1. Food and international law

Studying international law for its own sake is neither relevant nor interesting. My interest in studying global hunger and food insecurity from the perspective of international law is based on the assumption that international law can somehow contribute to understanding the problems, and consequently contribute to devising ways to reduce hunger and realize food security. Many different areas of international law are involved in some way in the fight against global hunger and the quest to realize food security. But there are questions that are not generally posed by international lawyers. What kind of food is produced, how, how much, by whom, and where? What kind of food is consumed, how, how much, by whom, and where? How is food traded, at what prices, and to whose benefit? And most importantly, what political, economic, social, and cultural dynamics and processes are at play in constituting global food relations?Footnote ¹ These questions are indispensable to explaining global food relations, and framing problems and possible solutions to global hunger and food insecurity. The ambition in this article is to reimagine an international law approach to global food relations, inspired by these more unorthodox (at least in the legal profession) questions.

Given the enormous complexity of hunger and food insecurity, we cannot possibly comprehend, let alone solve, these problems solely via any specialized area of international law. To really attempt to address global problems such as hunger and food insecurity, we have to look beyond the narrow confines of our own (sub-)disciplines, while also appreciating and putting to use the value of legal theory and skill. There is nothing at all original about the suggestion that interdisciplinarity is immensely valuable, or that international law has an important role in global governance. Yet it remains rare to see real interdisciplinary engagement when talking about food and hunger, both among different fields of international law and between international law and other disciplines.

In this article, I argue that food regime theory – an analytical tool developed and used mostly in the field of sociology – can provide a useful means through which to explore the role of international law in constituting global food relations. Food regime analysis deals with precisely the kinds of questions posed above, seeking to provide a historical, theoretical, and practically oriented political economy perspective on global food relations. More specifically, food regime analysis situates global food systems within a broader context of global capitalism, in an attempt to expose the role of food and agriculture in the development and transformations of capitalism. While food regime analysis draws heavily on international law, and international law – through various specialized fields including trade law, environmental law, and human rights law – contributes to shaping global food relations, there is little engagement between the different disciplines. Cross-disciplinary dialogue relating to global food governance might lead to a better grasp of the causes of hunger and the various solutions that international law may have to offer. These solutions go far beyond a neoliberal approach to hunger and food security, which prevails despite fierce and credible criticisms.

2. Neoliberal orientations in international law approaches to food security

In a recent piece by Anne Orford on food security and international law, the author poses the question: ‘what exactly might it mean to think about the role of international law in constituting a global food economy, and how would one go about studying a phenomenon like food insecurity across time and on a global scale?’Footnote ² Orford's question is timely, but also surprisingly absent from mainstream international legal education. You are unlikely to come across a course on ‘international food law’ in curricula of international law departments.Footnote ³ This is even more surprising as debates over food are by no means foreign to international law and policy. Since the first World Food Conference of 1974,Footnote ⁴ famine and hunger have come to be articulated in terms of food security, understood as a global problem, and international organizations and institutions have since been concerned with questions of food security.Footnote ⁵ International law has also become heavily implicated in questions of food security. Indeed, most areas of international law in some way deal with food and how to contribute to achieving food security.

Food and agriculture have become important subjects in the World Trade Organization (WTO), as evidenced for instance in discussions about agricultural subsidies and tariffs on agricultural products. Plant genetic resources for food and agriculture have, in recent decades, come to be considered subjects of intellectual property protection, through plant variety rights and patent rights. Heated debates are ongoing about whether the application of intellectual property rights on food helps or hinders the realization of food security. Environmental lawyers underscore the importance of biodiversity conservation for realizing food security. There are lawyers who deal with questions of food safety and how risk assessments on food – including genetically engineered food – should be done. Food safety regulations impact the kind of food available on the market, as well as its quality, and therefore have an impact on food security. There is also increasing recognition that climate change exacerbates existing food crises, and international law is involved in devising adaptation strategies in the agricultural sector with the objective of realizing food security. Human rights lawyers actively engage with food security, most notably through the instrumentalization and invocation of the right to food.

