 Welcome everybody to the annual distinguished lecture of the SOAS Food Study Centre this year given by Professor Alex Davall. My name is Elizabeth Hull and I'm the current Chair of the Food Study Centre. Before I introduce today's speaker, allow me just to say one or two things about the centre. The Food Study Centre was set up in 2007. It's an interdisciplinary centre with members from across SOAS's academic departments. It aims to promote research and teaching on the political, economic and cultural dimensions of food, and to foster links between SOAS and other institutions and people with an academic interest in food. The centre runs a weekly seminar series, convenes workshops and conferences, and oversees a master's programme in the anthropology of food. We're delighted that the centre has recently been awarded a three-year ESRC grant led by Dr Susanne Jaspers, which explores the digitalisation of food assistants in the UK, Sudan and India. Each year the centre invites a prominent figure in the field of food studies to deliver a distinguished lecture. Previous speakers include Sidney Mintz, Melissa Caldwell, James Scott, Yotam Otolenghi, Alan Ward, Krishnendu Ray and Hannah Garth. Several of these previous lectures can be viewed on the SOAS webpages and YouTube playlists, and tonight's lecture will also be recorded and made available online for you to view afterwards. The lecture will be followed by Q&A, and after that a reception just in the foyer just outside here, to which you're all warmly invited. I'd like to thank a couple of people for helping both organise and to run this evening's event. I'd like to thank Charles Tilandier-Ubsdal in the centres and institute office, Mohamed Centouf, the technician for tonight, the catering team and the student volunteers Nigel Jeffery, Mohamed Moliadi and Jake Richardson. So thank you so much for helping with this evening. So it's a great pleasure to introduce Professor Alex Daval, who is a world-renowned expert on Sudan and the Horn of Africa, and a leading voice in the fields of conflict, food security, human rights and humanitarianism. Professor Daval is the executive director of the World Peace Foundation and research professor at the Fletcher School Tufts University. He holds a PhD in social anthropology from the University of Oxford and has nearly four decades of experience as a researcher and practitioner working on conflict and humanitarian crises. His publication record is prolific and includes 18 books. On a personal note, Daval's book, Famine That Kills, that documents of famine in Darfur in 1984-85, is a book that I remember so vividly from my undergraduate days more than 20 years ago. It really made such a lasting impression on me. It really helped me to understand the political and economic roots of humanitarian crises and how stereotypes and misunderstandings held by those providing humanitarian relief can actually shape the course of events. A poignant discussion on the ethics of research gave me insight into what a critical anthropology of famine can contribute in the world. Throughout his career, Daval has been a prominent voice in debates about African politics, human rights and humanitarian issues. Professor Daval's most recent books include The Real Politics of the Horn of Africa, Money, War and the Business of Power, Mass Starvation, The History and Future of Famine and New Pandemic's Old Politics, 200 Years of the War on Disease and Its Alternatives, all published by Politi in 2015, 2018 and 2021. In addition to his academic work, Professor Daval has played a critical role in shaping policy and practice. He served as a senior adviser to the African Union High Level Panel on Sudan and South Sudan, contributing to the peace negotiations leading to the independence of South Sudan in 2011. In recognition of his achievements in 2008, Professor Daval was named one of foreign policies, 100 most influential international intellectuals, and in 2009 he was recognised as one of Atlantic's 29 brave thinkers. I'm thrilled and honoured to welcome this year's SOAS Food Study Centre distinguished lecturer, Professor Alex Daval. Thank you very much, Lizzie. It's always a pleasure to be back at SOAS. I've been coming here for quite a few years and it does feel a bit like home. So what I want to talk about today is a very high level overview of where I see the world food regime shifting at the moment. Part of my sort of stimulus, my motivation is whenever I hear Antonio Guterres talking about biblical famines and unprecedented, highly high world food prices, I think the guy is talking complete nonsense. We really need to have a much sharper analysis of what's going on. It's not because he's ignorant or stupid. There are some actually a lot more interesting reasons for the misrepresentation of what is a real world food crisis, which is where the slightly meandering path of this lecture is going to end up. So let me just start off by asking what kind of world food crisis do we have? Because if we go by the numbers, this isn't a crisis by historic standards at all. All the world hunger indicators are much more positive than they were for pretty much any time during the 20th century. And although progress has stalled and gone a little bit into reverse, the sustainable development goal of eliminating world hunger by 2030 is eminently achievable. And the goal of eliminating famines, which wasn't one of the STGs because it had basically already been achieved by the time the STGs were being adopted. That, of course, has slipped. It could easily be re-attained. There is a sort of good news story here, and if challenged, I can give