Chronic Food Insecurity in Kenya's Asal Areas: Naturalizing Uneven Development Through Depeasantization and Deproletarianization

Abstract

Food security and insecurity is often conceptualized in narrow, economistic or technicist terms that simply postulate an inefficiency in production or exchange as the root cause of food security. More elaborate notions put issues such as “access” at the center of their theoretical frameworks. In this paper, we examine food insecurity as a state of being that exists when various modes of production disarticulate. This disarticulation is examined within the governance process to determine how policy affects or inhibits change in the mode of production in rural Kenya. This paper contributes to the literature on depeasantization by explicating the role of the state in social and economic transformation. It is argued here that “food security” has been a convenient excuse to first depeasantize and then deproletarianize large swaths of people.