Food Wars

The Global Battle for Mouths, Minds and Markets

Tim Lang, Michael Heasman

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2015
• ISBN:
  9781317623137
• Edition: 2
• Topic: Commerce
• Subtopic: Agrobusiness

In the years since publication of the first edition of Food Wars much has happened in the world of food policy. This new edition brings these developments fully up to date within the original analytical framework of competing paradigms or worldviews shaping the direction and decision-making within food politics and policy.

The key theme of the importance of integrating human and environmental health has become even more pressing. In the first edition the authors set out and brought together the different strands of emerging agendas and competing narratives. The second edition retains the same core structure and includes updated examples, case studies and the new issues which show how these conflicting tendencies have played out in practice over recent years and what this tells us about the way the global food system is heading. Examples of key issues given increased attention include:

• nutrition, including the global rise in obesity, as well as chronic conditions, hunger and under-nutrition
• the environment, particularly the challenges of climate change, biodiversity loss, water stress and food security
• food industry concentration and market power
• volatility and uncertainty over food prices and policy responses
• tensions over food, democracy and citizenship
• social and cultural aspects impacting food and nutrition policies.

1
Introduction

The food policy problem

Freedom from want of food, therefore, must mean making available for every citizen in every country sufficient of the right kind of food for health. If we are planning food for the people, no lower standard can be accepted.

Sir John Boyd Orr, writing in 1943; later the first Director-General of the Food and Agriculture Organisation of the United Nations (1880–1971)^[1]

Core arguments

In this book we argue that humanity has reached a critical juncture in its relationship to food supply and food policy, and that both public and corporate policies are failing to adequately grasp the enormity of the challenge, let alone how to implement much needed change. From this perspective, food policy is in crisis, particularly over health and the environment. Both need to be addressed if society is to be well served. We argue the case for a new vision which links human health with the environment, often termed ecological public health. This cuts across the whole spectrum of the working of the global food system – from food culture and the way food business operates to agriculture and land use. The case for public and policy engagement to enable a secure and sustainable food supply for the future is pressing. Food policy needs to provide solutions to the worldwide burdens of diet-related ill health, food-related environmental damage and the social inequalities associated with these. At present, food policy is in a phase we term the ‘Food Wars’, with competing and sometimes contradictory analyses and solutions, and with different actors and vested interests putting forward divergent food policy agendas. These activities taken together represent a critical struggle over the future of food and the shaping of minds, markets and mouths. This will force us to change our relationship with what and how we eat and how the world’s food is grown, processed and sold.

Food is an intimate part of people’s daily lives. It is a biological necessity but it also shapes and is a vehicle for the way people interact with friends, family, work colleagues and ourselves. It is associated with pleasure, seduction, pain, power, sharing and caring. As people eat their daily food, bought in the shops that they know, buying brands that they are familiar with, it is hard to imagine that there is such a thing as a global food system, stretching from the local corner store to the giant food conglomerate, from the small farmer to the marketing mogul, and from the consumer to a web of business interactions. This book is partly about that, trying to bring to attention the complexity of the way food is produced and processed. We also consider its impact on long-term public health and well-being. In addition, there is overwhelming evidence about food’s impact on the environment. The natural resources used to grow, process and distribute food are a major factor, for example, in climate change, energy and water use. And there is a strong social dimension to the Food Wars; social factors such as class, gender and culture shape and are influenced by the material and biological realities of food systems. As data on these issues has improved, policy-makers and increasingly the consuming public and food businesses have become aware of tensions over the shape of the food system, in relation to both human health and the pressures on the environmental resources needed to sustain our food supply. What seems an obviously good thing – food – has become problematic with layers of complexity making it hard to grasp an overview to tackle the global challenges ahead. In this book we set out a framing narrative based around three competing ‘paradigms’ to help business, policy-makers and civil society situate problems and solutions facing the global food system – this is set out in detail in Chapter 2.

Our particular interest here is in food policy: the decision-making that shapes the way the world of food operates and is controlled. In the past, food policy was often seen as the responsibility and terrain of governments. They set food policies, if they wanted. It was a ‘top down’ process. Today, however, that view of food policy is obsolete. While the role of government remains important, such as in negotiations involving international forums over trade agreements and setting standards, corporations also set food policies, both explicitly and implicitly, and may be more important in shaping food systems than governments. As we will argue later, food governance has become ‘hollowed out’ in its oversight of food systems. Civil society organisations, too, have policies on food. They champion their interests and voice them to get leverage over change, if they can. The modern view of food policy in this book, therefore, is that food policy is itself contested terrain, fought over and created through complex processes of stakeholder engagement.

The need for a ‘big picture’ perspective of global food system challenges moved into sharp focus for policy and business in 2007–2008 when, alongside the global financial crisis, the world experienced a food price crisis. This crisis was unusual in a number of respects. For example, while food commodity prices historically tend to rise and fall, in the 2007 food price crisis the prices of most of the world’s major commodities – rice, wheat, maize (corn) and soy – in unison saw a sharp upward price spike. While food prices dipped and then rose more gently over subsequent years, they remain stubbornly high – creating costs and uncertainties for business and rising food prices for consumers.^{[2 3]}