These different areas of international law not only regulate with the aim of supporting the realization of food security, but also contribute to the constitution of the contemporary food regime. Despite the variety of expertise and approaches in the many different areas of international law involved, the overall tendency within international law with regard to food is heavily oriented toward neoliberal tenets. This neoliberal orientation narrows the possibilities of creatively reimagining different, and especially more just ways of governing our global food systems. Neoliberal orientations in international law approaches to food security are particularly evident when looking at international trade law, including trade-related aspects of intellectual property, and international law on climate change. There are many more areas of international law that could possibly be discussed,Footnote ⁶ however, the scope of this article limits the analysis in this section to these three.

An important question today is whether WTO law promotes or impedes the realization of food security.Footnote ⁷ International trade law under the WTO system regulates agricultural subsidies and tariffs applied to agricultural products, which influences food availability, access, and prices. The Agreement on Agriculture (AoA), a treaty under the WTO, purports to discipline trade-distorting measures specifically in the field of agriculture.Footnote ⁸ The AoA stipulates regulations to limit domestic support notably in the form of agricultural subsidies, promotes market access through limitations on tariffs, and requires developed countries to reduce export subsidies on agricultural products. The AoA explicitly recognizes the need to balance food security measures with free trade.Footnote ⁹ In some cases, it also allows agricultural subsidies needed to realize food security, provided that such measures meet the ‘fundamental requirement that they have no, or at most minimal, trade-distorting effects or effects on production’.Footnote ¹⁰ This last sentence in particular makes it strikingly clear that the AoA, and the WTO system as a whole, has as its main objective to stimulate free trade. In the WTO system, the balance between food security and free trade is weighted in favour of maintaining the existing trade regime, without any concrete reforms that might allow for alternative stakeholders or non-market based needs.

In addition to the market-based approach authorized by WTO law, another central feature of neoliberalism in the global food regime is privatization and commodification of food. The Agreement on Trade-Related Aspects of Intellectual Property (TRIPS), an annex to the agreement establishing the WTO, has been instrumental in privatizing and commodifying food.Footnote ¹¹ Article 27.3(b) of the TRIPS Agreement stipulates an obligation on all member states to grant patent rights or a sui generis form of intellectual property protection to plant varieties.Footnote ¹² This means that, effectively, all states members to the WTO must apply some form of intellectual property rights to plant varieties. There remains a great deal of controversy over whether plants and other living things should be subject to intellectual property protection at all.Footnote ¹³ Despite the controversy, the adoption of TRIPS has, in the words of Laurence Helfer, ‘done more to encourage the legal protection of plant varieties than any other international instrument’.Footnote ¹⁴ This is, in large part, due to the fact that the TRIPS Agreement is part of the WTO system, and therefore benefits from near-universal membership and strong enforcement mechanisms. Legal protection, however, does not necessarily mean democratic preservation of plant varieties with the goal to realize food security, but in practice usually means private ownership and the right to exclude others. Most of the world's genetic resources are located in the developing world. However, these countries often do not have the technology to exploit their resources and successfully apply for intellectual property protection on new plants and plant varieties. The TRIPS Agreement in this sense benefits mostly the technology-rich developed countries, and disadvantages the technology-poor developing countries.Footnote ¹⁵ As with WTO law relating to food and agriculture more broadly, the TRIPS Agreement is not fundamentally about realizing food security; it is, as the Preamble plainly stipulates, about ‘reduc[ing] distortions and impediments to international trade’.Footnote ¹⁶

The projected impacts of climate change on agriculture and food security are increasingly appreciated by international law, but again developments weigh in favour of neoliberal measures. The preamble to the Paris Agreement on Climate Change recognizes ‘the fundamental priority of safeguarding food security and ending hunger, and the particular vulnerabilities of food production systems to the adverse impacts of climate change’.Footnote ¹⁷ While ending hunger is a general objective, the language explicitly emphasizes the link between climate change and food production systems. Mitigation and adaptation strategies will thus be informed, and resources directed, accordingly. The latest assessment report by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) – which collects the scientific information on which the international law on climate change is largely based – contains a chapter on food security and food production systems in the volume about adaptation.Footnote ¹⁸ The authors of this chapter explicitly acknowledge that the relationship between climate change and food security is complex, but underscore that research is oriented to food productionFootnote ¹⁹ and themselves also focus primarily on information about declines in crop yields.Footnote ²⁰ If the principal problem presented is a decline in crop yields and availability of food, then increasing production is the main solution. Emphasis on the need to increase production is a feature of neoliberalism in the global food regime.

