Food security or commercial business? Gulf State investments in Australian agriculture

Worldwide investments in agricultural land have gained much attention in recent years, resulting in renewed awareness of land as being a scarce and finite resource. This paper investigates a case of South-to-North land deals, namely investments from the Arab Gulf targeting agricultural land in Australia. For the Arab Gulf States that highly depend on external food supplies, investment abroad is one strategy to guarantee future food security. At the same time, leading Australian political and economic representatives have been eager to attract investments from the Gulf. Increasing foreign investment in Australian land has, however, provoked a vivid public debate in Australia. Concepts of foreign direct investment and its role are currently renegotiated on the federal level with regard to Australia's own food security, the ‘national interest’ and the redefinition of ‘Australian agricultural land’. While these concerns also play out on the local level, investments have to be seen within the wider context of Australian ruralities. The paper reveals how food security and commercial and financial interests intersect and become blurred within current transformations of the global agri-food system.     

“Use words. Not your body”: The hunger that has no name

This essay examines the competing readings of food refusal that emerged from a student hunger strike held at Columbia University in fall 2007. The invisibility of the act of food refusal forces hunger strikers to adopt performance strategies that make their (non)action visible as protest. To make the politics of their food refusal legible, advocates for the hunger strike promoted their actions as part of a 40 year tradition of student protest. However, that same invisibility allowed the protest's detractors to deride the hunger strikers as anorexic. At the center of the protest and the commentary about it was a wasting female body that confused for spectators the line between the political and the pathological. Attention to this body raises questions of how community is created and disciplined through performative acts, how easily female protest is evacuated of political meaning and the uneasy role of whiteness in popular attention to anorexia.     

Gettin’ Down Home With the Neelys: gastro-porn and televisual performances of gender,race, and sexuality

This article illuminates how performances of gender, race, and sexuality are integrated with representations of food and food performance in contemporary American cooking television. Interrogating the intersections of food, gender, race, sexuality, and performance, this essay explores how the cable-television show, Down Home with the Neelys, depicts a nouveau gastro-porn anchored in the perceived pornographic level of blackness itself. The author reveals the ways that food and performances of food become a medium of gendering and racialization employed by American popular media. Through the lens of reality television, shows like Down Home (re)produce a certain type of black heterosexuality and gendered enactments of domesticity and space, while challenging dominant televisual reflections of black love and labor. The author argues that the Neelys self-consciously employ a vernacular aesthetic performative of “down home” (a uniquely classed, temporally–spatially situated, and sexualized blackness) to exploit the phenomenon of gastro-porn in a highly lucrative performance that signals the entangled artifice of gender, race, and sexuality. More than offering culinary expertise and education, such cooking instruction reveals the pedagogy of gender, race, and sexuality as visual lessons of a complex and contradictory authenticity. This essay reveals television cooking shows as critical sites for considering the domestic laboring of gendered and racialized sexualities. In particular, shows like Down Home evince the ways that race continues to be rendered in visual terms and the enduring edibility of blackness.     

春秋战国时期粮食安全思想的传承与当代战略选择

粮食是人类生存和发展的基本物质条件,是关系国家安全、政治稳定与社会和谐的重要战略性资源。粮食安全化与政治化是国际政治研究的热点问题之一。鉴于此,重新发现中国春秋战国时期已形成的粮食安全思想,从粮食对国家安全、国家权力以及国家道义层次考察彼时粮食安全思想,具有重要的现实意义。“不生粟之国亡”,粮食安全是国家安全的基础;“富国以粟”,粮食是国家富强的保证;粮食关乎人心向背和国家道义。齐桓公为建立霸业实施了粮食外交与粮食战略,开创了现代粮食战争的先河。“不生粟之国亡”是中国春秋战国时期粮食安全思想的核心和根本,也是对中国古代粮食安全思想再发现的落脚点。基于此,当代中国粮食安全战略应立足于坚持独立自主原则,保障国内粮食生产,积极开展粮食外交,实行粮食“走出去”战略,在全球化背景下确保实现国家粮食安全。这不仅是保障国家安全的重中之重,也是中华民族实现“中国梦”最重要的物质基石。     

