Global Foodscapes
eBook - ePub

Global Foodscapes

Oppression and resistance in the life of food

Alistair Fraser

Share book
  1. 172 pages
  2. English
  3. ePUB (mobile friendly)
  4. Available on iOS & Android
eBook - ePub

Global Foodscapes

Oppression and resistance in the life of food

Alistair Fraser

Book details
Book preview
Table of contents
Citations

About This Book

What we eat ā€“ as well as how it is produced, processed, moved, sold, and used by our bodies seems to matter like never before. Global Foodscapes takes on this topicality and asks readers to think about how we are all involved in the making of an odd and, in many ways, troubling and contested food economy. It explores how food is conceived, traded, grown, reared, processed, sold, and consumed; investigates what goes wrong along the way; and assesses what diverse people around the world are doing to fix these faults.

The text uses a carefully-crafted framework that explores the interaction of five forms of oppression and five means of resistance as they are worked out over five stages in the food economy. It draws on case studies from around the world that illuminate key issues about food in today's world; examines how oppression affects diverse people caught up in the food economy; and highlights how individuals, groups, and institutions such as governments, but also firms, are trying to improve how we interact with the food system.

Global Foodscapes is a highly accessible and useful text for undergraduate students interested in the global food economy. The global range of case studies, examples, and reference points, as well as its original framework allows the text to speak to diverse audiences and generate debate about whether anything ā€“ and if so, what ā€“ needs to be done about the food system we depend upon so heavily. Additional materials such as suggested readings and discussion points help students consider the issues at hand and conduct initial and more detailed research on today's food economy.

Frequently asked questions

How do I cancel my subscription?
Simply head over to the account section in settings and click on ā€œCancel Subscriptionā€ - itā€™s as simple as that. After you cancel, your membership will stay active for the remainder of the time youā€™ve paid for. Learn more here.
Can/how do I download books?
At the moment all of our mobile-responsive ePub books are available to download via the app. Most of our PDFs are also available to download and we're working on making the final remaining ones downloadable now. Learn more here.
What is the difference between the pricing plans?
Both plans give you full access to the library and all of Perlegoā€™s features. The only differences are the price and subscription period: With the annual plan youā€™ll save around 30% compared to 12 months on the monthly plan.
What is Perlego?
We are an online textbook subscription service, where you can get access to an entire online library for less than the price of a single book per month. With over 1 million books across 1000+ topics, weā€™ve got you covered! Learn more here.
Do you support text-to-speech?
Look out for the read-aloud symbol on your next book to see if you can listen to it. The read-aloud tool reads text aloud for you, highlighting the text as it is being read. You can pause it, speed it up and slow it down. Learn more here.
Is Global Foodscapes an online PDF/ePUB?
Yes, you can access Global Foodscapes by Alistair Fraser in PDF and/or ePUB format, as well as other popular books in Physical Sciences & Geography. We have over one million books available in our catalogue for you to explore.