International law on climate change also takes up another neoliberal preoccupation, highlighting the central role of technological solutions (to achieve higher food production). The texts of the UN Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC) and the Paris Agreement refer to technologies frequently,Footnote ²¹ and direct references are made to agricultural technologies to increase food production in additional reports by the IPCCFootnote ²² and the UNFCCC.Footnote ²³ Technologies, and specifically agricultural technologies, are also explicitly mentioned in international adaptation initiatives. Many reports submitted as National Adaptation Programmes of Actions (NAPAs)Footnote ²⁴ by developing countries contain references to technologies to scale up food production, adopting language such as ‘use of appropriate technologies to achieve higher farm productivity, food security and farm income’,Footnote ²⁵ ‘improving crop production through the use of appropriate technologies’,Footnote ²⁶ and ‘use of technologies for fertility improvement’.Footnote ²⁷ More recently, the majority of the (Intended) Nationally Determined Contributions ((I)NDCs) submitted by countries under the Paris Agreement contain references to technologies,Footnote ²⁸ including also express references to agricultural technologies.Footnote ²⁹ Of course, technology matters in the toolbox of potential reform to deal with the impacts of climate change and realize food security. However, it is striking that there is so little attention paid to other causes of food insecurity and hunger, including – importantly – embedded inequality, for which technology in itself does not provide a solution.

In addition to concentrating on production and technology at the expense of more fundamental political questions about who gets to eat and why, legal and institutional developments in the field of climate change are geared toward private sector engagement. In this model, hunger may be a public problem but it requires private solutions. This trend is usually expressed in terms of ‘partnership’. Article 6.8(b) of the Paris Agreement, for instance, requires states parties to ‘[e]nhance public and private sector participation in the implementation of nationally determined contributions’. Or more overtly, the Nairobi Work Programme (NWP) launched the Private Sector Initiative in 2011/2012, which ‘[a]ims to catalyze the involvement of the private sector in the wider adaptation community’.Footnote ³⁰ While states parties are still the sole duty-bearers under the legal regime of the Paris Agreement, efforts are made to involve and engage the private sector in mitigation and adaptation efforts, including adaptation in the area of food and agriculture.Footnote ³¹ The nature of this engagement is not merely to help fund or participate in the implementation of climate strategies, but to take the lead in directing policies.

Looking at international trade law through the WTO system, intellectual property rights in agriculture as made possible by the TRIPS Agreement, and emerging international law on climate change, it can be said that international law contributes to constituting a global food economy characterized by neoliberalism. This constructs a specific understanding of hunger and food insecurity as primarily problems of production, and presents technological innovations, private sector engagement, and economic market-based mechanisms as primary solutions. Such a neoliberal approach has evidently done little to alleviate global food insecurity, and arguably only increased the gap between those who are hungry and those are not. Fierce resistance against the neoliberal tenets of the food regime is growing, with calls for real solutions to hunger notably via food sovereignty movements. The struggle between the prevailing neoliberal approach to food governance and intensifying opposition against it are central in contemporary debates within food regime theory.

