Voice and Participation in Global Food Politics

Alana Mann

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2019
• Print ISBN:
  9781138478343
• eBook ISBN:
  9781351068864
• Topic: Politics & International Relations
• Subtopic: Ecology
• Index: Politics & International Relations

As awareness of the commodification of food for profit at the expense of our health and the planet grows, this book foregrounds the communicative dimensions of resistance by food movements.

Voice and participation are argued by the author to be the means through which rural and urban communities can, and in many cases do, resist the capture of value by corporate actors and work to democratise their foodscapes. Her critical analysis of meaning-making under neo-liberalism suggests that agroecology, as a socially activating form of agriculture within a food sovereignty framework, provides an example of social learning relevant across rural/urban and North/South divides. Embracing indigenous knowledge, gender equity and postcolonial theory, this approach mobilises growers and eaters to contest the power structures that shape their food environments, and also to focus on social and economic justice within their communities, particularly in the context of climate change.

Participatory ecologies that incorporate these forms of social learning encourage the co-creation of inclusive foodscapes and politicise food justice. Such a positive framing of resistance through horizontal pedagogy, participation, communication and social learning processes contrasts with the vertical dissemination structure of the corporatised food regime and takes vital steps towards a more democratic food system. Voice and Participation in Global Food Politics will be of interest to scholars of agri-food, transdisciplinary food studies and political economy of food systems. It will also be of relevance to NGOs and policymakers.

1 Introduction

We all eat. We all have our own foodscape, which includes ‘the places and spaces where you acquire food, prepare food, talk about food, or generally gather some sort of meaning from food’ (Mackendrick, 2014, p. 16). My foodscape, in Sydney’s inner west, Australia, includes an organic cooperative, three supermarkets, a community garden, a weekly Saturday farmers’ market, an abundance of restaurants and cafes, four hotels, and many fast-food restaurants – all within walking distance. I am fortunate – not only for having so many culinary options available to me but also for the simple fact that I can afford to eat. I am one of the 91.5 per cent of people in my city who are food secure. That looks like an impressive figure until you consider the flip side. Seventeen thousand people in my immediate proximity cannot always put food on the table for themselves and their families (City of Sydney, 2016). In 2018, food relief organisation Foodbank reported that more than four million Australians – 18 per cent of the population – had experienced food insecurity in the previous 12 months (Foodbank, 2018). Indigenous, culturally and linguistically diverse (CALD) and socially isolated people experience food insecurity at higher rates (Rosier, 2011). If you are of Australian Indigenous or Torres Strait Islander descent, you are five to six times more likely to be food insecure than other Australians (National Rural Health Alliance, 2016). In one of the most unaffordable cities in the world, food budgets often take a hit as rents and mortgages escalate while wages stay stagnant. Cities all over the world tell a similar story. Pockets of poverty and disadvantage can be identified through the diets and health of populations.

The scale of this problem is intimidating. Or perhaps it is scale that is the problem. Anna Lowenhaupt Tsing (2015, p. 38) argues that the expectation of scaling demands ‘projects expand without changing their framing assumptions’, therefore requiring project elements to be ‘oblivious to the indeterminacies of encounter … to allow smooth expansion’ (ibid.). Scaling-up ‘banishes diversity’ when it is diversity that can generate change. Following Tsing, I suggest we turn our attention to the nonscalable, ‘not only as objects for description but also as incitements to theory’ (ibid.) in assessing the opportunities to improve our food environments. We purchase, prepare, share, and talk about food in our neighbourhoods. In a world where the near and the far are conflated by information technology and air travel, we still eat ‘at home’, in neighbourhoods where we are flung together by geography and economic interdependence. This is the scale that matters, that drives us to action, the basic unit of a polity which ‘consists of people who live together, who are stuck with one another’ (Young, 1996, p. 126). This is the first building block of wider food systems transformation as a collective project. We are in this together.

The illusion of choice

The negative elements of foodscapes are often blamed on consumers – we vote for unhealthy food with our forks. However, the rise of unhealthy foodscapes has more to do with ‘deep-seated prejudices and the industrial food system’s hunger for profit than the spatial distribution of food cravings’ (Mackendrick, 2014, p. 17). Our food system is fundamentally undemocratic. It is dictated by Big Food – the agribusinesses, multinational food and beverage companies, and life science corporations that control supply chains. These actors have created a toxic food system that is killing us either through deprivation or through lifestyle-related diseases like diabetes and obesity. Unless we start to reclaim power over our food, we will have no say in how we produce and consume it in the future, and our bodies and minds will continue to suffer.