Information

Publisher
Routledge
Year
2016
ISBN
9781317274858
Subtopic
Geography
Edition
1

1 The world upstream of the farm

1.1. Introduction

Food production is certainly about what happens on the land. Yet, long before any farmland is prepared for seeding and before any buildings are erected in which chickens or pigs will be reared, an enormous range of action occurs. For example, governments and their agencies and institutions create rules, standards, and policies that shape what food producers can do. In offices, meeting rooms, legislatures, and various other spaces far from the farm, numerous actors make calculations that alter how food is produced, traded, and sold. The nature of these deliberations matters enormously for the sort of world we are living in.
In addition, upstream of the farm ā€“ often miles away from it, in places and spaces that are entirely disconnected from food production ā€“ there is a geographically extensive, powerful and global complex of enterprises churning out the seeds, feed, advice, as well as all of the various agricultural chemicals used by farmers big and small to produce the worldā€™s food. Thus, in offices, research labs, and field sites across the world, an almost unimaginable array of experiments and tests and innovations is pursued to boost farm productivity, shape the micro-scale structure of chemicals involved in the making of food, or bring existing foodstuffs into novel relations with other foodstuffs to make entirely new food products. New inventions are made, new product innovations are developed, new ways of making farm machinery imagined, and even entirely new foodstuffs conjured up. This upstream world matters.
My aim in this chapter is to explore the terrain and consider the character of this world upstream of the farm. In part, the purpose is to describe the lie of the land: who matters, what they do, and how they shape what happens later on in the life of food. And in doing so, I think an overriding narrative emerges. Specifically, I suggest that the interests and actions of governments combine with capitalist firms invested in the food economy to pursue an answer to the proletarian food question that prioritizes input-dependent, quasi-industrial ā€˜northernā€™ agriculture. Action here reaches all the way through the life of food, creating structures that set parameters for what can take place later on. Here ā€“ upstream of the farm ā€“ emerges a dominant viewpoint of how food should be produced: a set of ideas and practices that gives the life of food and the associated foodscapes their peculiar form in the contemporary period.
The rest of the chapter is organized as follows. I begin in Section 1.2 with a discussion of some of the ways that agriculture interacts with what I refer to as ā€˜governanceā€™, which is a term we can use to capture the idea that governments and other institutions shape and govern social action. I discuss agricultural supports, the stateā€™s role in shaping agricultural trade, and regulatory interventions. In Section 1.3, I turn to consider the role played by capitalist firms upstream of the farm. As I will highlight, there exists a wide range of activities and a vast complex of firms upstream of the farm, producing and supplying seeds, chemicals, machinery, and advice. Among the many enterprises in this complex, a striking feature is the prominence of a relatively small number of large, powerful transnational corporations. The discussion explores how these firms aim to transform the world in their quest to secure future profits; and how governments around the world have sought to play along in this risky game.
In Section 1.4 I note some of the key tensions arising from this emerging situation and use a brief case study on the infamous, and in many respects emblematic, seed and chemical firm Monsanto to shed light on how these sorts of tensions arise. In using this case study, my idea is to provide some background to help grasp how this stage in the life of food is oppressive. Thus, in Section 1.5 I introduce the idea that corporate influence and control over decisions affecting the life of food entails the creation of powerlessness for critical experts and those deeply affected by the way our food system is organized. Finally, in Section 1.6 I ask about resistance to this corporate dominance. I identify some exciting new ideas emerging in response to the problematic way that processes and actors upstream of the farm have altered how we produce, find, use, and eat food today.

1.2. Upstream of the farm and the making of ā€˜northern agricultureā€™

Northern agriculture ā€“ capitalist agriculture ā€“ has emerged over the last few decades in the rural heartlands of countries in the global north. This is an input-dependent, mechanized, quasi-industrial type of agriculture which produces enormous quantities of food and looms large over the whole global food system. From the perspective of governments across the global north ā€“ and increasingly in countries in the global south, too ā€“ ultimately only northern agricultural practices will be able to answer the proletarian food question. Alternative visions might exist of how agriculture should operate, how it might relate with the land and ecological systems and draw upon labour, but they are marginal to a dominant understanding of how food production should occur today.
In this part of the chapter, then, I dwell upon some of the ways that action upstream of the farm produces northern agriculture. My point is that, for northern agriculture to exist ā€“ and for it to have its extraordinary capacity to produce food ā€“ an upstream world has to be put in place: projects have to be dreamt up and rolled out, practices have to occur, and diverse and numerous people have to be put to work. As I will discuss, much of this action revolves around the firms that broker deals with or supply the agricultural sector. But another crucial set of issues involves what we might refer to as the ā€˜governanceā€™ of agriculture, and so I begin with this issue.

