Food security and the global agrifood system: Ethical issues in historical and sociological perpspective

The world food system was developed under the auspices of free trade. Very quickly though free trade was countered with protectionism in the form of policies favoring national and cultural food security. The traumas of World War led to the introduction of international commitments on individual rights with respect to labor and the right to freedom from hunger. From the seventies, the pendulum swung back in favor of free trade, this time provoking a response in the form of fair and ethical trade. The introduction of new food markets promoted by social movements as from the eighties where values were attached to the conditions and processes of production rather than the product itself led to agriculture and food markets becoming imbued with ethical attributes. At the same time, an increasingly holistic concept of food security became adopted in international forums pointing to the need for policies which were no longer reducible to food aid. While for a period, broader ethical values were identified only with alternative food networks, as from the turn of the new millennium, under the collective umbrella of economic, social and environmental sustainability, they became adopted by the global agri-food players as the triple bottom line for all agricultural and food markets. Although a new consensus has been achieved on the centrality of sustainability and food security a range of tensions and conflicts persist over the relation between food security and trade, investment, biofuels, producer and consumer rights, animal welfare, nature and the environment. (C) 2015 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved.