’s first attempt to construct a punishment mechanism for individuals who commit crimes against humanity, in cases where the national court system is reluctant or unable to prosecute (ROCHA, 2011).
In 2000, at the initiative of Japan, the United Nations Human Security Fund (UNHSF) was created, which
(..) [finances] projects related to peacebuilding, post-conflict restoration, and approaches to chronic poverty, disaster risk reduction, human trafficking and food security, seeking to translate them into operational activities that offer sustainable benefits to people and communities whose survival, dignity and livelihood are threatened as well as empower individuals to increase their resilience (ROCHA, 2017, p. 108).
Empowerment was included in the HDR as early as 1993, in the discussion on human development. This demonstrates that individual autonomy is essential to the state and the markets, not only for accessing civil and social rights but also because development is intended to help and support people, enabling them to have control over their own lives, whether it is within the context of physical or food security, for example.
The UNHSF became operational with the approval of Resolution 66/290 by the UN General Assembly, which recognizes that human security has three pillars: development, human rights and peace and security. This is the most emblematic resolution in terms of human security. In addition to asking member states to use the approach, it defines human security in practical terms, to be applied across the UN system. It also alters the functioning of
