Feeding a Humanitarian Disaster

Feeding a Humanitarian Disaster: International Law, Global Industrial Agriculture, and the Dual Dichotomy

People

Researcher

• Dr Sean Madden

Background

Evidence abounds that globalised industrial agriculture, focused on the intensified production of livestock, plays a predominant role in environmental depredation and is a major propagating factor in anthropogenic climate breakdown. The industry is further implicated in fostering antimicrobial resistance and in facilitating burgeoning crises of flora and fauna. Disturbingly, forced displacement, extra-judicial killings, and land-grabbing are also commonplace. Post-colonial states – and minority communities in particular – suffer disproportionately the effects of these practices, whereas, despite deriving the greatest benefit from the exploitation of land and resources, industrialised states of the Global North, dominant socioeconomic classes in the South, and transnational capitalists remain largely shielded. This dynamic has rendered serious implications for human rights, climate justice, and food security.

This project advances that the impunity of global agribusiness is enabled by technocratic institutions of international law and finance, and conceptions of sovereignty emergent of colonialist and imperialist relationships. Over centuries, they have maintained subordination, stifled autonomy, and enabled industrialised states to extract and utilise resources in order to further their own wealth and development. Through coercion and conditionality, post-colonial states are bound by a set of rules they had no say in creating, have great difficulty altering, and which are specifically designed, and regularly fluctuate, in order to maintain a hemispherical imbalance. These institutions homogenise and universalise, proclaiming benevolent assistance through a mission – initially of ‘civilisation’, latterly of ‘economic development’ – to expunge backwardness and primitiveness, and to radically alter the behaviours, epistemologies, and praxis of the subaltern, non-Western ‘other’, purportedly so that they may be better equipped to engage with the vicissitudes and values of modernity. In actuality, the contingency inherent within this relationship has enabled powerful global actors to decide metrics of civilisation and development, and thus maintain a level of paternalism, intervention, and encroachment within the post-colonial state enabling the continuation of destructive extraction and exploitation.

Key to the subaltern experience is that this relationship is replicated within the post-colonial state as well as inflicted from without, as the primacy placed upon state sovereignty within international and human rights law disenfranchises and silences indigenous peoples and other minorities. The replication of this relationship I refer to as the Dual Dichotomy. In the context of global agribusiness, this enables the post-colonial state to commandeer land and resources in order to achieve economic growth or to attract foreign investment. Intrusion by transnational actors is legitimised and rationalised by institutions of global finance and law, whilst the human rights regime that may have initially appeared to provide protection, through its induction into the language of development, and contingency on statehood and legal personality, renders the violations enabled by agribusiness justifiable and inevitable.

The study elucidates an explanation for how colonialism and imperialism has shaped and enabled the current system of exploitative and damaging industrial agribusiness, and its attendant implications for food security, human rights, and the climate. It outlines how regimes nominally established to aid post-colonial states in fact contribute to and perpetuate the deleterious status quo.

Aims

Addressing an important lacuna, it contends that, in the elevation of Western conceptions of ‘development’, the perpetuation of hegemonic, free-market, neoliberal capitalism, and in what has been described as the ‘transcendence’ of the economic above all legal and socio-political concerns, indigenous and subaltern knowledge and practice – particularly around land use, food security, and subsistence – is subordinated, and this acts as the driving force behind a system of global agriculture that is unsustainable, environmentally destructive, and antithetical to the enjoyment of rights.

Methods

This socio-legal research is a normative study, adopting a critical approach to international law and global governance. It employs a variety of analyses across a variety of secondary resource methods including books, research journal articles and working papers. It also draws significantly upon international conventions and declarations from international bodies including the UN and EU, in addition to research papers and reports from those same bodies, from the Bretton Woods Institutions, and from respected NGOs whose field research is necessary to augment examples and bring a reality to the contentions and assertions of the work. As such, the thesis relies on a combination of textual and case study-based analyses to establish a normative basis from which to posit potential solutions.

Outcomes

Publications:

• Madden S, ‘The Role of Multilateral Institutions in the Perpetuation of Climate Breakdown and Vulnerability’ in Mariela de Amstalden, Niall Moran and Henok Asmelash (eds) European Yearbook of International Economic Law: New Issues and Approaches (Springer Nature 2023)

Presentations:

• Sean Madden. ‘The Unexplored Potential of Subaltern Praxis in Food Security and the Mitigation of Climate Breakdown: Unveiling the Dual Dichotomy in International Law’, Society of Legal Scholars (SLS) Annual Conference 2024