AP/SOSC 3541 3.00
Land, Food and Development
This course offers an introduction to a deeper understanding of how issues around land, food and agriculture are intricately related to international development studies. Conceptually, the course exposes students to academic literature that covers the historical foundations of land and food as crucial components of development planning, critically assessing the contentious and political role of land and agrarian reform struggles that affected how the international development community shaped various rural development programs, which often pertained to food, though not always exclusively so. Empirically, the course draws on regionally specific examples from the Asia Pacific and Africa to demonstrate that these historical foundations of land and food are relevant for dealing with the contemporary challenges of development in these regions. In addition, the course will also provide students with opportunity and analytical skills to evaluate more recent and emerging trends that are likely to challenge and/or provoke debate within international development community. Such trends include the impact of financialization, GMO technology, the rise of ‘green markets’, climate change and ‘land grabbing’ as pervasive and unevenly distributed development phenomena. The current scholarly and practitioner debates over these trends in the global agro—food system indicate that they have serious implications for future direction and possibilities of achieving food sovereignty and food security as development goals in the Global South.