you some of the data. I mean, the indices of real prices of staple foods at their highest last year were still only 50% to 75% of the average in real terms of what they were during the 20th century. The global level of famine mortality in the last 10 years is still well below the average of what it was in the first nine of the 10 decades of the last century. And even with the enormous supply chain disruptions associated with COVID, the numbers didn't tell a calamitous story. So what was the Secretary-General talking about when he used those almost apocalyptic phrases even before the Russian invasion of Ukraine disrupted wheat exports from the Black Sea ports? And there's some conceptual confusion, but also an intuition that something is actually terribly wrong, and that's what I'm going to focus on. But the conceptual confusion, I think, which you see not only at the UN, but not only in the different institutions within the UN, the Secretary-General's Office, the World Food Program, the UN Security Council, but also across most of the developed world, among most of the donors, is deeply frustrating, but it needs, I think, to be unpacked. And at its core, it's a shifting of blame to where the food crisis isn't, because world leaders have not made it a priority, despite their rhetoric, to address world hunger. So let's start with the widely recognised fact that the globalised neoliberal era is at a turning point. It's not over by any means, but it is changing in some fundamental ways. And characteristic of this new emergent era is economic nationalism making a comeback, selectively but significantly, and a geo-strategic rivalry or set of rivalries between the United States and China, and also the proxy war that is going on, perhaps not even proxy, between NATO countries and Russia. And in this context, the neoliberal ideal of a globalised market unfettered by states has gone out of the window. And formally idealistic neoliberal economists have been obliged to recognise that it's actually political choices that determine how markets function. And none of this is particularly surprising. You can read it in the comment columns of the major newspapers every day. What I'd like to do is to suggest that the shift in where we are moving can be captured with the idea of war economies, which I'm going to redefine for the current era. The key feature of these being that tools of economic statecraft are used to sustain and finance war and as weapons against enemies and rivals. They can be used to inflict pain and devastation in extremist starvation crimes, something that I've written a lot about recently. In this lecture, I'm not going to deal directly with starvation crimes and the need for those responsible for them to be called to account. Rather, I'm going to look at the context that makes them so permissible. Economic tools can be used to pay for the war, controlling supplies, managing demand and reallocating the pain. And they can be used to manage politics, prioritising political goods such as loyalties such as winning elections over public goods. This is the novel element, I think, in my redefinition. Two other clarifications which won't become as any surprise to this audience. One part of the confusion, I think, is the age-old zombie notion that food crisis is crisis of aggregate production and supply. This, of course, is only one side of the hunger equation. The other side is consumption or food entitlement, as my old Professor Amarche Sen coined the term. Do people have the means to buy it? Another element in the confusion is the distinction between hunger in general and the much rarer phenomena of famines. I just want to make one key point in that regard, which is that empirically, overwhelmingly, famines, however you choose to define them, are caused by war, conquest, massive errors of economic policy enforced by autocratic states or are deliberate crimes. These facts are often acknowledged by policymakers in the preambles to their statements. They almost never arise when they get onto conclusions and recommendations and proposals for action. I would say one other point on this, even with today's levels of economic precarity and climate crisis, famines whose immediate or major cause is drought are remarkably rare. It's not unheard of. We see that in parts of Somalia and parts of Madagascar, for example. But they are exceptions. They are not the paradigmatic cases. They are pointed to as the paradigm cases, paradigmatic cases because it's convenient to do so. I use this concept of war economies for two reasons. First of all, to point to the political choices in economic policymaking, the allocation of the burden of paying for things such as wars. And because economic policies today are everywhere being dictated at least by a minimum by geo-strategic rivalry, which includes forms of economic warfare, and at maximum by actual war. It's a new adaptation of the term. But let me digress a little into the lineage of the concept of the war economy because it leads us into how and why the dominant war economy of the U.S. and the G7 is being managed in the way that it is. The concept originated during World War I when Europe's market economies came under state management. And these economies involved massive burden shifting, both in World War I and even more so in World War II. And that burden shifting was a factor in some terrible families. Bengal in 1943, John Maynard Keynes, who we all love, was actually his wartime policy of demand management and burden shifting, actually was a major contributor to that famine. And the more blatant case, possibly the most blatant case in history, the