Analysis | Future food security, geopolitics, and food nativism
Key themes in ISD’s new project on food security
Kelly McFarland, Jonas Heering, and Eleanor Shiori Hughes
As part of our New Global Commons Working Group series on emerging diplomatic challenges, funded by the Carnegie Corporation of New York’s Bridging the Gap Initiative, ISD is hosting a working group this spring on the nexus between food insecurity, instability, and conflict.
Our forward-looking group of experts from government, academia, NGOs, and think tanks is discussing threats to food security, how food insecurity drives instability and conflict, how this risks becoming a larger geopolitical stress point in coming years, and how we can try to overcome these challenges. Their insights and contributions will be a critical part of ISD’s effort to produce meaningful policy principles and recommendations for all those who work on this issue.
This blog post, the third in a series on the topic, looks at the geopolitics of food security.
Global food security has become so precarious in recent years that a handful of governments now view food security as a national security priority. The COVID-19 pandemic has only exacerbated this trend.
Taking a more serious view of food security in relation to other forms of security is not a bad thing in and of itself, but it is troublesome when nations begin to look at food security as a zero-sum game with the potential to become a significant geopolitical issue. Likewise, governments that feel the need to embark on nativist food policies disrupt regional or even global food systems. Animosities between nations can fester or grow.
The Gulf case
With little arable land, sparse water supplies, and growing food demands, the Arab Gulf countries are increasingly looking to Africa to secure their food supply. Due to a growing and prosperous population, food consumption across the countries of the Gulf Cooperation Council (GCC) is expected to increase at an annual 3.3 percent between 2018 and 2023. The GCC region is heavily food import-dependent, with countries sourcing as much as 90 percent of their food needs from abroad. Africa, which contains 60 percent of the world’s arable land, has become a primary destination for GCC agricultural investments.
Especially since the 2007–8 global food price crisis, GCC states have purchased land and invested in agricultural production in East Africa, primarily through the countries’ sovereign wealth funds and other state-led investment mechanisms. The United Arab Emirates and Saudi Arabia have been the primary actors in this field. Saudi Arabia launched its foreign land acquisition campaign in 2008 with the King Abdullah Initiative for Saudi Agricultural Investment Abroad. By 2018, Saudi Arabia was the largest investor in Africa’s agricultural industry. In the UAE, state and private investors launched an alliance in 2015 to invest in food and agricultural projects in “19 countries, including Egypt, Pakistan, Namibia, Sudan, Vietnam and North and South America.”
In 2016, the UAE was the second-largest overall investor country in Africa. In 2018, the UAE and Uganda signed a deal to establish a 2,500 hectare agricultural “free zone” to enable UAE investors to produce and develop agricultural products in Uganda and export the products more cheaply back to the UAE. Other countries that have received GCC investments linked to agricultural production include Egypt, Tunisia, Morocco, Mali, Mauritania, Mozambique, and Namibia.
Qatar has also become a more active investor in the region. In 2019, the state’s investment fund announced that it would invest $500 million over three years in Sudan’s agricultural and food industries. The decision was in part motivated by additional stress on Qatari food imports through the blockade of Qatar starting in 2017, by its Gulf neighbors.
Gulf investments in the region have been controversial. The local population in Kenya opposed Qatari plans to purchase 40,000 hectares of land in 2009. And in 2012, five people died in an attack on Saudi-leased farm land in Ethiopia. Africans are worried that GCC investors will displace them because approximately 90 percent of land in Sub-Saharan Africa is unregistered. Nevertheless, several countries, including Ghana and Zambia, have actively tried to solicit GCC investment in their agriculture sectors.
Beijing and geopolitics
More worrisome, in light of the growing competition between the United States and China, is the level to which Beijing views food security as national security. As a recent article in Foreign Policy noted: “From a food as national security perspective, Beijing’s desire to secure nutrition to its massive population may be a primary motive for some actions that others consider aggressive, such as the purchase of land in Africa and investment in agriculture and fisheries around the world.” This also includes infrastructure projects on the continent, such as railroads, and a Chinese military base in Djibouti.
Beijing has high ambitions to prioritize food security as national security for at least two reasons, as it has done for the last decade: first, to meet its objective to feed its own population of approximately 1.4 billion people; and second, to project its ambitious campaign to promote global trade and infrastructural connectivity through its Belt and Road Initiative (BRI), which began in 2013.
But increasingly, in order for it to meet both of these objectives, the Chinese government has forged cooperative ties with developing nations, namely African countries. Half the countries that have signed onto the BRI are in sub-Saharan Africa. With 40 African countries participating in the BRI, this has opened doors for Beijing to exert its economic and infrastructural statecraft by “connecting China with more than 130 nations through roads, railways, and marine links to increase trade.”
Moreover, in 2019, China and the African Union signed a memorandum of understanding to elevate cooperation on food security initiatives and grain management in Africa. But as altruistic as these intentions may sound, Sino-African relations are not entirely a rosy picture, as some Africans have expressed their deep concerns over the Chinese government’s perpetuation of “a neo-colonial relationship in which Africa exports raw materials to China in exchange for manufactured goods.”
From a geopolitical perspective, China has benefitted greatly through proactive engagement with African countries and entities to secure food security and infrastructure-oriented partnerships. According to the 2020 Report to Congress of the U.S.-China Economic and Security Review Commission, China secured a key leadership role within the United Nations with the election of Qu Dongyu, China’s vice minister of agriculture and rural affairs, as head of the UN Food and Agriculture Organization in June 2019. According to the report, this victory for the Chinese government was only possible with African support. Through this critical leadership position within the United Nations’ food security body, Beijing has shown its eagerness to expand its influence in Africa as well as over global governance writ-large.
Going forward, China will have to grapple with potential indicators of food insecurity within its own borders. First, while China has 10% of the world’s arable land, a fundamental demographic shift has seen Chinese citizens abandon their agrarian lifestyles and move to metropolitan areas. This has left a dangerously depleted rural workforce, especially at a time of rising concern over grain shortages. In addition, unforeseen natural phenomena, including the reemergence of the African Swine Fever in 2019, a deluge of heavy rain last year, and the COVID-19 pandemic have already triggered concerns over food security in China. The confluence of these factors and mounting concerns over food scarcity compelled Xi Jinping to launch a state-run campaign to eliminate food waste called the “Clean Plate Campaign.” This initiative has prompted dialogues over whether or not China is truly running out of food and the motivations behind the timing of Xi’s campaign.
Vietnam and food nativism
Elsewhere, Vietnam recently pursued temporary nativist food policies as an initial response to COVID-19. In late March 2020, Vietnam, which is the third-largest rice exporter in the world, announced that it would cease rice exports indefinitely in order to assure domestic food security amidst the uncertainty of the COVID-19 outbreak. These moves, along with drought and increased salinization in the Mekong Delta, led to surging rice prices in the early part of 2020. While potentially good for producers, these price spikes increased the likelihood that low-income families in the region would have a harder time accessing a staple of their diets.
ISD’s food insecurity working group seeks to address trends in global food systems, and provide recommendations on how governments, NGOs, and international organizations can address these overlapping issues.
Kelly McFarland is a U.S. diplomatic historian and the director of programs and research at the Institute for the Study of Diplomacy. Follow him on Twitter @McFarlandKellyM
Jonas Heering is a research assistant at ISD. He is also the Bunker graduate fellow in diplomacy, and a master’s student in the School of Foreign Service.
Eleanor Shiori Hughes is a research assistant at ISD and a master’s student in Asian Studies in the School of Foreign Service. She is also a contributing writer for EconVue.
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