Added to this, the strong evidence for the environmental unsustainability of many parts of the global food system in the face of climate change or the overuse of natural resources such as the exploitation of global fisheries or of freshwater, has forced governments and business to become much more proactive.^[4] They are responding to the threats global food markets face such as the ability for food markets to operate ‘efficiently’ or the inability to maintain ‘food security’ due to environmental degradation.^[5] Global policy-makers also continue to be confronted with the double burden of disease – namely, persistent hunger and malnutrition at the same time as the global human health tragedy of escalating numbers of people experiencing non-communicable diseases (NCDs) such as diabetes, cardiovascular diseases (CVDs) and certain cancers, as well as the ongoing and spiralling rates of overweight and obesity in populations.^[6]

We thus see the world of food policy as one experiencing ongoing conflicts. Consensus may be arrived at regarding the extent of the problems, but it should not be assumed there is agreement on solutions or even the nature or scope of the actions required. The principal argument of this book is that food policies are formed and fractured by these series of conflicts – what we term the ‘Food Wars thesis’ – structured around what we present as the three dominant narratives or ‘paradigms’ we explain in Chapter 2. These paradigmatic narratives offer different conceptions of the relationship between food, health and environment. They offer distinct and sometimes competing choices for public policy, the corporate sector and civil society. We argue that health in particular has often been somewhat marginalised in policy, although that is changing with rising obesity in particular, and that the Food Wars can be analysed, in part, as the manoeuvring or positioning by different interest groups seeking to influence the future of food.

Addressing what we regard as the linked challenges of diet-related health, environmental sustainability and corporate and civil society policy objectives will require better processes for making food policies and reform of the institutions of food governance; they need to be shaped in an integrated way. Unless this is done, we believe that food supply chains will lose public trust. If they are to achieve popular support and legitimacy, they will need to be infused with what we call ‘food democracy’, a notion we explore towards the end of the book. This goes beyond mere consumerism, the exercise of choice at the check-out or selecting between brands.

Our focus therefore is on the wider policy choices that shape how humanity orders its food economy and on urging public policy to play a positive role in promoting the public good. To this end, we explore key elements of the world of food that we consider to be crucial. These are:

• health: the relationships between diet, disease, nutrition and public health;
• business: the way food is produced and handled, from farm inputs to consumption;
• consumer culture: how, why and where people consume food;
• society: how food is framed by values, norms, roles and social divisions;
• the environment: the use and misuse of land, sea and other natural resources when producing food; and
• food governance: how the food economy is regulated and how food policy choices are made and implemented.

These issues are often studied in isolation, and at times deserve such micro-attention. But the scale of the pressures and challenges in the context of the global food supply now suggests that this ‘compartmental’ approach is no longer a viable way of handling food policy-making. The book calls for a new framework for making food policy choices. In the 2000s – particularly when a global commodity and food price crisis emerged in 2007–08 – minds were focused on the vulnerability of future food supplies. The developed world suddenly became worried that its security, not just Africa’s or Asia’s, was uncertain. This brought to wider attention a concern that had been growing among scientists and policy analysts around the food system’s sustainability and whether the 20th-century legacy and definition of progress were still appropriate.

While today’s food economy is grounded in a long history of production, experimentation and technological change, the industrial food supply is still relatively young in human history – a little more than 150 to 200 years old. Since World War II the food economy has undergone remarkable commercial and technological expansion in order to provide food for an unprecedented growth in human population – to more than 7 billion in the 2010s and forecast to reach 8 billion by 2020 and 9.6 billion by 2050.^[7] Yet the commodity price crisis raised old questions about whether enough food can realistically be produced for 9 billion plus or so by mid-21st century. To put it starkly, could the world feed itself with this explosion of mouths at a time of planetary and societal stress and strain? Or feed it in a way and with diets (particularly high in meat and dairy) that came to dominate in the late 20th century? The means to address these questions have become highly contested, with technological solutions being promoted from some quarters, while others offer the argument that there is enough food but it is mal-distributed and/or wasted, and that plant-based diets would be beneficial for health and environment.

In the first edition of this book (published in 2004), it seemed radical to be arguing for a new integrated approach to food policy, one which took health, environment and the public interest equally seriously, and outlining a paradigm in which these goals were at the heart of future food systems. Yet as we produced the second edition of the book over a decade later, the assurance that the 20th-century model we call Productionism had worked perfectly was gone. The issue was now whether to unleash a new industrial food revolution or to go for a softer route. One thing is certain: the sustainability of food production systems and the quality of foodstuffs in the developed and developing worlds are being challenged as never before. The current food system appears to lurch from crisis to crisis: from earlier serious health scares such as BSE (‘mad cow disease’) to continuing major outbreaks of foodborne disease, from a world in which food corporations’ power seemed unstoppable to one where their investments and sure-footedness could be questioned. In this new era, global food supply faces new challenges: a continuing surge in population growth in some parts of the world and an increasingly aged population in others; a global population where the majority now live in urban centres yet rely on food from the rural; the introduction of radical new technologies such as genetic modification and nanotechnology yet consumers saying they want authenticity and integrity; a new global scale and scope of corporate control and influence; a fragility in consumer trust in food governance and institutions; and persistent health problems associated with inadequate diet such as heart disease, obesity and diabetes which, alongside hunger and famine, affect hundreds of millions of people. This is a complex, troubling picture for food policy analysts to attempt to clarify, let alone politicians with their eyes on short-term issues.

This book argues that such challenges cannot be met in a piecemeal fashion. There has to be a clear commitment to framing food around public health and sustainability. Our concern is to make the links across discrete policy areas, from the way food is produced to the management of consumption and the healthiness of foodstuffs. We argue that the future viability of the food economy depends upon policy-makers articulating this necessity and delivering a new reality.

But is this easier said than done? Difficult questions loom. How does this new vision fit demands from developing countries? How can population ...