German hunger plant, which basically starved millions of Eastern Europeans and citizens of the Soviet Union in order that the Germans themselves in the homeland would not go hungry. Now, just going back to World War I and its aftermath, neoliberalism was born in the immediate aftermath of World War I in response to the war economies which the neoliberals saw in some cases correctly as the opening the door to state management of the economies. And of course, in their language, the road to communist serfdom. They weren't particularly interested in hunger and famine. They saw it as a relic of old orders. But they were quite explicit that small states, and here they had in mind their own state, Austria, this is where it began, that small states would have to make painful adjustments to compete in the international market. They were at the mercy of the business cycles of much more powerful neighbours, Germany, Britain, etc. And those adjustments would require terrible pain, unemployment, impoverishment, the devastation of entire high-skilled economic sectors, mass emigration. And the neoliberal theoretician Gottfried Harbella argued, but the pains of transition will not be long-term. And it was precisely in response to that argument that Keynes famously responded in the long run were all dead. And true to their open market ideologies, they insisted on freedom of movement of people, though when scratched some of them did not extend that freedom to non-Europeans. And by the end of the short 20th century, they of course got their way pretty much across the board, not of course with freedom of movement for non-Europeans on industry, finance, on capital, and to some extent on agriculture. So the organisation of agriculture and food supply has been a special case for the neolipals. Their well-known vested interests in farming in Europe and developing countries with various degrees of clout have wanted to protect their national security food regimes. And from certain quarters within the UN, the UN Special Rapporteur on the right to food, for example, has been pushed back. But the logic of this, of neoliberalism, which triumphed, was famously articulated by the US Agriculture Secretary John Block in 1986. And I quote, the idea that developing countries should feed themselves is anachronism from a bygone era. They could better ensure their food security by relying on US agricultural products, which are available in most cases at much lower cost. And of course at that time, there was no competition in world agriculture from the Soviet Union or China. And it opened the door to the North American agro-industrial conglomerates with Europeans as junior partners dominating global food production and supply. And then this went on steroids, this 1980s, 1990s approach, was put on steroids with the financialisation of commodity markets when they entered into agriculture in the early 2000s. Turning the practice of hedging on its head, hedging which had begun as a practice to reduce volatility in prices for farmers, became a practice for increasing volatility so as to increase the profits of speculators. Both of these choices, both of these steps were political choices. But food supply is of course only half the story. The neoliberals thinking about wages was very explicit, very, very transparent. Wages might need to be held down at levels in which people might not be able to afford food. And we see this in extraordinarily candid ways. It's so remarkable when you notice it in the debate on inflation. When you hear economists and bankers celebrating the fact that wage rises have been kept down, isn't the point of economic development that wages should actually go up, people might have more money to spend. And in the context of food crisis, if the response to food price inflation is to keep wages down, doesn't that defeat the whole point if we are trying to defeat hunger? The implications of this for food security are so obvious, but they're extraordinarily absent from the global policy debate. So but then circling back a little bit to the thread of the question of how a neoliberal regime organizes and pays for a war. It's something that the neoliberal theoreticians didn't address. Like the early 20th century world peace movement and my foundation founded in 1910 was founded out of that same sentiment. That belief that if the economic world were properly governed with a global regime of law and regulation for capitalism, there would be no war. That was their argument. National governments would manage the cultural affairs of their populations while the market did all the rest. The assumption was we don't need to address this issue of war finance. But of course neoliberal states did go to war where they prefer not to call it war. Sometimes it's like calling it intervention. The US and the UK did so in Kosovo, Afghanistan, Iraq and Libya to name but the most obvious cases. Now Donald Rumsfeld at the point of initiation of what he later called the long war made his famous contribution to political poetry with his statement about known unknowns and so on. The one he missed out was the unknown knowns, the unacknowledged certitudes. In this case what underpinned his whole philosophy and approach, the unquestioned neoliberal global economic order, which is what would pay for the war on terror. The political geography of this was made very explicit in an interesting book by a man called Thomas Barnett who worked with the Pentagon. He called it the Pentagon's new map and he identified what he called the non-integrating gap. Those parts of the world seen as not sufficiently connected to the globalised economic