Tenth International Conference on Food Studies

Abstract

“Food is failing us” is the overwhelming consensus from a variety of stakeholders, from the most recent Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) 2019 report highlighting the centrality of food and land-use systems to the dynamics of climate change, to the conservative US think tank, Foreign Policy, with a recent essay by Jason Hickel, (August 2019), entitled: “The Food Crises is here.” Indeed, as Rockstrom et al, (2019) comment: “Food systems hold a firm grip over the stability of the Earth system and the future of humanity.” This is in tandem with the fact that globally, the number of persons who are hungry and malnourished is increasing, with FAO (2019) estimating this number at 2 billion (with a severe and moderate level of food insecurity). In this short reflection paper, I will argue that this crisis calls for 3D thinking; that is 1. Divergent 2. Disruptive and 3. Decolonial intellectual frameworks in order to challenge the untenable neoliberal-reformist agenda of saving clauses and silver bullets that seeks to preserve the corporate food regime. I argue that this global food regime is deeply inefficient as it is based on primitive accumulation biases that are gendered and racial, thereby sustaining an unholy alliance with the logic of extractivism and disposability. I will conclude by highlighting a new decolonial project in Jamaica, led by scholars from the Global North and South for promoting alternative seed networks, that could help effect this 3D thinking for transformational change.