Globalising Food

Agrarian Questions and Global Restructuring

David Goodman, Michael Watts, David Goodman, Michael Watts

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2013
• Print ISBN: 9780415162524
• eBook ISBN: 9781134716067
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Physical Sciences
• Subtopic: Geography
• Index: Geography

In an increasingly global world, societies are being provisioned from a bewildering array of sources as new countries and new food commodities are drawn into international markets. Globalising Food provides an innovative contribution to the area of political economy of agriculture, food and consumption through a revealing investigation of the globalisation and restructuring of localised agricultural sectors and food systems.
The book draws on new theoretical perspectives and wide-ranging case studies from Britain, the USA, India, South Africa, New Zealand and Latin America. The key themes addresses range from giant multinational food corporations, rural industrialisation and World Bank policies, to the regulation of pollution, labour relations, urban food politics and environmental sustainability. Globalising Food offers important insights into the problems, consequences and limits of the industrialisation of agriculture and the provisioning of food in a global world as we approach the new millenium.

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AGRARIAN QUESTIONS

Global appetite, local metabolism: nature, culture, and industry in fin-desiècle agro-food systems

Michael Watts and David Goodman

INTRODUCTION

[C]apitalist agrarian transition is protean in its manifest diversity.

(Byres 1996)

The fact is that the food business is entering a period of unprecedented turmoil.

(The Economist, 1993)

In 1974, the World Food Conference was held in Rome amidst growing anxiety over food availability and food prices. Poor weather and unprecedented US grain sales to the Soviet Union radically tightened the world wheat market, prompting apocalyptic predictions of mass starvation and famine. Three years later, world prices had fallen to the point where they were lower than at any time since the end of the Second World War. Aggregate crop production in the developing world grew at almost 3 per cent per annum from 1970 to 1990, confounding Malthusian expectations that output could not keep abreast of staple food output. Twenty years after the first food conference, the Rome World Food Summit in late 1996 was held in a quite different political and economic atmosphere. Rather than bristling Third World nationalisms and robust protectionism, the 1990s is a moment of unprecedented deregulation of agriculture (a shift from aid to trade), the hegemony (the so-called ‘new realism’) of export-oriented neoliberal development strategies, and a recognition that globalisation (a word not even part of the lexicon of the earlier Rome summit) of the world agro-food economy was proceeding apace. Of course the transformation of the world food economy since 1974 has been complex; while output (primarily driven by yield increases) outstripped population growth, a number of countries slid into net food import dependency during the 1970s, while the food security situation in global terms itself proved to be intractable. Despite an increase in food production per capita of 20 per cent in developing countries over the period 1980–90, roughly 800 million people suffer from hunge– of whom 500 million are chronically malnourished–and more than one-third of children are malnourished (UNDP 1996:20). Indeed, shock therapy in the former socialist bloc, coupled with deregulation and a frontal assault on entitlements in the North Atlantic capitalist economies, has elevated the food question to the front pages of the newspapers in the First and Second Worlds alike. A study published by the California Policy Seminar (Neuhauser and Margen 1995) revealed an astonishing increase in hunger in California since 1980:8.4 million are currently food insecure and 5 million are hungry. A rather more dyspeptic view of the much vaunted new Pacific century. A forthcoming International Labour Office report reveals that adult unemployment or underemployment worldwide exceeded one billion in 1995, an increase of 180 million over 1994, a condition which the UN describes as a crisis not seen since the Great Depression (New York Times 26 November 1996). In the fifteen European Union nations, unemployment averaged 11.3 per cent of the labour force in 1995, compared with 2 per cent in the 1960s; a high proportion of the unemployed has been jobless for over a year. One in five American children live below the poverty line, and this proportion rises to 42 per cent of the country's black children (New York Times 30 November 1996: A1).

Curiously, while much has changed since the first World Food Conference –indeed, these transformations represent one of the major concerns of this book–the environment within which the latest UN Food Summit transpired was in some respects resonant of the ‘crisis’ of twenty years ago.¹ Business Week devoted most of a recent issue to ‘the new economics of food’ in which the central motif was ‘as global demand outpaces supply, both haves and have-nots are in for a shock’. At the heart of Business Week's concern was the ‘huge Chinese appetite’ (currently China imports almost 20 million tons of grain), itself rooted in the rising living standards of the many Chinese in the post-Mao period. Collectively, falling grain production in Russia, massive food imports for Africa and the Middle East, and escalating Chinese demand offer the prospect (according to Business Week) of low grain reserves, ‘cycles of panic’, and price inflation. What is at stake, however, in the 1990s is neither Malthusian dearth nor a replay of the 1970s. As Business Week puts it:

As disposable incomes rise sharply across the developing world, millions are eating better. A fast-growing middle-class from Seoul to Sao Paulo is buying more beef, pork and poultry. In Brazil chicken consumption is up 20% in the last year. McDonald's Corp. has brought hamburgers to 93 countries.… Per capita global consumption of beef, pork and poultry has surged 11% in the past decade.… Consequently, feed grain use is surging to record highs in developing nations…