3. Food regime theory as a guide to move beyond neoliberalism

The prevalence of neoliberalism as the dominant logic of international law approaches to food security reflects the broader dominance of neoliberalism in the contemporary food regime. Despite – or perhaps more accurately, in spite of – the dominance of neoliberalism, intellectual and socio-political efforts are growing to open the field to a wider range of approaches and policy options with regard to food. These efforts are particularly visible within current debates in food regime theory, and international law is also implicated in the pushback against the neoliberal food regime. Pioneered by Harriet Friedman and Philip McMichael in the 1980s,Footnote ³² food regime theory attempts to explain global food relations in the context of global development with a particular emphasis on ‘the strategic role of agriculture and food in the construction of the world capitalist economy’.Footnote ³³ There has been a recent spike in interest in food regime theory, prompted by the global food crisis of 2007–2008 and the growing concerns over the impacts of climate change on global food security.Footnote ³⁴ Issues of food insecurity and hunger are central to food regime analysis. Exploring the role of food and agriculture in world capitalism is important precisely to assert who is hungry, why they are hungry, and consequently to answer the question of ‘how to feed the world?’ These questions are confronted at the level of history, practice, and theory.

In terms of history, food regime analysis tends to group global food regimes retrospectively around periods of relative stability. A shift between regimes is marked by a period of instability and power struggles, eventually leading to a new prevailing and stable regime. There appear at least two periods of stability in recent history – what Friedmann and McMichael have popularly labeled the first and second food regime. The first food regime ranged from the late nineteenth century until the early twentieth century, and set against the backdrop of European colonialism and the rise of global wheat markets. The collapse of the global wheat market and the Great Depression of the 1930s marked the collapse of the first regime. The second food regime materialized in the late 1940s and lasted until the 1970s, understood primarily in relation to contemporary industrialization and US hegemony.Footnote ³⁵ The second food regime encountered a number of challenges, including the persistence – and the growing visibility – of a global food crisis characterized by volatile prices and increasing critiques of environmental deterioration connected to agricultural practices and industrialization.Footnote ³⁶ Much of the debate in the area of food regime theory now centre on the question of whether or not a third food regime has consolidated out of this instability, and what this new mode of global food governance does (or should) look like.Footnote ³⁷

In terms of practice, contemporary global governance of food is dominated by neoliberal tendencies, leading some authors to refer to a possibly emerging third food regime and the ‘neoliberal’ food regime.Footnote ³⁸ As already intimated, neoliberalism is generally defined as a ‘theory of political economic practices that proposes that human well-being can best be advanced by liberating individual entrepreneurial freedoms and skills within an institutional framework characterized by strong private property rights, free markets, and free trade’.Footnote ³⁹ Key features of the third food regime include a strong emphasis on free trade in food and agriculture, the rising application of intellectual property rights on agricultural products and processes, and a leading role for the private sector in food and agriculture. These features are exemplified in the incorporation of important provisions on agriculture in the WTO, the growing number of patent rights in the field of agriculture, and the dominance of (a handful of) agricultural biotechnology corporations. This dominant trend in global food relations asserts that free trade and related ‘neoliberal’ features will contribute to realizing global food security and most effectively combat global hunger. As demonstrated in the previous section, international law enables and reinforces the neoliberal tenets of the current food regime.

The crisis or instability of the third food regime is fuelled by fierce opposition against these dominant neoliberal trends in current global food relations. Resistance against the neoliberal tenets of the third food regime is principally articulated through the concept of ‘food sovereignty’ and propelled by social movements.Footnote ⁴⁰ Resistance in the form of food sovereignty stems to a large extent from the adverse effects that global trade in foodstuffs managed by transnational agribusiness has on small-scale farmers. Although the term food sovereignty has been used in different contexts by different actors,Footnote ⁴¹ it has become popularized in contemporary discourse since the peasant movement La Via Campesina introduced the following definition of food sovereignty at the World Food Summit of 1996: ‘the right of peoples to healthy and culturally appropriate food produced through sustainable methods and their right to define their own food and agriculture systems’.Footnote ⁴² Key characteristics of food sovereignty include a focus on local production and consumption as opposed to mass corporate production of food, sustainable and small-scale agriculture with respect to different contexts and cultures, preference for agroecology rather than high end technologies to increase production, promotion and preservation of biodiversity, respect and recognition of the contributions of small farmers rather than corporate interests. These characteristics reveal opposition to the idea that food security can be realized in a neoliberal capitalist global economy, and instead argue for a food sovereignty approach to achieving food security and combating hunger.