sphere which were the source of danger to the US. All the places of intervention were in this non-integrating gap. This is where the war on terror was fought. I'll get back to that point in a moment. The next question was how the neoliberal state paid for its wars, didn't raise taxes. What it did was partly through privatisation, subcontracting the war to the private sector, an age-old British and Dutch mechanism for expanding maritime empires and a direct link to the type of war economy I'll speak about in a few moments, the war economy of private profit or kleptocracy. Another part and this is where the Barnett non-integrated gap becomes important was the idea that the wars would finance themselves by bringing the places that were intervened in into that neoliberal order, Iraq being the obvious case. The biggest element of war finance was borrowing, that is shifting the burden to the future. This has a number of interesting political ramifications. Wolfgang Streik, the German sociologist, has argued that the financial turn in government funding created the bond market as the daily plebiscite on the standing of government, displacing the electorate, displacing the taxpayers, what he calls the market book taking over from the start's book. He doesn't go into the stock market but that is actually perhaps even more important because those who organised and financed the ruling parties, particularly in the US also here in the UK, were massively invested in the stock market and the returns to stocks served as their diagnosis of the health of the body politic. The returns to stock were driven by the ever expanding frontiers of exploitation of capitalism to keep the footsie and the Dow Jones rising. Note that the neoliberal mechanism for financing war, particularly the US mechanism, was made a lot easier by the fact that the dollar is the world's reserve currency. So the US has this exorbitant privilege of being able to borrow on its own terms. No one else can do this. And it can enjoy the way in which when there are economic headwinds and it puts up interest rates, capital flows into the United States. And that's a very significant form of burden shifting enabling it to finance wars. Insofar as it suppresses wages at home, the hardship is felt by people on lower wages. Insofar as international debts are denominated in US dollars, it squeezes those debtor countries. And also because of the way the US dollar dominates the banking systems of the world, it gives the US exclusive control of a particular arsenal of monetary weapons, especially financial sanctions, especially targeted financial sanctions aimed at individuals during the war on terror expanded to include entire nations. So ultimately the wars of the neoliberal era were paid for by the long boom in the stock market and the dominance of the US dollar. Both of those are coming to an end. The boom rapidly, the dollars dominance slowly. And so we're seeing a new kind of hybrid economy beginning to emerge. A selective return to industrial policy, a much broader use of trade and financial sanctions to target adversaries. And therefore the question we need to ask is, in returning to our question about hunger, where will this burden fall? And within the current debate, we're not seeing that question addressed. That is the, I think, the big question if we are addressing the world hunger problem. On the food supply, there's a sort of consensus to keep the current corporate food regime intact, to keep food cheap. There's no appetite for revising that, for returning to earlier eras of national food security regimes. The global corporate food regime is an only quasi neoliberal. It's global, but it's an oligopoly dominated by the big four, the ABCD, ADM, BUNCH, Cargill and Louis Dreyfus. And their role in this story is really one in how they set the debate. They have an extraordinarily important role in setting the terms of the policy debate, including up to UN. Their role in climate crisis has been notable overlooking their massive contributions to CO2 and methane footprints. Their leading role in deforestation and species loss, etc. They just say, we are desperately needed to feed the world. I should also mention their evisceration of sustainable agricultural livelihoods. Their investments in Russia were potentially damaging to their public relations. And they escaped by reluctantly, I think, divesting from Russia. If anyone knows how much they've really divested, I would be keen to know. Of course, they were very anxious to escape blame for the so-called world food crisis. While they profited from those higher food prices, they didn't want to seem to be profiting too much. And of course, when sanctions were imposed on Russia and Belarus, fertilisers were exempt. Western and international reliance on those fertilisers is quite considerable. So we don't see any burden of this food crisis being shifted to the conglomerates with the sole exception of their divestment from Russia. Now what's missing again extraordinarily from any debate when the food conglomerates are engaging at the UN and elsewhere is the question of food entitlements. But we see the burden shifting already with the increase in interest rates. But before turning to that, let me just look at the rival war economy that is emerging, which is rather incoherent. And we'll characterize it here with a rather ungainly phrase, the G7 Plus East, that rivals the BRICS countries plus a few others that have gone along with them. A very different kind of war economy there. They have many fewer financial tools at their disposal. They're joined by others who sympathize with their