ABSTRACT
The chapter critically examines three main arguments regarding food security and their consequences for policy-making and development strategies. Market-based productivism remains the dominant position, calling for increased agri-food trade through the incorporation of new areas and higher productivity. Productivism was the key feature of the Green Revolution and continues to drive neoliberalized agribusiness. The common alternative is the pursuit of a post-productivist paradigm that emphasizes the environmental, cultural, and social dimensions of agriculture, however without a meaningful consideration of socio-political inequalities and environmental injustices. Finally, the search for food rights and community-based responses represents a radical departure from both productivism and post-productivism in favor of local production and food sovereignty, although the idealization of peasant agriculture often leads to a form of elitism by the backdoor. The main lesson is that food security is a highly politicized phenomenon and an important locus of debate connecting daily life with global politico-economic and ideological systems. Food security is an integral requirement of wider justice and security agendas, which should necessarily include a more egalitarian basis of economic production, representative democracy, property relations, and socioecological interaction. The construction of food security basically depends on reclaiming agriculture from agribusiness and reinstating the centrality of good, locally produced food.