The struggle between dominant neoliberal characteristics and resistance in the form of food sovereignty movements within the third food regime play out in many arenas on different issues, including but not limited to: the rise of supermarket food, biotechnology, financialization of food through speculation on food commodities, industrial agriculture and mass food production, organic agriculture as a form of resistance, rising obesity, farmers’ movements, and the dominance of transnational agricultural corporations. Tensions and contradictions between these two currents have become particularly evident in the context of increasing awareness of the impacts of climate change on food and agriculture, and growing awareness of the contribution of industrial agriculture on causing climate change in the first place. The question ‘how to feed the world?’ has arguably become more urgent, and has certainly become more prominent, in the face of climate change. In this perspective, hunger is framed as a global emergency that demands a reorientation of political priorities and international law reforms, both intellectual and institutional.

While the dominant tendency in international law reinforces neoliberal tenets of the food regime, international law is also implicated in resistance against the neoliberal regime. This is especially evident through the invocation of human rights. In explaining food sovereignty, for example, Raj Patel invokes Hannah Arendt's notion of ‘the right to have rights’, contending that ‘Via Campesina's call for food sovereignty is precisely about invoking a right to have rights over food’.Footnote ⁴³ Whereas the neoliberal regime seeks to achieve food security via free trade market mechanisms, the food sovereignty regime seeks to achieve food security via human rights. The right to food – stipulated in Article 25(1) of the Universal Declaration of Human RightsFootnote ⁴⁴ and Article 11 of the International Covenant on Economic, Social and Cultural RightsFootnote ⁴⁵ – is especially relevant in driving food sovereignty movements. Other forms of ‘rights’ are also invoked in opposition to the neoliberal tenets of the current food regime.

Food sovereignty movements generally reject strong corporate intellectual property rights on plants and plant genetic resources – colloquially known within debates as the ‘Seed Wars’.Footnote ⁴⁶ Disagreements about the application of intellectual property rights to plant genetic resources have especially intensified in the age of the TRIPS Agreement. Opposition against strong intellectual property rights that benefit mostly corporations is articulated through the concept of farmers’ rights, which emerged as a ‘strategy of resistance against the perceived inequities of intellectual property rights regimes for plant varieties’.Footnote ⁴⁷ The idea behind farmers’ rights is to recognize and protect ‘the contributions of nameless and countless cultivators whose patient labours have improved indigenous varieties over centuries and even millennia’.Footnote ⁴⁸ Farmers’ rights are being included in legislative reform efforts, perhaps most importantly in the Treaty on Plant Genetic Resources for Food and Agriculture (Plant Treaty), which came into force in 2004.Footnote ⁴⁹ The Plant Treaty came out of an initiative by a group of developing countries in the Food and Agriculture Organization in the 1980s. The objective of the treaty is to promote the conservation, access, and benefit-sharing of plant genetic resources. Although farmers’ rights is often not formally considered a form of intellectual property rights, the concept can certainly be viewed as an international legal means of opposing corporate seed patents.

There are also features of a food sovereignty approach in international law related specifically to climate change. Over the past decade, Human rights actors have successfully developed the narrative that climate change impacts on human rights, and that human rights can inform strategies to deal with the impacts of climate change.Footnote ⁵⁰ The ultimate proof of the success to connect human rights to climate is the inclusion of a reference to human rights in the preamble of the Paris Agreement.Footnote ⁵¹ The right to food is invoked specifically in the context of the impacts of climate change on agriculture and food security.Footnote ⁵² Climate change is presented as a threat and potential violation of the right to food.Footnote ⁵³ At the same time, right to food approaches are promoted as ways to inform and direct adaptation strategies to climate change.Footnote ⁵⁴ Emphasizing the right to food encourages an understanding of food insecurity and hunger that is related not only or not primarily to availability, but also to access, both physically and economically, and distribution of food. This emphasis on human rights also serves to highlight the problematic relationship between industrial food production and climate change.

