Food Security and Agricultural Crises in a "Financialized Food Regime"

The paper explores the impact of finance's penetration into agriculture and the global food system. The authors analyze the causes of the recent global food crises, unveiling the key role played by financial speculation and explaining why this phenomenon is likely to affect food security more than the problems related to the supply and demand dynamics taking place in the "real economy". Financial markets, the authors argue, are engendering pricing mechanisms and dynamics of wealth distribution that have consequences on the agrarian structures, but also on everyday life of both producers and consumers. While creating new profit opportunities for speculators and the agribusiness, the penetration of finance into food systems increase uncertainty and imply new risks for local actors, to the point of compromising their capability to respond to exogenous shocks, such as the COVID-19 pandemic. In any case, to make sense of these phenomena they must be linked to the broader transformation of the global food system and to the long-term trajectories of capitalist development. This operation is here made with the support of the analytical tools provided by some approaches inspired by the world-system analysis, bringing to light the roots of what can be defined as a "financialized food regime" and discussing some of its important ecological and socio-economic contradictions.

COVID-19 infodemic on Facebook and containment measures in Italy, United Kingdom and New Zealand.

The COVID-19 pandemic has been characterized by a social media "infodemic": an overabundance of information whose authenticity may not always be guaranteed. With the potential to lead individuals to harmful decisions for the society, this infodemic represents a severe threat to information security, public health and democracy. In this paper, we assess the interplay between the infodemic and specific aspects of the pandemic, such as the number of cases, the strictness of containment measures, and the news media coverage. We perform a comparative study on three countries that employed different managements of the COVID-19 pandemic in 2020-namely Italy, the United Kingdom, and New Zealand. We first analyze the three countries from an epidemiological perspective to characterize the impact of the pandemic and the strictness of the restrictions adopted. Then, we collect a total of 6 million posts from Facebook to describe user news consumption behaviors with respect to the reliability of such posts. Finally, we quantify the relationship between the number of posts published in each of the three countries and the number of confirmed cases, the strictness of the restrictions adopted, and the online news media coverage about the pandemic. Our results show that posts referring to reliable sources are consistently predominant in the news circulation, and that users engage more with reliable posts rather than with posts referring to questionable sources. Furthermore, our modelling results suggest that factors related to the epidemiological and informational ecosystems can serve as proxies to assess the evolution of the infodemic.