critique of the dominant system. They're seeking to challenge, to reform or to escape from the dollar and the exorbitant privileges that accrue to the US. And this was, of course, underway well before the Ukraine war. Without a global reserve currency, China and its partners want to anchor their economies on commodities, especially oil. It's not exactly economic nationalism because they want global trade, just on terms more favorable to them. In a newsletter at the end of last year, one of the analysts for Credit Suisse, Sultan Pazhar, wrote about what he called commodity encumbrance, how China had stolen a march on the Western G7 by securing preferential or exclusive access to key commodities in an attempt to break the dominance of the dollar. Those commodities included oil, minerals needed for batteries, to some extent land, possibly some elements of agricultural produce. And China has its own lending regime that has left countries in dangerous debt traps. It then drives a hard bargain when it closes the trap. It can take over entire economic sectors, can monopolize entire commodity production systems. And there's a fierce debate among economists as to whether China is actually prepared for the costs of really decisively de-dollarising and whether other like-minded countries have the financial infrastructure and unity of purpose to go along with it should it go down that road. But one thing they do agree on, one thing on which there is a consensus, is dismantling the sanctions regimes. Russia and China have been bit by bit blocking every sanctions committee at the UN Security Council. They've been building an anti-sanctions consensus across the global south. And this removes one of the most important multilateral tools that can be used against abusive regimes. Ethiopia being a case in point. It's dressed up as a third worldest challenge to the American-dominated global financial system. And the charge of hypocrisy against the US and Western nations does resonate. But this G7 Plus East grouping is not interested in the consistent application of these norms. It is in the norms that underpin the sanctions regimes at the UN. It's interested in abandoning those norms altogether. The implications for food and hunger of this cluster will play out in due course. We haven't seen them yet because they haven't reconfigured on the supply side. They haven't reconfigured the global food regime. Because food-importing countries have become addicted to very cheap food. Russia doesn't want to be accused of disrupting it, especially by potentially friendly states in Africa, Asia and the Middle East. And he wants to keep on exporting its food and fertilizers. And China and the Gulf countries and a handful of others have been investing in agricultural land, especially in Africa, and in the agro-industrial conglomerates. They want a bigger stake in that regime, not overturning it. Now, many of you will have seen last year in response to the closing of the Black Sea ports, Ukraine's ports by Russia and also by Ukrainian mines, that Guterres and the Turkish president Erdogan had the Black Sea grain initiative to unlock those exports. That was designed to rescue this global food regime, and for the time being, it has done so. Its advocates point to the way in which it's kept food prices from rising. It's allowed Ukraine to export and has provided some shipments of food aid to the Horn of Africa. Its critics point out that most of the Black Sea exports go to Europe, much of it for livestock feed. It looks like a nice consensus there, but actually that consensus is concealing the underlying problem. It's conflating two very different things, keeping food supplies moving and addressing world hunger. It's not addressing this fundamental problem that I keep coming back to. Food entitlement, the question of living wages and precarity. China and the G7 plus East, they don't have an agenda for this. When China entered the WTO, it destroyed whole swathes of manufacturing employment across much of the developing world, especially in Africa. It wiped out Africa's textile industry. China's investments in infrastructure are not going to bring those jobs back. Now, there was a moment when a poor country such as Ethiopia had the opportunity of triangulating, positioning itself to get the best out of the different blocks. Infrastructure from China, trade with the US and Europe, technical assistance from European donors. A unified block within the global south such as the African Union could potentially have played this position, intermediate between the emergent rival powers to its advantage. Not so now. What we're seeing is these countries divided, disparate, being picked off one by one. There's no principled multilateralism at work to defend that position, that vulnerable position that they occupy in the global world economy. And the norms and principles that might constrain the use of starvation of the weapon of war, the real sharp point of creating famine, lost completely in this mix. So, in the last but one part, let me look at the war economies that we see in the global south, the hard edge of generating deep hunger. Let's go back 100 years to that key point that I made about the Austrian neoliberals in the wake of World War I and their dark view about what was needed for their country to survive, rejected to the turmoil of the business cycle of their bigger neighbours. It was pretty much exactly the same question that drove Ethiopia to adopt its developmental state strategy some 25 years ago. In the Ethiopian national security strategy of 2002, we read that if poverty and hunger are not overcome, the country will be at risk of destabilisation from actors in the wider region, and national disintegration cannot be ruled out. Now the fact is that the volatility in the global economic order means that for small open economies, the chances of social cohesion over the longer term under these conditions, the chances are approaching zero. Which means that the governments cannot expect to meet the aspirations of their people over any extended period. Any political programme based on earning legitimacy through the delivery of real outcomes is no longer a viable option. This is a brute reality. 