Food security: the building of a common public share?

Soaring of food prices in 2007/08 has put again food security high in the global agenda. Several elements of explanation have been put forward to explain this crisis, including traditional ones such as imbalance supply/demand and stocks, energy effect, dollar effect; and new factors such as biofuels, financial speculation and low interest rates, export bans. Various arguments linked to this food crisis have also questioned the global nature of food security issue : global insecurity (with the urban food riots), humanitarian (with the worsening situation of the bottom billion), cross-sectoral (with the relationships between agriculture and other related issues such as environment, health, trade rules and market impacts, etc.). Several initiatives have insisted on the need to address more seriously the problem at the global level. Indeed, lack of global coordination on food security has been recognized as a major problem. This lack of coordination could be understood both at the substantive level (i.e. between the different issue-areas which are part of the food security problem) and at the institutional level (i.e. between the different international organizations in charge of food security) leading to the fragmentation of global food security governance. This paper respectively analyses these two dimensions of fragmentation in order to assess the extent to which current global initiatives better address coordination needs for global food security.