In terms of theoretical debate, food regime theory originates its critiques and normative policies from a combination of world systems theory and regulation theory.Footnote ⁵⁵ World-systems theoryFootnote ⁵⁶ attempts to analyze the capitalist economy through a multi-disciplinary approach, particularly breaking down the barriers between social sciences and history. A world systems analysis allows the politics and economy of food to be studied in the context of specific historical conditions and circumstances.Footnote ⁵⁷ Regulation theoryFootnote ⁵⁸ studies the tendencies or laws that support modes of capital accumulation, and how they are influenced by historical and social conditions. Insights from regulation theory led food regime theorists to focus also on the modes of regulation that supported food relations at specific points in history.Footnote ⁵⁹ In keeping with these traditions, food regime theory encourages interdisciplinary approaches to global food relations, and invites exploration concerning the role of (international) law as a means of regulating the political economy of food. The foregoing discussions revealed that international law is involved in constructing global food relations, both the dominant neoliberal tenets and the reactionary food sovereignty movements.

Food regime theory is, in many ways, not really about food at all; it is, rather, about complex power struggles with food as a vector. International law in relation to food, then, serves to manipulate those power struggles, advancing often contradictory visions of governing global food relations. International food law is moreover not a distinct field of law, but a ‘regime complex for food security’,Footnote ⁶⁰ ‘a set of loosely coupled regimes’ rather than one ‘integrated, comprehensive regime’.Footnote ⁶¹ Different legal regimes such as the ones described above all deal with food security, but there is no one comprehensive international law system for realizing food security. Of course, in theory an important feature of a regime complex is that there is no hierarchy between the different regimes. WTO law seeking to contribute towards realizing food security by promoting free trade and market access is on a par with human rights law seeking to contribute towards realizing food security by promoting the right to food.Footnote ⁶² Concurrent regimes that address food security, however, do in practice have different goals and objectives. While some argue that patent rights on food crops and seeds incentivize necessary agricultural innovation, others contend that seed patents only raises prices and obstruct access to food, dispossessing small-scale farmers from the right to save and share seeds. A regime complex can predictably lead to forum shopping and uncertainty. However, recognizing the existence of a regime complex, and thus breaking down traditional notions of international law and food law, can also positively contribute to increased co-operation among the different actors, opening the way for more diverse approaches to food governance.Footnote ⁶³ This can be seen, for example, with more dialogues between WTO lawyers and human rights lawyers, intellectual property lawyers and environmental lawyers, climate change lawyers and human rights lawyers, on issues relating to food security.

Theoretical debates are perhaps most contentious in terms of defining what causes food insecurity. After all, answering the question ‘how to feed the world?’ depends on what you think causes food insecurity in the first place.Footnote ⁶⁴ While there are countless potential and interrelated causes for food insecurity, the crux of the battle seems to operate as a dichotomy between viewing the causes of global food insecurity as, on the one hand, a problem of availability, and on the one hand, a problem of access. The dominant neoliberal oriented assumption insists that food insecurity is primarily a problem of food availability and therefore prioritizes solutions that focus on increasing food production. Science and technology – including fertilizers, pesticides, and genetic engineering – are promoted as necessary means to achieving higher crop yields. This dominant perspective is often portrayed as a ‘Malthusian’ idea underscoring the mantra: too many people, too little resources.Footnote ⁶⁵ Opposing the premise that food insecurity is caused by a lack of availability is the idea that lack of access to food is the real cause of food insecurity. Distribution, not capacity; political will, not ability. Popularized by Amartya Sen's work on entitlement and command, the message here is that people are not hungry because there is not enough food available, but because they do not have the means to access that food.Footnote ⁶⁶ These different perceptions of what causes food insecurity – lack of production versus lack of distribution; lack of capacity versus lack of will – inevitably lead to different international legal conceptions of problems and solutions.

