Food and nutrition security discursive frames in the context of the Spanish economic crisis

The recent economic crisis in Spain has provoked a number of food and nutrition security (FNS) impacts that have fuelled a fragmented landscape of food-related debates, although these have not taken the form of a coherent and all-embracing public discussion on national food security. This paper is an inductive analysis of such debates, mostly based on media coverage, in an attempt to disentangle the different discourse frames on FNS in Spain, and the role played by the economic crisis in the shaping and underpinning of such frames. For this purpose a frame matrix was constructed, paying particular attention to the stakeholders’ governance claims in order to confront frame-specific problems. Results show how stakeholders have used elements of the crisis to underpin or reinterpret their core arguments. In addition, governance claims have concentrated on the malfunctioning of the food chain, mostly due to unequal bargaining power, and the way this could be putting at risk crucial components of the food system and future FNS. Also, the short-termism of most stakeholders’ approaches obscures the long run threats to the Spanish food system.