(Business Week 23 September 1996:78)

The food economy is on the one hand increasingly differentiated in new sorts of ways at the level of consumption–some within the LDCs are eating better at a time when others in Africa are descending into a universe of ever-greater food insecurity, millions in California go hungry² while others consume ‘designer’ organic vegetables shuttled around the world in a sophisticated late twentieth-century ‘cool chain’–a reflection of deep polarities within the world economy at large. Arresting evidence of rising inequality and polarisation between rich and poor countries over the past fifteen years, exacerbated by the ‘lost decade’ of the 1980s for Latin America and Sub-Saharan Africa, is inventoried annually by the Human Development Report 1996 (UNDP 1996). Assets of the world's 358 billionaires exceeded the combined annual incomes of countries with 45 per cent of the world's population. Equally sobering is evidence that developing countries with nearly 80 per cent of the world's population account for 20 per cent of global GDP; the gap in per capita income between the industrial and developing worlds has tripled since 1960 (UNDP 1996:2). On the other hand, at the level of production and distribution the food economy is being restructured in radically new ways; to employ Business Week's language, the food economy is increasingly driven by global demand and internationalisation of the agro-food industry. The giant food companies and the large retailers are aggressively transforming the world agro-food economy, offering a future of what Harriet Friedmann (1993) calls the ‘private global regulation’: ‘[transnational corporations] are the major agents attempting to regulate agro-food conditions, that is, to organize stable conditions of production and consumption which allow them to plan investment, sourcing of agricultural materials, and marketing on a global scale’ (Friedmann 1993:52).

A casual stroll through the daily newspapers and weekly magazines over the past fortnight confirms that contemporary food and agriculture is very much a global reality which shapes our lives in profound cultural, ideological, and economic ways. The Sunday magazine of a London ‘quality’ paper directs its middle-class readership to ‘Our Festive Food and Drink Guide, Packed with Recipes from London's Leading Chefs. Plus: The Best Champagne Buys’ (Independent on Sunday 24 November 1996). An ‘Eating Out’ review of a new central London restaurant coyly observes that the menu trendily includes ‘the words “root vegetable”, “rocket”, “ricotta”, “parfait’, and “cabbage” (Independent on Sunday 24 November 1996: 88). A week earlier, the same newspaper commented on the ‘barrage of rhetoric’ that had marked the closure of the World Food Summit in Rome, where the US delegation opposed international recognition of the right to food, and reported that the US plans to reduce by two-thirds its contribution to the International Fund for Agricultural Development (IFAD), the only UN agency whose exclusive remit is to help poor Third World farmers (Independent on Sunday 17 November 1996:4). This article also cites a new report by a UN committee of experts who estimate that it will take 200 years to eradicate malnutrition in the Indian subcontinent. Hunger is increasing in Africa. Closer to home, the lead story in the business section of The New York Times, ‘Biting into Food Industry Profits: Companies Squeezed from All Sides in Battle of Prices’, depicts the ‘reorganisation’ and ‘downsizing’ efforts that are cutting jobs at such food giants as Kellogg, Unilever, Campbell Soup, Grand Metropolitan, RJR Nabisco Holdings, H.J.Heinz, and Conagra. These corporate ‘lean-and-mean’ strategies at the expense of the work force intensify the feeding frenzy on Wall Street, helping to raise the Dow Jones industrial average to a new high above 6,500 (New York Times 26 November 1996: C1).

This selective trawl of news reports conveys not only the diverse meanings and everyday experiences of food, from lifestyle semiotics to basic metabolic life force, but also the dystopic extremes of world political economy in the late twentieth century. These polarities also are emphasised in more explicitly analytical treatments of globalisation. One scenario presented by the Group of Lisbon (1995) combines the renewed prominence of regionalism–the European Union, NAFTA, APEC–in international political economy with the increasing concentration of international production, foreign direct investment (FDI), and trade in the ‘triad’ of North America, Western Europe, and Japan. This global regionalism of competing continental trade blocs–’triadisation’–is premised on centrifugal forces that exacerbate fragmentation and exclusion, leading to the progressive de-linking of the triad from the rest of the world–a form of ‘truncated globalisation’.

Rapidly changing conditions of global competition have focused attention on emerging forms of corporate organisation and the concomitant reconfiguration of international production. Thus the textbook world of neoclassical ‘inter-national’ trade theory, involving open or arm's length exchange conducted in competitive world markets between separate national firms in sovereign national economies, is on the wane. A high (and rising) share of world trade is now internalised by transnational corporations (TNCs) via intra-industry transactions between firms integrated into worldwide production systems and intra-firm hierarchies. This shift in corporate organisation toward integrated international production under the governance of TNCs is characterised by the UNCTAD-PTC (1993) as a transition from ‘shallow’ trade-based linkages to ‘deep’ international production-based linkages. These sea changes are, as this books reveals, integral to any understanding of the world agro-good system–how, in other words, we are all provisioned– at the fin de siècle.

