G4S, the world’s largest private security company, represents the new ideology of security in a neoliberal world. The company’s rapid growth is driven by the privatisation of security, warfare, prisons and a range of public services.
This report reveals how DFID has been using hundreds of millions of pounds of taxpayers’ money with the express purpose of extending the power of agribusiness over the production of food, especially in sub-Saharan Africa.
With the recent furore over private security contractor G4S failing to supply the required number of security personnel for the Olympics, this issue of Up Front looks deeper into the murky underworld of private military and security companies.
The report contrasts the UK government’s preferred approach of ‘food security’, based on free markets supplemented by aid, with the positive alternative of food sovereignty, which returns control over the food system to farmers.