Against food security as national security

An hour after I published my previous article – I came across an entirely new and alarming definition of food security. In a post on LinkedIn ffinlo Costain wrote:

‘Food security’ framing addresses how we feed Britain in an emergency or when the nation is under attack.

It really made me double-take. I’ve never once encountered this usage of the term before1. Costain is someone who calls for food sovereignty but then leverages this definition of food security which is so clearly bound up in a variety of disaster centrism: a ‘better than nothing’ ideology that uses the same logic that caused the disaster to try and ameliorate the worst effects of the disaster for some. A variety of lifeboat politics.

I find the direction of travel for food sovereignty alarming, in the West – we can see in Meloni’s Italy that food sovereignty is embraced by right wing nationalists. But this isn’t what winning looks like – it’s a sign of our movement being defeated. Co-option is an inevitability but capitulation is not. The point is to contest the right not opportunistically fold into them. It makes me think of what theorists Aaron Winter and Aurelien Mondon call the mainstreaming of the far right. When liberals scaremonger about ‘3.5 billion climate migrants’, as I mentioned in my last post, then they are indulging in a more liberally acceptable version of the more racist ‘great replacement’ conspiracy theory. They are attempting to mobilise a sense of emergency via a racial emergency: if we don’t act, we’ll be overrun by migrants, is what they’re suggesting. This is what Winter and Mondon would refer to as a form of liberal racism.

That food security is about Britain being under attack in an emergency is a truly outrageous claim but the food security discourse of the last two years’ has constructed this. Under the drive towards British and European rearmament this shift makes sense in its crude sense. Realpolitik has taken over.

The gambit wagered by Costain and others, I think, is that if they can persuade government that the British food supply is at risk from attack by the Russians then the British government will up its funding of British food and agriculture. It’s a crude logic but it’s not necessarily incorrect. It might work. But at what cost? What does it mean to amplify the WWIII vibe when seeking funding.

I warned privately to a friend a couple years ago that if the food and farming world cottoned on to the potential of the national security discourse then perhaps they will be successful. This trend was unfolding through articles by the likes of hugely influential figures like James Rebanks. In a piece called The Food Apocalypse is Coming, on UnHerd, Rebanks wrote:

The world around us grows ever more hostile and we have chosen to be a stand-alone geopolitical unit. Whatever you think of how we got here, that’s our reality.

In another piece called Could Britain Run Out of Food:

Our food system, however, is incredibly fragile. It depends on a just-in-time logistical miracle, one that can easily be derailed by war, geopolitical fallout or a natural disaster somewhere along the global supply chain.

In both pieces Rebanks, as ever, makes important arguments about the precarious nature of British agriculture. He gives voice to how arable farming is hitting a hard limit on its ability to produce food cheaply enough under the current food regime. He calls attention to how 3 million households are forced to rely upon food banks.

What troubles me about the current mood isn’t the existential dread itself – I get that – it’s the focus on an exogenous threat from which we must defend ourselves from, that bothers me. We are the ones going around the world causing death and destruction and yet we then we claim we are the ones at risk. Alana Lentin has talked about the centrality of this idea to the racial regime of white supremacy. This is why the language of ‘internal and external security threats’ – used by Costain – is so concerning. This is the colonial playbook – cause destruction and terror, then play the victim – typified by Britain, the US, Israel and plenty of other Euro-American empires.

But this is where the Brexit Remainer politics has gone for many in the wake of Russia’s invasion of Ukraine. Largely this crowd will ignore Israel’s genocide of Palestine, just as they will our support of the US and Israel’s mass murder in Iran, but they will continually mobilise the invasion of Ukraine as a reason for us to prepare for war with Russia, rather than as a reason to fight for peace and an end to senseless war.

The disaster centrist seeing the breakdown of the liberal international order – triggered mostly by the US and Israel – has turned to a form of realpolitik that now seeks to capitalise upon warmongering to ‘rebuild the nation’ in order to protect ‘citizens’ from this breakdown. For those in the food and farming world they correctly, within their own logic, sense an opportunity to do so. But rather than mobilising against war they mobilise in favour of war preparedness without even opposition to war. This same dividing line existed in the early 20th century in Europe. Those who were against mass war on the continent and those who mobilised in favour of it. Jingoism led to the slaughtering of 100 million working class people cheered on by upper class calls to patriotism – for all their talk of the world wars, too many centrists forget this.

The mythos of the Second World War sometimes portrays it as a heyday of British food and agriculture, not entirely unsubstantiated, and is being used to mobilise action at the state level. One of the key figures in this is Tim Lang.

A report on ‘civil food resilience’ for the National Preparedness Committee is one of the key catalysts in the recent discourse. It’s a report with lots of important findings. But, for example, he refers to ‘the importance of food defence’ in the context of war preparedness, and then goes on to talk about ‘civil food defence’. Going further Lang makes the frankly alarming statement that: ‘Democracy has to be underpinned by defence.’ Defence from whom is left out of the report. Certainly not defence from the same imperialist, capitalist class who profit from warfare that he is in-effect appealing to.

Lang advocates for involving the Ministry of Defence in the food civil resilience strategy and implementation. Idealising Sweden as a country with a ‘formidable and profitable’ military industry – he links their ‘intensified’ interest in food preparedness to their abandoning of military neutrality, after the Russian invasion of Ukraine. He goes on to discuss their plan of ‘Total Defense’ and the '[r]ecognition that food matters in national defence’.

