The Importance Of Food Justice

Humans are biologically programmed to do whatever it takes to survive, and from the beginning of time this goal of survival has been predominantly based on food security. Possessing access to a sustainable and reliable food source is so important is has been has been the driver of much of human evolution and migration over the centuries. Alkon and Agyman argue in their paper Cultivating Food Justice: Race, Class, and Sustainability that humans are inherently driven to obtain food security for their community. This can even include the extraction of food resources from another community to obtain a perceived balance or “justice” in food distribution. In the Second World War it is apparent that many of the actions taken were motivated by
the desire to obtain food security and this paper will argue that this war was substantially driven by food.
How does war arise over something as common as food? Communities or nations seek to provide its people with the right to grow, sell and eat food. Along with this, nations have a perceived idea of what their people deserve in terms of food due to class and race. When nations have varying perceptions of how food should be distributed, this is when conflict arises. In the context of the Second World War, it is apparent that Germany and Japan’s perceptions of how food resources should be allocated was both riddled with racially based motives and vastly different from the views of the rest of the world. Both these countries felt disadvantaged in a global economy that was largely dominated by the United States and Britain. To combat this, each country sought to devise a plan to sever dependency from these global powerhouses and obtain economic self-sufficiency.
When a nations seeks to become self-sufficient, it is key to have the ability to sustainably feed its population without the use of imports. This self-sufficiency posed a problem for a Germany that felt constrained in its borders. This led to the re-emergence of Lebensraum as a means of eradicating this problem. Lebensraum was the conquest of living space for the German Volk, living space that could eventually be used for agriculture and food production. In this way, the Germans were seeking to obtain the food security they though they deserved and had previously been denied. As mentioned by Collingham, Hitler’s aim in going to war was to create a “truly self-sufficient and immune to blockade” Germany. This type of economic autonomy requires the acquisition and development of land for the means of producing food. If believed that the war was started by Germany, which is a widely accepted stance, then it is appropriate to attribute the start of one of the world’s largest conflicts to the issue of food security.
Control over food commerce is an essential element in a nation’s ability to become an autarky, and is also the main driver for conflict in the Second World War.
For the German community, the right to control food commerce was linked very much with the racial policy in place. But this trend of racially based food commerce was echoed throughout the world at this time and not only in Germany. The roles within the economic cycle food production was very much segregated, in that certain roles were reserved for the racially inferior and other roles for the superior. This can be seen in the Bengal Famine which saw the starvation of the very people who worked to provide food for the British war effort. Those of the inferior race were seen as the food producers and rarely as the consumers. This trend is echoed once again with the displacement of Slavs from their farmland for the use of ethnic Germans. Along with the food production itself are efforts and strategies were very often centered on wartime food commerce. An example of this is the Battle of the Atlantic where the issue of greatest importance to the Allies was keeping a supply line open from the United States to Europe. Britain’s war effort was “entirely dependent” on the imports as more than half its calories were coming from overseas. This empathizes the great importance food had over both sides of the conflict as it had a whole theatre of whole dedicated to it and heightened the racial aspect the economic cycle of
food. Food was not only a large part of wartime economics and society; food was also used as a weapon, sometimes being even more dangerous than any tank or U-boat. The most well-known example of this is the targeted starvation of those imprisoned in concentration camps by the Nazi regime. An ongoing debate for the Germans throughout the war was whether or not feeding the mouths of their forced labor was worth it. On the one hand, it was argued the workers would have a greater output if feed therefore contribute a greater to the war cause, the other argument stemmed from ideology as it was seen as pitiful to being providing food to these “sub-humans” when Germans are having to ration. The Soviets practiced the scorched earth policy all along the Eastern Front, this technique left the Germans with limited local food sources as their supply lines were stretched thin. In the Pacific Theatre of war, the IJM conducted death marches in Bataan where just under 100,000 Filipino and American POWs were forced to survive on limited nutrition. War emerged in a time where the world was still recovering from the recent depression making the international economic conditions unique. This post-depression Allied countries had governments setting controls on their trade and industry in attempts to stimulate the economy. With the start of the war came the mobilization of millions of soldiers, all of whom needed to be fed. Civilian life during the war was changed dramatically from what it was in times of peace in terms of food production and consumption. The rationing, and sometimes complete elimination, of certain foods from the civilian diet was a reality for both the Axis and Allied powers. When war hits a nation, the food industry a must react and adapt to the new situation it is presented with. This led the mechanization of many farms in Britain that had never before seen new technology on its lands. Government controls needed to change their goals, instead of restricting farmers from growing too much they were now encouraged to utilize land to the highest caloric output possible. This meant that the war was largely dependent on the agricultural sectors of the various nations involved in the conflict. With nations possessing monopolies on certain markets, like US oil, blockades became a strong weapon during the war. Preventing a resource from reaching a certain country can be crippling to that nation. Even limiting exports can cause major stress on a nation in need, this can be seen in the US’s policy on only sending well below what was requested by the British. This is a good example of how food was a measure of control and power during the war, making it a valuable aspect to the conflict. The Second World War is often framed by its ideologies and its violence, so why is this war about food?
It is important to look at what truly drove these ideologies and actions to happen during this conflict. The Nazi ideology for example, was based on the idea of racial superiority of the German Volk, to achieve this superiority they needed to first achieve food autonomy to grow and strengthen the population. A way to gain an autonomous food market for Germany was to expand and secure agriculturally rich lands from those who were of ‘inferior’ stalk. Just as the Germans needed land to fuel their ideological motives, the Japanese also felt the need to expand its reach. The violence of the IJM throughout the Pacific was in pursuit of an empire, an empire that could sustain the needs of the growing Japanese population. This war saw the death of millions of people, with more than half due to food related causes. If wars are won by the number of people killed on the other side, food would have to be nominated as the most brutal
combatant.