Living with insecurity: Food security, resilience, and the World Food Programme (WFP)

Abstract

As the world’s largest humanitarian organization fighting hunger, and primary expositor of food insecurity in sub-Saharan Africa, the World Food Programme’s (WFP) activities offer a unique opportunity to examine the contemporary food-security nexus. In this article, we examine the ‘turn’ toward resilience in the practices and policies of the WFP. Our analysis emphasizes that resilience is one of a family of security strategies through which the WFP seeks to govern food security. As such, it is impossible to claim, as some have, that resilience is displacing security as the dominant logic for governing insecurity. Nevertheless, resilience is a cornerstone of the WFPs’ current activities. Whereas more familiar strategies of security attempt to pre-empt or contain disruptive events – in the context of food crises – resilience is a style of thinking that assumes the inevitability of unpredictable, high-impact events and aims to foster the capability for systems and people to adapt, absorb, and bounce back from their effects. Resilience, while championed as part of an overall solution to a range of ills afflicting human populations today, aims only to equip people and populations with the capacity to live with the instabilities of a neoliberal food system without questioning, destabilizing, or resisting the very sources of socio-economic and political instability.