30 years of development programming and state building aimed at enabling countries to pull themselves out of poverty and fragility. We just haven't succeeded. Countries that did this before the 1980s may have got to a safe place. Those that didn't, I don't think, are in a safe place. And the question that the development community didn't want to address was, what is it that's dragging countries down back into crisis, the crises that we'd hoped they were escaping? In his much neglected little classic, When Things Fall Apart on State Failure in Africa, Robert Bates addressed this. He argued that the level of public revenues in Africa descended to such low levels in the 1980s because of a multitude of factors. It simply wasn't possible for the basic variables that made state functioning to work for those variables to be in the zone that made that functioning possible. He said, posed dispassionately, Africa was subject to an experiment as these forces pushed the value of key variables into ranges in which the possibility of political order became vanishingly small. It exposed the African state to the site that was horrible and instructive, a Hobzian state. It was an experiment, an structural adjustment, which may in the long term have led those countries to become a bit more competitive though in the interim to adapt Keynes quite if you died. It was an experiment in dismantling government in the hope that this would create a new social contract, but it turned out to be a Hobzian contract rather than a Lockean one. A form of governance that has much to do, much in common with how to run a civil war. It was an experiment also repeated on the political side by the Americans in Iraq with a similar outcome. In my book, The Real Politics of the Horn of Africa, I posed the follow-up question. How are countries governed that have actually given up on providing the basics for their populations? The outcome is akin to a political un-contract. The outcome when transactional politics becomes the mode of governing, dominating institutions, I called it the political marketplace. A combination of kleptocracy and gangsterism. Economies of pillage, racketeering, a host of economic activities in many cases. Many of that form of war economies. But what defines them actually isn't that those economic activities as such. It's that power is the tradable commodity. Governance is not about social contract. The aggregate of individualized, commoditized power relations. And as I mentioned, these countries are not forming a cohesive bloc. They're not able to do so. They don't have the political infrastructure and leadership to do that. They're being divided and ruled. So their strategies for keeping their ships of state afloat, they can't steer them anyway. All they can do is keep them afloat, involve becoming clients of other actors. And for governments east and west, it's much cheaper, much easier to purchase or rent the alignment of these countries, or rather their rulers, than it is to invest in development and stability. And these political markets are terribly bad at producing public goods. Public goods are subordinate to political goods. Political goods are the goods needed for taking and maintaining political power. So in the case of Nigeria, where one of the famous godfathers has just won an election, the entire political structure of that election was not about rhetoric aside, about how to deliver Nigeria from its predicament. It was about the workings of godfatherism, of buying votes, of buying clients, of making that political system work so that a particular faction was in charge of the goods that came from the position of power. This is the nub of the war economies of the global south. Not necessarily in conflict, but war economies in which the economy and financial tools are purposed for political ends, which are very narrow and often violent. This happens through four mechanisms. One is the prioritisation of funding. It's expensive to run an election. It's expensive to pay off your clients. It doesn't leave enough left over for public goods. Perhaps more importantly, it embeds kleptocracy in the system. It opens the door to grand corruption. Corruption cannot be controlled in such a mechanism. Whenever you see a campaign against corruption, it is actually a campaign of targeting political opponents. Selectively, everyone on both sides were corrupt. An honest politician cannot compete in this market. Third, often it slides into outright war. War then becomes the most direct cause of humanitarian emergency. Starvation crimes will likely occur. Fourth, the norms that constrained the most egregious misbehaviour are dismantled. They are subordinate to the calculus of power. The case of hunger is overlooked and tolerated. Starvation crimes are overlooked and tolerated. This rather dismal picture can be summed up as a new global priority regime. Whatever other priorities of government in America, Europe, China and the global south, solving hunger frankly isn't one of them, nor is stopping famines. A lot of high-level