The contributions to this volume investigate the political economies and discursive regimes of late twentieth-century agro-food systems, yet they also engage with larger questions of the many-headed beast called global capitalism and its multiple local trajectories. Namely, the processes of globalisation, economic restructuring, and new space-time dynamics shaping fin de siècle capitalism, and how these are theorised. The second question can be recast in terms of the tensions between classically influ enced, ‘modern’ political economy and poststructuralist perspectives, which course through contemporary agro-food studies. Trends and changes within provisioning systems frequently are ‘claimed’ by rival social theoretic factions in other fields, and paraded as either singular exceptions to, or emblematic exemplars of, some aspect of the new realities of late twentieth-century capitalism. Most notably these arguments have encompassed international food regimes and regulation theory, Fordism/post-Fordism in agrarian restructuring, poststructuralist perspectives, especially actor-network theory, and the ‘spaces’ in late capitalism for material and discursive struggles around alternative forms of social organisation. Two examples illustrate our point. The first is taken from the efforts of the French regulation theorists–working with researchers from INRA in France–to apply regulation theory to the agricultural sector precisely because it reveals attributes–quality, institutional innovation, flexibility, conventions– which are taken to be constitutive of the new ways in which markets, states and indeed capitalism itself are conceptualised (Allaire and Boyer 1995). Ben Fine's work provides a second illustration. In The World of Consumption (Fine and Leopold 1994) and Consumption in an Age of Affluence (Fine and Wright 1996) he is concerned to show how provisioning systems under capitalism differ in their internal dynamics, and in the case of the agro-food system the difference that makes a difference is what he calls the organic (‘nature’ or ‘biology’), which especially shapes both ends of the food circuit (consumption and production) but indeed ramifies throughout its entire length.

The intellectual currents captured in this collection are testimony to the new-found vitality of agro-food studies, reinvigorated by the infusion of theoretical approaches and controversies from such widely dispersed fields as industrial geography, economic sociology, development studies, neo-institutional economics, cultural studies, and the sociology of scientific knowledge. This engagement is drawing agro-food studies into the mainstream of critical social science, marking a final and definitive rupture with the fettered disciplinary traditions of land-grant university rural sociology and rural geography. This epistemological break had its origins in the revival of academic interest in Marxism in the 1960s as a new generation of scholars reconsidered the ‘agrarian question’; that is, the politics and political economy of agrarian transitions to capitalism. Marxisms of various sorts brought renewed attention to the earlier agrarian debates of German Social Democracy in the 1890s, distinguished by Karl Kautsky's classic contribution Die Agrarfage (The Agrarian Question), and the subsequent Russian Narodnik debates, in which Lenin and his populist critics offered contrasting visions of rural social relations as capitalism took hold of the Russian mir. These rich intellectual roots were further nourished by neo-Marxist analyses of Third World peasantries and commoditisation processes, the Brenner debate, the extended controversies that surrounded Althusser's structuralist Marxism, and the articulation of modes of production literature associated initially with French Marxist anthropologists working outré mer³

We have self-consciously returned to the classical discussions of the agrarian question, not because the world is unchanged or because there are simple historical parallels between 1890 and 1990. Rather we do so because of the salience and power of many of the questions posed by Kautsky in particular. In his new book, Terry Byres (1996) has suggested that there are three agrarian questions. The first, posed by Engels, refers to the politics of the agrarian transition in which peasants constitute the dominant class. What, in other words, are the politics of the development of agrarian capitalism? The second is about production and the ways in which market competition drives the forces of production toward increased yields (surplus creation on the land, in short). And the third speaks to accumulation and the flows of surplus and specifically inter-sectoral linkages between agriculture and manufacture. The latter Byres calls ‘agrarian transition’ and embraces a number of key moments, namely growth, terms of trade, demand for agrarian products, proletarianisation, surplus appropriation, and surplus transfer. Byres is concerned to show that agriculture can contribute to industry without the first two senses of the agrarian question being, as it were, activated, and to assert the multiplicity of agrarian transitions (the diversity of ways in which agriculture contributes to capitalist industrialisation with or without ‘full’ development of capitalism in the c...

Table of contents

• Front Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright
• Dedication
• CONTENTS
• List of Illustrations
• Notes on Contributors
• Acknowledgments
• 1 AGRARIAN QUESTIONS: GLOBAL APPETITE, LOCAL METABOLISM: NATURE, CULTURE, AND INDUSTRY IN FIN-DE-SIÈCLE AGRO-FOOD SYSTEMS
• Part I Institutions, embeddedness and agrarian trajectories
• Part II Restructuring, industry and regional dynamics
• Part III Globalisation, value and regulation in the commodity system
• Part IV Discourse and class, networks and accumulation
• Part V Transnational capital and local responses
• Part VI Nature, sustainability and the agrarian question
• Index