Social nutrition has once again become topical with the threat of famine in Yemen, South Sudan and Syria and the work of the Global Rights Compliance and the World Peace Foundation on accountability for mass starvation.[1] A social nutrition approach could be one way of providing evidence on the causes of mass starvation. One problem, however, is that social nutrition no longer really exists as an approach in emergencies. In
The hypothesis that financial speculation was behind soaring food prices in 2007-08 and 2010-11, or at least substantially contributed to it, first surfaced in 2008 when ‘The Accidental Hunt Brothers’ Report by Masters and White (2008) drew a link between institutional investors’ positions in commodity futures markets and the significant and synchronised spike of commodity prices. Prices across commodities almost quadrupled between 2004 and 2008, including prices of key staples
On January 19, 2018 the SOAS Food, Nutrition and Health in Development Research Cluster organises a one-day workshop that brings together topics in contemporary food regime studies examined from a political economy perspective. Topics include inequality and food security, the state and food sovereignty, food regimes and the politics of conflict and financialisation of food and were discussed in four panels covering 11 papers. A full descriptions of the panels
The Summer School Food and Nutrition in Development 2017 has taken place over three weeks in August at SOAS. It has been jointly co convened by Deborah Johnston, Fiorella Picchioni and Lorena Lombardozzi, and involved various academics from the department of Economics and the Food Studies Centre. It has offered a unique programme built on the SOAS Economics Department research and teaching expertise in the political economy of food and nutrition. The