评析中世纪晚期英国济贫法

英国从封建主义向资本主义过渡时期曾出现过历史上最严重的贫困问题,贫困和流浪普遍存在,社会不安定因素急剧增加,这引起统治者的关注,为了维持统治,稳定社会秩序,统治者颁布了一系列的法令法规,确立了济贫原则,通过法律的形式将早期的社会保障活动固定下来.英国是世界上最早建立济贫法的国家,其立法精神一直对世界各国和地区的社会救济立法产生了重要影响.     

民生保障研究:论适足生活水准权保障与实现

适足生活水准权的实现遵从辅助性原则、国家义务、平等与非歧视原则。食物权、住房权与健康权构成了适足生活水准权最主要的具体权利形态,其实现标准主要有:有效、真实与可接受。适足生活水准权的保障与实现不是孤立的,是与其他人权,如财产权、工作权等,特别是公民权利与政治权利,密切相关。公民权利和政治权利的保障是实现适足生活水准权救济的有效方式。适足生活水准权的实现为呼声日高的民生保障研究提供了新视角。     

网络服务提供者“知道”认定新诠——兼驳网络服务提供者“应知”论

我国目前立法规定和司法实践全面承认了"应知"可用于认定网络服务提供者主观知道,但学界在这一问题上却分歧很大。这一现象的产生源于对网络服务提供者提出的应知要求与其不负审查义务的共识相冲突。主张网络服务提供者应知既难以在理论上得以证成,也是对相关规定的误读。通过借助诉讼法中的推定规则,可有效证成网络服务提供者主观知道,从而实现了从起点客观事实不明到终点网络服务提供者承担侵权责任间逻辑脉络的贯通。依循这一逻辑路径,我国目前的相关立法、司法和未来学界的研究重点等都需作出相应的调整。     

我国食品安全法律制度研析

频发的食品安全事件使食品安全问题成为我国当今社会关注的焦点.《食品安全法》在这样的环境下应运而生,但却没能有效解决我国的食品安全问题.从我国食品安全法律规制的现状起笔,分析日前国内食品安全法律规制的不足,并从道德建设、行政处罚制度、民事赔偿制度、食品安全标准体系、平衡城乡执法力度等角度努力探寻解决问题的方法.     

风险社会背景下的公共安全与政府责任——以食品安全事件为视角

社会存在一定的风险。现代社会中的风险具有不确定性以及多样性、广泛性和人为性的特点。与风险相对应的是安全,尤其是备受关注的公共安全。其中,与民生有着密切联系的食品安全由于发生的频次高、危害范围广、原因复杂、后果严重,更是考察政府职能的一个参照。在如此的背景下,相关部门应当建立并完善风险预警机制、食品安全信息公布与通报机制、食品安全检验和检疫机制以及重大事故处置机制,以应对风险。     

Navigating Small-Scale Trade Across Thai-Lao Border Checkpoints: Legitimacy,Social Relations and Money

ABSTRACT

Marked in part by a narrow river, the border between the neighbouring provinces of Loei in Thailand and Sayaboury in the Lao PDR appears to be porous and unregulated. While a Friendship Bridge regulates large-scale international trade, an extensive amount of informal, small-scale trade continues to flow across smaller checkpoints and other parts of the river. Trade along these sites is not only highly organised, most of it also happens under the gaze of border officials. This article examines the material and power exchanges that occur at local checkpoints between the different actors involved in the facilitation and restriction of trade. Between Loei and Sayaboury, trade is regulated according to a spectrum of licitness that is constantly negotiated and renegotiated between traders and officials. Negotiations rely on the social relations between these actors and involve practices of gift-giving and bribery, which blur the boundaries between reciprocity and corruption. By focusing on the interactions between state and non-state actors, this article sheds light on the way the informal economy is configured by checkpoint politics.