attention to the crisis of world hunger, but frankly that's a facade. We saw this in the World Food Summit of September 2021, and Michael Facry, the UN special rapporteur on the right to food, has a withering description of what happened there. He said the summit was touted as the ultimate place to provide the world with solutions, but it never clarified the problems with the dominant world food systems. The summit can be best understood as an inter-corporate contest that did not have any substantive regard for social justice or human rights. It's a long speech, those are just two of his points. He also pointed out an amazing oversight, no mention of COVID. This is explicable because the powers that be want to keep the hunger agenda on the food production rails, not on the entitlement rails. Last year, 2022, there were two summits of the UN, a global ministerial summit in May, and a global food security summit in September. The disruption of the world wheat supply from Ukraine and Russia was a convenient culprit. Of the first summit in May, the US anticipated that the global south would line up to condemn Russia for weaponising food, and the US was so confident that Secretary of State Antony Blinken went so far as to raise a very sensitive issue in US policy, which is starvation crimes. The US has historically used sanctions and blockades, and insofar as it wants to outlaw the war crime of starvation, it only wants to outlaw a particular type of starvation crime, one that the US does not itself engage in very often. Blinken mentioned the potential criminality of Russia's blockade of Ukrainian ports, which is actually quite dubious in this context. It just mentioned it the one time that he stepped back. The case against Russia was no stronger than other cases the US did not want to see raised. Representatives from the global south took the opportunity to point out that the world food crisis wasn't a direct product of the Black Sea grain crisis, preceded it, wasn't a crisis of aggregate food supply, and they pressed various agendas which were uncomfortable to the US. So incoherent actually was the US script that even a rather hypocritical rant by the Russian representative managed to score a few, land a few blows, pointing out that the situations of conflict-affected food crisis before the Security Council in 2022 were all before the Council, before the Ukraine invasion, of course we didn't call it an invasion, and also he ignored the fact that the Russian veto had been used, or the threat of veto had been used to stop additional cases coming up. Everyone talked about drought, some about climate crisis, no one talked about political economy, and they all agreed that food prices were at historic highs, which was, as I said at the beginning, untrue, but it focused the debate and determined the outcome. We've also seen a series of high-level events about armed conflict and hunger and the war crime of starvation, an issue that I've been personally very vested in. The UN Security Council adopted resolution 2417 on armed conflict and hunger in May of 2018. That arose because of the recognition that almost all severe humanitarian emergencies arose in the context of armed conflict, and often because food was used as a weapon. The resolution notes in its preamble that starvation can be a war crime, and the following year the state's parties to the Rome Statute of the International Criminal Court adopted an amendment that extended the war crime of starvation from international to non-international armed conflicts. Those of us who are campaigning on this issue thought, this is opening the door, this is a breakthrough to our agenda. In fact, in retrospect, it was the high water mark. In 2020, the World Food Program won the Nobel Peace Prize. For those of us who hope this might encourage it to speak out on starvation crimes, we were gravely disappointed, shockingly so in the case of Ethiopia. It took four years for the African Union to take up the agenda of 2417. In May of last year, it finally did so, no mention of criminality or culpability. All the focus was shifted to how to improve production and get more aid. Last September, at the instigation of Ireland, that indefatigable champion of the rights of the hungry, the UN Security Council belatedly held a special debate on 2417. The statements there were pallid to unspeakable. Confusion, ignorance, there's plenty of that. A conspiracy of silence, certainly many interests converge on conflating the problem of world hunger and famine with disruptions to the corporate world food regime, not mentioning food entitlements, not mentioning burden shifting, not mentioning starvation crimes, identifying the solution as getting the food ships sailing, keeping the world food prices within the right range. Business as usual. So what we see, I think, is a sort of new politics of indifference. And it is new. When President Kennedy spoke to launch the food for peace programme some 60 years ago, he said, food is strength, food is peace, food is freedom, food is a helping hand to people around the world whose good will and friendship we want. And the US actually had a commendable record in many respects from the Marshall Plan through the Green Revolution up to Reagan's statement that a starving child knows no politics. It saw hunger as an issue. Of course, it was deeply hypocritical in many ways, cynically used hunger as a weapon, notoriously so in Bangladesh, but it did so acknowledging that this was a political issue and that it was something that it ought to be embarrassed about when it was on, as it were, the wrong side of that debate. And remarkably, even