POLITICS OF FOOD SECURITY DISCOURSE IN A CHANGING CLIMATE

Abstract

Threats of climate change have become salient, increasingly raising questions regarding economic, environmental and human consumption practices. With climate change impacts, state leaders have become more attentive to achieving long-term sustainability and adaptability. The challenges climate change poses on the agri-food system is multi-fold, affecting the stability, availability, access and utilisation of food and agriculture, which makes vulnerable countries even more so susceptible. In this paper, I examined Thailand, Vietnam and the Philippines as case studies to analyse policy discourses related to each country’s agri-food system in the context of climate change. Building on the literature on hegemonic and counter-hegemonic discourses in the global food regime, food security and food sovereignty respectively, I carried out quantitative and qualitative discourse analyses on three purpose-built corpora of policy documents released by the countries’ main agriculture and environment ministries. The results show that neoliberal capitalist ideologies undergird the political discourses in Thailand, Philippines and Vietnam in varying degrees. I find that the higher the level of agricultural modernisation a country has adopted, the greater the level of neoliberal framing in its policy discourses. This, however, does not entail that food sovereignty discourses are absent; these are present in varying degrees depending on the distinctive agrarian political economy and governance of the state.