Even in affluent communities, the choice of food offered is an illusion. Power in food systems is now strongly embedded in the retail sector. People have to eat, and purchasing patterns suggest people prefer supermarket produce, because this is what most people buy. That is no surprise, given the lack of alternative foodways on offer to the average eater. In Australia, where I write this book, we have the second most concentrated grocery market in the world after New Zealand, and a cost price-squeeze is having a catastrophic impact on farmer livelihoods, particularly in times of drought. Governments on all sides of politics lack the political will to challenge Big Food, despite farmers insisting that, at the end of the day, they are unlikely to cover their costs, let alone make a profit. As more and more farmers leave the land, Australia’s food security is increasingly under threat.

Eating healthy food produced in ways that do not damage the environment is essential to healing ourselves and the planet. This assumption is the foundation of this book. It is less about the problems of our food system which are detailed in growing abundance of academic and popular literature and more about talking, listening, practising and learning food together for potential social transformation. In this context, learning is both a process, and an outcome that promotes the emergence of assemblages of people, places and knowledges. It involves ‘particular constituencies and discursive constructions, entails a range of inclusions and exclusions of people and epistemologies, and produces a means of going on through a set of guidelines, tactics or opportunities’ (McFarlane, 2011a, p. 361). I argue that learning is essential to re-establishing connections with what we eat, and with the people who produce it, and is thereby central to the project of reclaiming control of our local food environments.

From this position, food becomes a mediator in learning processes. But if social learning is to bring about social change, we need democratic spaces and action centres for local and trans-local learning to engender transformative change across the entire food system.

A radical shift in consumers’ mindset is also needed. We have all been ‘deskilled and disempowered’ (Booth & Coveney, 2015, p. 23) throughout the entire food chain – and the latter – disempowerment – is especially true of people experiencing disadvantage and malnutrition. We need to start re-understanding ourselves not merely as consumers but also as eaters or food citizens. And we need to include the voices of those marginalised, the ‘all affected’ (Fraser, 2007), if we are to realise new forms of food democracy (Lang, 2003) and take back control of our food.

Voice

Voice can be defined as, following Judith Butler (2005), a process of ‘giving an account of oneself’ in the form of a narrative. It is crucial in foodscapes, yet frequently absent. I share the concern of communication theorist Nick Couldry (2010, p. 1) that we are experiencing ‘a contemporary crisis of voice’ across not only political and economic but social and cultural domains. Couldry attributes this to the discourse of neo-liberalism which ‘operates with a view of economic life that does not value voice and imposes that view of economic life onto politics, via a reductive view of politics as the implementing of market function’ (ibid., p. 2). In doing so it ‘evacuates entirely’ the role of the social in political regulation of economics.

To deny the capacity to possess and share one’s narrative is to ‘deny her potential for voice … a basic dimension of human life’ (ibid., p. 7). Socially grounded, voice requires resources in the form of language and status. It is a form of reflexive agency through which we ‘disclose ourselves as subjects’ (Arendt, 1958, p. 193) and make sense of our lives (Cavarero, 2000). As an embodied process of articulation, voice involves speaking and listening. It is therefore an ‘act of attention that registers the uniqueness of the other’s narrative’ (Couldry, 2010, p. 9) which respects also the internal diversity or plurality in each voice. We all have many stories, embedded in multiple contexts.

Importantly, Couldry emphasises that voice is not about individualism, nor does it dismiss the value of collective forms of action. He emphasises that ‘defending voice as a value simply means defending the potential of voices anywhere to matter’ (ibid., p. 9).

‘Voice’ does more than value particular voices or acts of speaking; it values all human beings’ ability to give an account of themselves; it values my and your status as ‘narratable’ selves.

(Couldry, 2010, p. 13)

Accordingly, articulating one’s voice is a form of resistance against an economic system which strives to silence voices, especially those that lack ‘opportunity to compete as a commodity’ (ibid.).