President George W. Bush, his policy of no famine on my watch meant that the US was ready to deliver emergency assistance to unpopular places, North Korea, Sudan. It didn't gain any public credit for that. And that policy was actually abandoned by the Obama administration. Sadly, it didn't do the needful to prevent famine in Somalia in 2011, an augur of this new politics of indifference. It's an augur partly because it happened, and even more so because no one in that administration, including President Obama, has felt the need to apologise for failing to prevent a perfectly preventable famine. Yes, this was something the Bush administration did better than the Obama administration. But what we see today, I think, I fear is worse, the world leaders who spoke at the summits over the last two years said they were concerned about ending world hunger. Frankly, we're not. Our world hunger regime is one in which there's a consensus we should maintain the corporate agro-industrial regime in one form or another. The issue of precarity of huge populations isn't on the agenda. The political economies of the global south are abandoning or have already abandoned the politics of development and welfare for the war economies of political survival. And the norms and principles are frankly being thrown out of the window, are politics of indifference. And the irony here is actually the goals of abolishing world hunger and ending famines are eminently achievable. They're achievable in the short term by making the existing system work. But that existing system is fundamentally untenable over anything other than a very short term. So we need, I think, to revive some agendas, the right to food activism, the progressive ideals of the World Food Summit of 1996, food sovereignty movement, et cetera, and framing hunger as a matter of entitlements, the real capability of the poor to have a living wage. This has to be top of the agenda. And that will bring up, I would believe, the burden shifting of the US and the G7 countries and the commodity encumbrant strategy of their rivals. We need to stir up again the revulsion against starvation of something man-made very often a crime. I was just reading Chinua Cebe's Memoir of Biafra, and it was striking how the international outrage against the starvation in Biafra, how that contrasts with the total lack of outrage against an identical crime committed in Tigray in the last couple of years. Guterres has called the Black Sea Grain Initiative his proudest achievement as Secretary-General. Plenty of reasons to mock that, but on the other hand, it is perhaps a key which we could turn, a carve out for food and agriculture and into food entitlements from the new geostrategic rivalry, a space in which something can be done, an opportunity to seize on that otherwise empty rhetoric with something real. The starting point for this, I think, has to be candidly seeing this crisis for what it is. Well, thank you so much, Professor Deval, for such a wide-ranging and incisive discussion of the politics that underpin the problems of the global food system. I'm going to open it up to Q&A in a moment. One reflection I had followed on from your comment about one of the dominant discourses identifying non-integrating gaps as a source of volatility and this struck me as really contradictory because, of course, many economists and food system scholars suggested that it's precisely how integrated the global food system is and its connection to other tightly integrated systems like finance that is actually reducing its resilience. There seems to be this tension here. You also highlight that the global powers of Russia and China, far from wanting to break up the existing food regime, are looking to integrate it further. In many respects, what you seem to be describing is a crisis appearing to derive from conflict, as much actually deriving from consensus and consensus building around the global food regime. So many questions arise from this, and I'm not sure which to pick, but I wonder if you could reflect on this dynamic of integration versus a kind of splintering. You mentioned at the beginning the question of the emerging kind of national, the emerging of kind of economic nationalism. How does this relate to kind of continued globalising forces and how does the question of economic nationalism potentially play into some of these questions of a highly integrated food system? Very good questions, and I think your key point about that being actually amidst this rivalry and conflict is actually a consensus across the board about the type of world food regime that there should be. It's just the conflict isn't about the type, it's about who is going to profit from it, and how that profit is going to be shared. That is the ultimate burden shifting because the burden of that is not going to be felt by the rich countries, but of course there is burden shifting within those countries as well, which is an integral part of this whole picture. I didn't allude it to that, but in terms of the non-integrating gap, what Barnett was specifically talking about was the countries that in one way or another had not fully integrated into the global system. Iraq, Afghanistan, Libya, Egypt, and Sudan, a bunch of others. Although that was his view, that when you scratch the surface, as you say, you do see an element of integration. They're integrated more as the frontiers where the regulations are looser, and the tighter integration is happening in those grey areas of illicit economies, and dubious political transactions, including arms sales and other things that don't register in national accounts.