Viewing how international law deals with food security as a regime complex can in this light be an important start to a continued dialogue about what the problem is and how we can best deal with it. At the end of his piece on the regime complex for food security, Matias Margulis writes: ‘A failure to recognize the interlocking relationship among the elemental regimes of agriculture and food, international trade, and human rights is likely to impede international cooperation to reduce world hunger.’Footnote ⁶⁷ But equally, impediments to reducing world hunger are the lack of engagement with the broader political economy of food beyond a strictly legal disciplinary lens. What processes and dynamics lead to the prevailing idea that food insecurity is primarily a problem of availability and production? And conversely, what processes and dynamics lead to a different, and more accurate, perception of food insecurity as a problem of access and entitlement? How is international law – or the regime complex of international law – implicated and influenced by these dynamics and processes? What role does international law play in shaping and being shaped by global food relations?

If we as international lawyers are serious about helping realize global food security and reducing world hunger, these questions must at the very least be asked. There must be a continued awareness of the complicity of international law, in this example in promoting neoliberal approaches to feeding the world, and a quest to move our intellectual horizon beyond the comfort of formal legal argument. Food regime analysis can provide a means through which to pose questions, to situate contemporary debates about food security within the broader context of neoliberal capitalism, and to effectively challenge this dominant regime.

4. The value of interdisciplinarity

The initial premise of this article is that studying international law – whether trade law, human rights law, intellectual property law, environmental law, or international law as a whole – for the sake of studying international law is neither relevant nor interesting. To speak of food regulation is ultimately not simply an intellectual or professional exercise about law, but about life, about thinking through the dynamics of our world, and seeking how it might be more justly governed. In studying international law in relation to food insecurity and hunger, my assumption is that there is a real interest in finding a solution to these problems. Considering the obvious complexity of food insecurity, including the added challenges posed by climate change, a second premise in this article is that these problems cannot be truly understood or addressed from an inherently limited disciplinary perspective. Of course, many people study hunger and food insecurity from many different orientations, and it is unrealistic to expect experts to consider the issues from all perspectives simultaneously. My intention in this article is to suggest that food regime theory can provide a useful mode of analysis to improve our understanding of the role of international law in constituting global food relations, and consequently to enable us to provide more just and effective solutions to global hunger and food insecurity. International law has an important role to play in reinforcing the dominance of the neoliberal food regime by emphasizing the prevailing production paradigm, thereby denying effective policy space to tackle the entrenched inequality that is the true cause of hunger.

My inspiration for this article came from my own introduction to food regime theory as an international lawyer. It struck me how much international law in implicated in constituting global food relations, and I was surprised at the lack of communication between food regime theorists and international lawyers dealing with the question of food security. As is often the case, people stay within their own disciplines. When I tell fellow international lawyers that I study food and international law, I often get suspicious looks. What does international law have to do with food?, they ask; and there is no such thing as international food law, they say. I do not argue for the creation of a single comprehensive field of international food law – after all, such a distinct field would ultimately be a fiction that conceals the enormous complexity of global food governance. What I do argue for is more concerted engagement with other disciplines in seeking to more effectively deal with global problems such as food insecurity and hunger. How might the work one does as an international trade lawyer, an international environmental lawyer, or an international human rights lawyer influence perceptions of global hunger and food insecurity? An international law approach to food regime theory is only one suggestion of interdisciplinary engagement that can contribute to thinking about these and other questions, and offering more just solutions.

International trade lawyers do not need to become international human rights lawyers, and international lawyers do not need to become food regime theorists. Interdisciplinarity does not mean discarding one's own training, nor does it mean necessarily adopting multiple disciplines concurrently. Interdisciplinarity means being able to situate your discipline or disciplines within a bigger picture. Regarding international law in relation to food security as a regime complex is one way of seeing the bigger picture. Food regime theory can provide an even wider view, situating the regime complex of international law within global food relations, within the political economy of food, and more broadly still, within varieties of capitalism. If we really want to address global issues like hunger and food insecurity in a meaningful way, and do so from a perspective of international law, then we must be curious about what other disciplines have to offer on the same topic. I have no illusions that we will be able to eliminate global hunger and realize food security simply by situating international law within food regime analysis or having a richer literacy in political economy. I am, however, confident that we will be able to understand the complexity of hunger and food insecurity just a little bit better, and from there to push for real solutions to global hunger. And that is already a feat worth striving for.