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Food as security: Russian concepts, strategies and applications of agricultural power

This paper examines Russian state conceptualizations, strategies, and applications of agri-food power, particularly as it relates to its foreign economic relations. Since 2010, official doctrine has linked the concept of “food security” with the idea of “food independence” or self-sufficiency. Cycles of Western sanctions and counter-sanctions have tightened Russian state’s import substitution imperatives, a defensive form of economic security. However, Russian state-makers have and are simultaneously attempting to use the agri-food weapon offensively: to capture greater shares of global export markets, to dispossess and appropriate foreign land and associated agricultural resources, and to damage or disrupt the supply chains flows of competitors and adversaries. While these latter cases are well-documented in relation to Russia’s war in Ukraine, this paper examines these developments not as incidental to the war, but part of more systematic policy considerations and strategies. Indeed, as related a specific understanding and enactment of state power, abroad as well as at home. These strategies span, as the paper discusses, much longer time perspectives as well as scales of political, economic, and natural geography; accordingly they have and will continue to shape both regional and global (in)securities and politics well beyond the war, and beyond the agricultural sector itself.