Given the domination of market logic over social life, where the economy comes ‘pre-rationalised’ or part of ‘the given’, Wendy Brown calls for a ‘counter-rationality – a different figuration of human beings, citizenship, economic life, and the political’ (Brown, 2003, para 42). Amartya Sen (2002, p. 10) insists we reclaim ethics in economic discourse through recognising human potential – i.e. ‘the actual ability of [a] person to achieve those things she has reason to value’ – while Nancy Fraser (2005, p. 75) argues for a reassessment of ‘who is included in, and who is excluded from, the circle of those entitled to a just distribution and reciprocal recognition’. Étienne Balibar (2004, p. 114) demands a ‘new civility’ in the form of:

… a politics of politics [aimed] at creating, recreating, and conserving the set of conditions within which politics as a collective participation in public affairs is possible, or at least not made absolutely impossible.

In Radical Hope (2006) Jonathan Lear makes the point that whatever transformations our social, economic, political, and cultural institutions and structures undergo, they will lack value unless they are based on individuals’ lived experience. Radical hope is grounded in valuing this experience, which can be translated into forms of ‘counter-expertise’ (Gilbert, 2008) that can lead to policies and politics for ordinary people.

Radical hope is evident throughout our foodscapes in the form of a mobilising civil society where pockets of inspiration and innovation are sites for doing food differently. Though some of these actors might not recognise themselves as part of it, there is a lot of discussion about whether a wider ‘food movement’ exists and, if so, how disparate groups unify to reclaim a food system that has effectively been corporatised. This emergent ‘movement of movements’ is comprised of energetic but often exhausted activists, advocates, practitioners and academics; it is fragmented more by time and capacity than ideology. Which raises some important questions: how do we converge in diversity to do the movement building necessary to bring about transformative change? Where is the common ground or common language needed to collectively combat the agents of Big Food who have created a system ‘based on faith trust, reassurance, and unfortunately ignorance’ (Booth & Coveney, 2015, p. 51)?

To reclaim our intimate experiences of food and repair the connections severed by its commodification, we can only start from our lived experience in the communities where we procure, eat and, if we are able, produce food. Our attachments to place include our food histories, and form our ways of seeing food. Learning can help us to recapture place-based ways. As Alethea Harper et al. (2009, p. 7) report in their evaluation of the development of Food Policy Councils in the United States, ‘the power of informed, democratic convergence – especially when linked to the specific places where people live, work and eat – has an additional emergent quality: it can change the way we – and others – think’. Providing the structures and processes to enable this convergence of world views is not a straightforward task. The most food insecure are rarely invited, and even when they are, they often lack the capacity to engage in conversations about food policy. Capacity to participate, in terms of time, education, ability and will, comes before agency. Food insecurity is complex. It is often a symptom of severe and multiple disadvantage. Repairing relations between individuals in communities must come before reform. This healing is most difficult in countries which have not addressed histories of dispossession and violence such as Australia.

How did we get here?

According to Fritz Schumacher (2011, p. 8) ‘one of the most fateful errors of our age is the belief that the problem of production has been solved’. He says this false belief is ‘mainly due to our inability to recognise that the modern industrial system, with all its intellectual sophistication, consumes the very basis on which it has been erected’ (ibid.). In the case of the food system, the relationship between capital and labour has been transformed to produce social exclusion on a scale we have never witnessed before. There are pockets of economic irrelevance in every country and city on earth, where

areas that are non-valuable from the perspective of information capitalism, and that do not have significant political interest for the powers that be, are bypassed by flows of wealth and information, and ultimately deprived of the basic technological infrastructure that allows us to communicate, innovate, produce, consume, and even live, in today’s world.

(Castells, cited in Capra, 2002, p. 126)

Unlike ecological networks where no species or being is excluded and all contribute to the sustainability of the whole, in the world of wealth and power, large segments of the population are excluded or their value is limited to the supply of labour and raw materials. The neo-liberal trade regime, for example, has produced regions where local food production has been dismantled in favour of exports and imports, and transnational companies are free to relocate resource-extractive and polluting industries leading to environmental destruction. In these places, corporate power is exerted in a controlled, aggressive, and hierarchical manner, reducing the sovereign power of states.

Biotechnology provides a case in point. Technology is part of every human culture and predates modern-day science. It is not neutral; it has beneficial or catastrophic effects, depending on how it is applied, and who wields it. Genetic engineering has been promoted and adopted on a wide scale, with regulatory bodies and governments unwilling to exercise the precautionary principle under pressure from corporates. The overriding motivation for this is not advancing science or curing disease for the greater good, it is for financial gain. David Ehrenfeld, cited in Capra (2002, p. 163), argues that:

like high input agriculture, genetic engineering is often justified as a humane technology, one that feeds more people with better food. Nothing could be further from the truth. With very few exceptions, the whole point of genetic engineering is to increase the sales of chemicals and bio-engineered products to dependent farmers.