The genesis of these ideas in British liberal civil society now being propagated by Costain and others, with the help of the British war industry, is in Tim Lang’s report. It now makes sense when Costain says:

‘Food security’ framing addresses how we feed Britain in an emergency or when the nation is under attack.

In the report there a few mentions of Gaza in the context of famine for example:

Recent events in Ukraine since 2002 and Gaza since 2023 are reminders that food infrastructure can be attacked and that blockading a population’s access to food can be a swift weapon of war.

This is the other side of the coin of food strategy as military strategy. Another grotesque example of this is during the Second World War when the British government led by Churchill starved Bengal in order to feed Britain:

It was ultimately special wartime factors that caused this difficult situation to become a disastrous famine. Fearing Japanese invasion, British authorities stockpiled food to feed defending troops, and they exported considerable quantities to British forces in the Middle East. They also confiscated boats, carts, and elephants in Chittagong, where the invasion was expected. This deprived fishermen and their customers of the ability to operate and generally inhibited the sort of low-level commerce upon which many Bengalis relied for survival.

Encyclopedia Britannica

Funnily enough, this part of history is left out of the British WWII myth. When we talk about ‘dig for victory’ we never talk about ‘starve them for victory’. The 1943 genocide of Bengalis murdered potentially as many as 3 million people. A Bengali life taken to save a British life. This is food security as national security. This is how the military enact food policy on a global scale at times of war. They find the weakest link and violently exploit it. This is what the disater centrists are in-effect demanding. As Churchill remarked on the famine in 1943:

I hate Indians. They are a beastly people with a beastly religion. The famine was their own fault for breeding like rabbits.

The same Malthusian line the British upper class used on the Irish in the 1840s.

Lang does not have this in mind whatsoever when he reframes food security as national security but the British state is going to weaponise food like any other imperialist nation at a time of war regardless of reports written by well-meaning liberals. He’s trying to mobilise an effort to rebuild civil resilience in the food system in light of very real vulnerabilities that are not just vulnerable during war but during pandemics, natural disasters and other catastrophic events. But senselessly reproducing militarised logics causes damage and cannot be read as innocent. The report neglected to say that Starmer himself vocally supported the siege of Gaza.

His conception of food security is nationalist. The report mentions Ireland and Bengal, amongst a list of other famines, but fails to vocalise how these famines were instigated by the very idea of food security as national security. So what does it mean to play a strong role in inculcating the idea of the military as central to food security? What does it mean for the food sovereignty movement to implicate itself in this plan?

One effect that comes to my mind is that it dials down the opposition to military-state led visions. Regardless of its theoretical and practical flaws food sovereignty was about food producers and local communities taking control of their food provisioning against that of corporations. Lang talks about the need for households to be involved in civil resilience plans but doesn’t talk about the risks of involving the military. Not paying attention to the racialised dynamics of a white supremacist state means he cannot foresee how this will go wrong. Be that on the international stage when a country like the UK inevitably uses its imperialist power to deny food to others, hence ‘displacing’ starvation elsewhere. Or when domestically human beings are ranked in order of priority according to perceived worth to the nation state. He talks about William Beveridge’s ‘food control’ strategy during WWII – a rigorous management of supply and demand by the state – but doesn’t talk about how this strategy included starving Bengalis to death to ensure food supply to the British military as part of national defence.

If food sovereignty caves into this through a senseless economic opportunism or realpolitik it ends up abandoning the entire utility of the project of food sovereignty altogether. Rather than representing the ambition of a different world it represents a minor nationalistic tweak of the current. What the food sovereignty world should be doing is instead of lending rhetorical support to this shift it should be actively constructing arguments against it. That it isn’t should concern anyone who does care about food sovereignty as representing an alternative to white supremacy, imperialism, patriarchy and capitalism. The upcoming Conference on Food and National Security bringing together organisations from the world of food sovereignty including the Sustainable Food Trust, Pasture for Life, Soil Association, and the Food, Farming and Countryside Commission, with the foreign office, former imperialist military generals and Zionists, shouldn’t just be boycotted but actively protested by anyone who believes in a non-militarised world.

If we don’t defend the idea of food sovereignty from those who are co-opting it towards militarised meanings, then food sovereignty will cease to exist as an alternative to the status quo of continued death and destruction. Rather than opting-into national security arguments we should be opting out and doing our job of providing an alternative. Against the militarisation of everything. Against the banging of the war drums. Nationalism has often split the left and it’s happening again.

The reality is our world is deeply interdependent. Rather than lionising autochthony, we need to build greater awareness of global interdependence and work instead to end imperialism relations which extract from global periphery to imperial centre. That would catalyse greater stability and safety for everyone around the world, rather than just a handful of rich, imperialist nations in the global north. That was supposed to be the mission of food sovereignty, even if some of its ideas are misguided. Either it reclaims that or the movement collapses in on itself or becomes a tool of the disaster nationalists – be they centrists or fascists.

The British food system is entirely reliant on the land and labour of people across the globe – there is a need to rebalance those social relations to allow people across the globe to pursue their own needs. But that comes through ending imperialist relations and food security as national security is anything but anti-imperialist.

How about instead of arguing within the logics of war and defence we argue in favour of peace and solidarity? How about against national security we argue in favour of global collaboration? What if the real threat comes from the very people being appealed to?