1.2.1. The governance of agriculture

By using the term ā€˜governanceā€™ here, I mean that agricultural production on the land is shaped not just by local or national governments, but also by multilateral governance institutions, not the least of which is the all-important World Trade Organization (WTO). I will come to the WTO soon, so let me turn now to consider some of the ways that governments affect what happens on the land.
Given the sorts of complexities contemporary society throws up, governments are more-or-less obliged to keep an eye on things in agriculture. That regulation and governance of agriculture exists is really no big deal. Nevertheless, even if we might tend to imagine a capitalist society as ā€˜normalā€™ and might assume that social relations framed by capitalism are just the way things are, it is notable how governments in the worldā€™s leading capitalist societies have used their agencies and institutions ā€“ in other words, they have mobilized ā€˜the stateā€™ ā€“ to shape a food system amenable to capitalist firms. Upstream of the farm there is action, intent, planning, deliberation. All of this reaches downstream onto the farms where food production actually occurs. I think we need to view this action as held together by an overriding consensus about what sort of agricultural system is best placed to answer the proletarian food question. But to get to that conclusion, it is necessary to step back a little and take a broad view of how the state interacts with agriculture.
Undoubtedly central to the overall story here is that agricultural sectors in places where northern agriculture has emerged have enjoyed decades of extensive government support. Although not all of these supports are explicitly directed at agriculture ā€“ a decision to build a new road that passes through an agricultural zone might benefit farmers and agri-businesses, but when governments allocate money for such a project they usually have the general population and more specifically industry in mind ā€“ many certainly are, especially those that help cover some of the costs of producing food. In other words, and to introduce a controversial concept in debates about the global food economy, the state in countries such as the US and Japan, and then in Western Europe, has tended to offer agriculture ā€˜subsidiesā€™.
ā€˜Subsidiesā€™ typically refer to a form of support which the state extends to businesses. Farmers, shipbuilders, even car manufacturers might all conceivably receive subsidies from the state. From the point of view of governments, these supports might be acceptable if they help employers stay afloat and retain jobs; from the perspective of firms, subsidies might be the difference between surviving and going out of business, or at least between making profits or a loss in a specific time period. Wherever we find them, therefore, subsidies highlight and reflect the existence of complex political decisions about who deserves the stateā€™s support and why. The point is: governments cannot simply extend supports to everyone; there will be winners and losers.
For anyone unfamiliar with farming the land, the nature of these supports might not be too easy to comprehend. However, consider a more obvious way that the state can support agriculture: public support for food and agricultural research (Norton, 2004: 404ā€“420). Such research, usually based in universities, might entail work on developing the productivity of crops, controlling pests, or how best to store or move food. Since 1960 publicly funded research on food and agriculture has grown by about 700 per cent, from around $5 billion to $35 billion per year (in constant 2005 prices) (Pardey et al., 2014: 3). Research by the private sector has grown as well, and now totals around 45 per cent of all research funding. In total, around $60 billion was spent by governments and the private sector on food and agricultural research in 2009, and 78.3 per cent of this was spent by high-income countries such as the US, Japan, Germany, France, and the UK (Pardey et al., 2014: 3). In short, research on food and agriculture is heavily dominated by action occurring in a small group of wealthy countries. This sort of spending reflects a determination on the part of these governments to develop knowledge and capacities to improve agricultural performance. The calculation is that skilled researchers in universities can use the stateā€™s support to find innovative solutions to the developing proletarian food question and the related challenges presented by population growth and changing dietary habits. So the state intervenes upstream of the farm: it spends money, appoints panels to decide how research money is invested, and generally supports (although its level of support might rise and fall from time to time) the development of a research infrastructure that can prop up agriculture.
In addition to research, of course, the state has at its disposal a wide variety of other interventions that it can use to help agriculture or to encourage farmers to change what they do. It can, for instance, provide direct payments to farmers to help them stay afloat; offer ā€˜set-asideā€™ payments to take land out of production; extend loans at low interest rates; promise guaranteed prices for crops if market prices fall below production costs; offer low-cost insurance policies; and extend subsidies to cover potential losses made by exporters (see Carolan, 2011: 194). And indeed exactly these sorts of instruments have been widely used. In the US, for example, the government created a variety of policies to support agriculture in response to an agricultural crisis in the 1930s, which saw many farm incomes collapse (Friedmann, 1993). Some of these actions were intended to maintain prices, such as by offering a minimum price to farmers or by paying them to remove their worst land from production and thereby reducing supply. Then there were subsidies in the form of credit that paid a portion of fertilizer, seed, or machinery costs. The idea was to protect the agricultural sector ā€“ to lend it support, to nurture it ā€“ with a view to developing its capacity to produce. Likewise, the agricultural sector across Europe has enjoyed extensive government support. Individual countries had their own policies to promote food security or provide extension, but in 1962 the European Economic Commission, which later became the European Union, introduced a wide-ranging package of supports under the name of the Common Agricultural Policy (CAP) (see Weis, 2007: 66ā€“67). Some supports provided farmers with guaranteed prices, while others protected European producers from imports (Friedmann, 1993). Initially these were ā€˜productivistā€™ supports that aimed to boost output; later they became post-productivist, in so far as the desired outputs were less about crops and more about keeping farmers on the land, even if they were not working at their full capacity (e.g. see Marsden, 2013). Supports continue to reach agriculture. For example, in the 49 countries examined in a recent Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD) Agricultural Policy Monitoring and Evaluation report (OECD, 2015), agricultural producers received a total annual average of $601 billion in the years 2012ā€“2014. How this money is spent varies from one place to another: some governments focus on price supports; others on reducing the costs of inputs or credit; while others still use direct payments to help cover incomes or to encourage farmers to adopt more environmentally sensitive operations (OECD, 2015: 7). The key point, then, is that rich-world or ā€˜global northā€™ governments intervene and extensively support their agricultural sectors.
For many farmers operating on a relatively small scale, receiving any payments or support from the state will always be welcome, and may even be what helps keep the farm going. In this regard it is worth noting here that policies to support farmers covered 18 per cent of gross farm receipts in OECD countries in 2014 (OECD, 2015). Yet agricultural subsidies do not only support small-scale farmers. In fact, in the US and Europe it is the larger farmers as well as some agri-businesses that benefit the most from subsidies. Between 1995 and 2009, for example, the US government distributed $24.5 billion to around 1.76 million farms, but another $186.5 billion to just 460 000 of the wealthiest farmers (Carolan, 2011: 193): that is, 88 per cent of the subsidies went to ...

Table of contents