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Responding to the problem of ‘food security’ in animal cruelty policy debates: building alliances between animal-centred and human-centred work on food system issues

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Abstract

Research on ethical issues within food systems is often human-centric. As a consequence, animal-centric policy debates where regulatory decisions about food are being made tend to be overlooked by food scholars and activists. This absence was notable in the recent debates around Australia’s animal live export industry. Using Foucault’s tools, we explore how ‘food security’ is conceptualised and governed within animal cruelty policy debates about the live export trade. The problem of food security produced in these debates shaped Indonesians as ‘victims’ of food insecurity due to the nation’s inability to produce sufficient quantities of protein. This understanding of the problem reproduced the dominant framing of food security as a problem for developing countries addressed by increasing global food production. The underlying premise uncritically accepted in Australia’s debates on live export trade was that intensive animal agriculture, and Australia’s live export trade specifically, were essential to alleviating global food insecurity. Drawing on our findings, we show how dominant representations of ‘food security’, and related regulatory and technological trajectories, flourish where alliances between animal and food activists, scholarship, and movements are weak. Accordingly, we argue for agri-food scholars to take up opportunities to contribute to the policy discussions about the treatment of animals to effectively expand the kinds of problems, solutions, and strategies of resistance produced in the discourses surrounding food system issues.

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Data availability

The data that support the findings of this paper was collected as part of a larger research project (see Evans 2018) and derived from secondary source documents previously available in the public domain.

Notes

  1. For an informative introduction to this area see Andersen and Kuhn (2015) or the proposed diet shifts suggested by Ranganathan et al. (2016).

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Acknowledgements

This research builds upon Dr Brodie Evans’ completed PhD study funded by the Australian Government’s Australian Postgraduate Award (APA) scheme and Queensland University of Technology’s (QUT) Excellence Top-Up Scholarship, located within QUT’s School of Justice. Brodie also acknowledges QUT’s Faculty Write-Up Scholarship, which was provided to support the preparation of refereed papers whilst the thesis was under examination. The authors thank Brodie’s principal supervisor A/Professor Matthew Ball for his feedback on earlier versions of this paper. The authors would like to acknowledge the feedback and support in the early stages of the paper from our colleagues in the ‘Governance, Activism and Social Change’ writers group within QUT’s School of Justice. We also greatly acknowledge the two anonymous reviewers whose comments helped improve and clarify this manuscript.

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  1. School of Justice, Queensland University of Technology, 2 George Street, Brisbane, QLD, 4000, Australia

    Brodie Evans

  2. School of Law, Queensland University of Technology, 2 George Street, Brisbane, QLD, 4000, Australia

    Hope Johnson

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Evans, B., Johnson, H. Responding to the problem of ‘food security’ in animal cruelty policy debates: building alliances between animal-centred and human-centred work on food system issues. Agric Hum Values 37, 161–174 (2020). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10460-019-09979-2

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