GOVT 40.28 Feeding the World: The Politics of Food and Farming
With the world population nearing 8 billion and climate change threatening both existing industrial and non-industrial modes of food production, long-standing debates about how to best feed the world have grown even more pressing. Where should food be produced and how? What forms of agricultural can meet global need in the immediate term and over the long run? And what systems of trade and global governance are needed to feed the world? In this course, we dive into these debates from a policy and political science perspective.
We first learn the basics about how farming and food production is organized in different parts of the world, as well as how international food trade is structured, and we become familiar with the major challenges created by existing food and farming systems. We then consider the many political and policy solutions being offered to address these challenges and weigh their costs and benefits to form our own educated conclusion about the best way forward to feed the world.
We further delve into the politics of food, asking how access to food and support for or attacks on farming are used to achieve political aims. For example, we examine how governments use restrictive food trade policies to accomplish foreign policy goals and how rebel groups appropriate humanitarian food aid to finance civil wars. Overall, the course illustrates just how central food and farming are to politics.
Instructor
Johnson