Whose scarcity, whose security?

This chapter describes that 16 million people in Somalia, Kenya, Ethiopia and South Sudan are desperately in need of food, water and medical treatment. It discusses how peoples' movements are using the concept of food sovereignty to contest the naturalisation of scarcity in discourses about hunger. The chapter addresses how food sovereignty exposes food scarcity as a socio-political construct that legitimises further intensification of production at the expense of people and environments. By unveiling the webs of power and social relations that govern access to and control over productive resources, advocates of food sovereignty draw attention to the politics of allocation and attendant policies that are legitimised by predominant framings of scarcity. Food has long been recognised as a political weapon, and the discursive production of scarcity is key to this. Scarcity relies on an imbalance of systems and establishes the basis of the free market.