This is the third edition of
Ideas from IDS, our publication featuring student essays, now from the 2018/19 academic year. This is the first time this publication has a thematic focus:
food.
Food is a prominent development issue that concerns hunger, malnutrition, inequality, environmental sustainability, power and politics, social justice, and cultural identity. It is about the trade-offs that this era of globalisation has brought about, such as ensuring food security for all, while protecting the environment. It is about striking paradoxes such as the concurrence of under and overnutrition, sometimes in the same country or region, which reflects pervasive social inequalities and power imbalances in the food system.
The first two essays tackle
aspects of nutrition.
Takeshi Suzuki (MAPov12) links nutrition to care and argues that addressing the basic causes of malnutrition demands a gender perspective.
Deeksha Sharma (MAGen32) also considers aspects of care and malnutrition. She takes us to Odisha, India, where child undernutrition is pervasive, to discuss why government interventions to improve sanitation have failed to tackle child undernutrition.
Theresa Jacobs (MADev12) too considers government intervention but this time in relation to the
taxation of agriculture in China. Moving on from the focus on food security and nutrition, her paper draws attention to the significance of agriculture in internal state bureaucracy and in state–citizen relations.
The
politics of food come up again strongly, in a different guise, in the essay by
Wil Hopson (MAFood01). He discusses popular mobilisation around food, looking at modern food riots and the backlash to neoliberalism.
Beryl Lo (MADev12) looks to address issues of
food insecurity, undernutrition, and low level schooling in fragile, conflict and violence-afflicated states, with her essay about school-feeding programmes in Sri Lanka.
Three essays engage with different aspects of
environmental sustainability related to food.
Mikhail Moosa (MADev12) takes issue with the claim made by policymakers and climate activists that climate change will increase the incidence of violent conflict.
Atika Suri Fanani (MScCCDP09) unpacks and critiques the notion of climate-resilient development. The third essay engaging with environmental sustainability reviews the biofuel debate in the context of Sierra Leone.
Olivia Compton (MADev12) draws on policy process literature and the ‘pathways to sustainability’ framework to consider the positions of different stakeholders in the debate, interests at stake, and narratives deployed.
Moving the focus down to southern Africa,
Amy Coupland (MAGlob11) engages with the notion of
value chain upgrading, in relation to small-scale maize production in Zimbabwe.
The final paper in this issue engages with the notion of
South–South cooperation, considering its discursive nature, geopolitics, and competing interests, for providers and recipients.
Shohei Murayama (MADev12) focusses on agricultural cooperation between Brazil and African countries.
The diversity of themes, analytical frames, geographical foci, and levels of analysis represented in this issue reflect the multidimensional nature of food as a development topic. This is an encouragement to engage further with students and the wider academic community across IDS and Sussex on debates, studies, and research on food and development.
(Adapted from Lidia Cabral’s introduction to Ideas from IDS: Graduate Papers from 2018/19)
Ideas from IDS 2016/17 and Ideas from IDS 2017/18
