Challenges of Food Security: Free Trade, Distribution and Political (In)Stability in Mid 18th Century France

The paper focuses on the history of food security in mid 18th century France. It explores why and how in the 1750s French economic thinkers began to argue that free trade was the best way to achieve “food security” for everyone, and also thought about distribution, availability and quality of grain. These thinkers maintained that agriculture would provide subsistence for everyone and every region, if interventionist regulations did not get in the way of continuous circulation of grain to all parts of the kingdom. The dearths that occurred in the kingdom thus seemed to be artificially generated starvations caused by unequal “trade-based and exchange entitlements” (Sen in Poverty and famines: an essay on entitlement and deprivation. Oxford University Press, Oxford, Oxford Scholarship Online November 2003, 1983). For that reason these early liberal thinkers held that the government should, therefore, transfer the authority over trading practices to the individual traders and speculators, who alone could create a balanced market through competing interests.