The aspirations of life science companies such as Monsanto (which was acquired by the corporate agricultural giant Bayer in 2018) to ‘consolidate the entire food chain’ (Hodgson, 2018) underpin a corporatised food regime that concentrates knowledge and power in the hands of fewer and fewer merging mega-companies. This cedes control of food security to the profit-hungry, and represents a real threat to the democratic governance of food and agriculture policy. Framing market opportunities as moral imperatives, the agribusiness narrative is to ‘feed the world’ (Vidal, 2018) while making exorbitant profits at the expense of small-scale farmers and consumer health. This rhetoric, backed with scientific evidence produced by academic research funded by these very companies, leaves little room for alternative views. Corporate agents create and exercise discursive legitimacy in the public sphere by projecting and exploiting fears of a dystopian future based on two assumptions: first, that there is not enough food to feed the world and second, that genetic engineering is the only way to increase production. The rhetoric of scarcity is hollow; excess production is in fact the problem.

The food industry is a major contributor to overproduction, food insecurity and environmental degradation. This includes the production of up to a third of global greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions, when fertiliser manufacturing, food storage and packaging are taken into account. Yet Big Ag is committed to raising output, intensification of farming, mass processing, mass marketing, homogeneity of product, monocultures and a reliance on chemical and pharmaceutical solutions. The powerful US agribusiness lobby, for example, employs the rhetoric of scarcity to justify claims that America’s farmers must double their production of grain and meat to meet the needs of a global population of nine million by 2050. In reality, the surplus, heavily-subsidised production of the US grain-livestock complex makes little contribution to ending global hunger and nutrition. This industrial monolith relies on the externalisation of costs, inequitable subsidies, and the (over)production of surpluses dumped as food aid while reducing biodiversity, and exhausting soils and water sources. The search for biomass alternatives to replace fossil-fuels drive land use changes which take more land out of agricultural production and place further stress on biodiversity.

Having a holistic view of the food system necessitates reconnecting the production of food with the downstream stages of the food chain. Most consumption happens in the urbanised regions of the world where the ‘stuffed and starved’, as Raj Patel (2009a calls them, co-exist. ‘Food violence’ (Eakin et al., 2010) in the form of hunger, obesity and diseases of malnutrition, disproportionately affect populations subject to chronic economic marginalisation, social exclusion and discrimination. These structural inequalities were highlighted in 2008 when food riots in over 40 countries were triggered by high food prices, lack of available food and reactions against government food policies. Signalling a ‘critical stage in global neo-liberalisation’ (Bohstedt, 2014, p. 16), the riots were driven by citizens joining in popular movements against perceived and actual breaches of the social contract by political leaders. At the time of writing, this malaise is manifested in the ‘yellow vests’ uprising in Europe. Violent protests in France triggered by fuel tax rises and living costs have led beleaguered President Emmanuel Macron to commit to an increase in the minimum wage, the removal of tax on overtime, and the elimination of surcharges on pensions (BBC News, 2018a). Whether this rhetoric will satisfy the discontented is dubious. ‘We are fed up of hearing promises for politicians. The French don’t believe in them any more’, said Freddie Bouvier, a truck driver from Beauvais (BBC News, 2018b).

In times of austerity the problems inherent in the food system are by no means exclusive to the Global South yet the apparent abundance of food and comparatively low rates of food insecurity in more developed economies mask the unsustainability of how we produce and consume food as well as the rising number of hidden hungry. In the UK and Wales, for example, stagnating incomes and rising food prices since 2007 have made food 20 per cent less affordable for the lowest income decile than in the mid-2000s (Defra, 2014) and children are among those most affected (Lambie-Mumford & Green, 2017). As the Food Ethics Council...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Series Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Table of Contents
• Acknowledgements
• Acronyms
• 1 Introduction
• 2 The capture of voice and value
• 3 Recovering and reclaiming voice
• 4 Organising through communication
• 5 Learning as resistance
• 6 Participatory by design
• 7 Conclusion
• References
• Index