Food politics in the Global South explores how power, conflict, and negotiation shape the production, distribution, and access to food in low- and middle-income contexts. These dynamics intersect with global inequalities, climate change, urbanisation, and international trade. They raise urgent questions of sovereignty, justice, and sustainability.
Recent scholarship has highlighted how global food systems sustain structural dependence. It has also examined how food sovereignty, agri-food governance, and certification schemes influence these dynamics. Contemporary challenges, including corporate consolidation, commodity market volatility, climate disruptions, and nutrition transitions, make food politics a key lens for understanding struggles over development, democracy, and livelihoods in the Global South.
Food is both a human necessity and a political tool. Decisions about who grows, trades, and consumes food shape access to resources, cultural practices, and state legitimacy. Food crises have triggered protests, regime change, and social mobilisation across Africa, Asia, and Latin America. Governance also determines how societies adapt to climate change, resist exploitative trade, and assert sovereignty. Understanding food politics in the Global South is therefore crucial not only for addressing hunger and malnutrition, but also for engaging with larger debates about inequality, democracy, and sustainable development.
This Collection seeks critical, interdisciplinary reflections on the politics of food in the Global South. We welcome empirical and theoretical contributions from political science, sociology, anthropology, economics, history, development studies, environmental studies, and related fields. By bringing diverse perspectives together, we aim to interrogate existing paradigms, amplify voices from the Global South, and explore pathways to more equitable and sustainable food systems.
Topics of interest include, but are not limited to:
- Food sovereignty and resistance to global agri-food regimes
- Food crises, political stability, and regime legitimacy
- The role of international organisations, trade agreements, and global governance
- Agrarian change, rural movements, and coalition building among farmers
- Certification systems, sustainability standards, and local resistance
- The politics of nutrition transitions and health in urban and rural contexts
- Climate change, adaptation strategies, and agricultural policy
- Historical legacies of colonialism, land dispossession, and neoliberal restructuring
- Gender, class, and intersectional perspectives on food politics
- Bioeconomy policies, biotechnology, and the future of agriculture in the Global Sout
Editors
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