Food Systems Failure

The Global Food Crisis and the Future of Agriculture

Christopher Rosin, Paul Stock, Hugh Campbell

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2013
• Print ISBN: 9780415712606
• eBook ISBN: 9781136529412
• Topic: Biological Sciences
• Subtopic: Ecology
• Index: Biological Sciences

This book provides a critical assessment of the contemporary global food system in light of the heightening food crisis, as evidence of its failure to achieve food security for the world's population. A key aspect of this failure is identified in the neoliberal strategies which emphasize industrial efficiencies, commodity production and free trade-ideologies that underlie agricultural and food policies in what are frequently referred to as 'developed countries'.

The book examines both the contradictions in the global food system as well as the implications of existing ideologies of production associated with commodity industrial agriculture using evidence from relevant international case studies. The book's first section presents the context of the food crisis with contributions from leading international academics and food policy activists, including climate scientists, ecologists and social scientists. These contributions identify current contradictions in policy and practice that impede solutions to the food crisis. Set within this context, the second section assesses current conditions in the global food system, including economic viability, sustainability and productivity. Case study analyses of regions exposed to neoliberal policy at the production end of the system provide insights into both current challenges to feeding the world, as well as alternative strategies for creating a more just and moral food system.

1

INTRODUCTION: SHOCKING THE GLOBAL FOOD SYSTEM

Christopher Rosin, Paul Stock and Hugh Campbell

The spike in global food prices, peaking in 2008, is commonly recognized as a shock to the global food system by media, governments and international organizations, and academics. The broad resonance of this shock reflects the challenge that localized food scarcity, and subsequent popular protest (often referred to as ‘food riots’) in Africa, Asia, South America and the Caribbean, posed to a shared sense of progress – and some would argue complacency – toward meeting the world’s food demands. After all, one of the central conceits of the last years of the twentieth century held that, even if hunger was still with us, it was only a matter of time before a combination of trade liberalization, expanding food markets, new technologies, post-Cold War political stability and economic growth in the Developing World rendered the spectre of a hungry world obsolete. Faith in the potential of these dynamics was underpinned by the consistent downward trend in the cost of food commodities in the second half of the century. The real threat and shock value of the food crisis was most evident, however, in the erosion of cheap food as a pillar of global food security. Clearly, an ability to feed the global population was proving to be less certain and hunger on a large scale was still a reality.

Understanding the causes of the global food crisis has proved elusive, not for any lack of potential contributing factors, but for the absolute abundance of competing explanations. The crisis led food system analysts to re-examine the relationships between food production, the looming end of plentiful petroleum-based energy (also known as ‘peak oil’), a rapidly changing global climate and volatility in financial markets. While both inequality in distribution of, and access to, food, as well as expanding and more intensive consumption patterns still threaten global food security, the competing demands for agricultural products from a burgeoning biofuels industry was quickly identified as a villain of the food crisis. Similarly, the impact on global food supplies of crop failures caused by climatic extremes in Australia, Vietnam and Russia, suggested that food scarcity would be more common in a future affected by anthropogenic climate change. These factors were further compounded by the economic uncertainty linked to the financial crisis in the US housing market. Investors looking for more secure investment options were blamed for accelerating price increases for food commodities by ‘bidding up’ the value of grain futures. Some talked of a ‘perfect storm’ which might, after all, prove to be a ‘blip’ before things return to business-as-usual. Others are less convinced, viewing 2008 as a harbinger of an increasingly dire global food situation.

One result of the sense of crisis in the global food system was a proliferation of conferences and meetings intended both to develop explanations of the crisis, and to propose solutions or pathways for the future. This book is a development of one such conference at the University of Otago in New Zealand – the 44th Otago Foreign Policy School: Dimensions of the Global Food Crisis, 26–28 July 2009.¹ The critical nature of the situation was evident in the ability of a relatively small, regional conference to attract the interest and contribution of recognized international experts such as Robert Watson, Jules Pretty, Jean Ziegler (represented by Claire Mahon) and Tim Lang. While the Otago Foreign Policy School is intended to focus on issues of contemporary importance as they relate to New Zealand foreign policy, it became very evident that the role of a small nation in the South Pacific extended well beyond its contribution to the global supply of milk, meat, fruit and wine. Thus, the book has evolved as a broader examination of the global food system using the food crisis as a vantage point from which to scrutinize the social, moral and environmental landscape of food provision. While there may not be complete agreement amongst the contributors as to the exact nature of the crisis (as a temporary ‘blip’, as a reflection of established structural conditions, or as a harbinger of greater challenges in the future), all of them recognize the significance of the event as a feature of the vulnerabilities and uncertainties surrounding the imperative to feed the world. As a whole, the contributions also indicate the need for a fundamental shift in orientation and emphasis necessary for developing a more resilient global food system.

The food crisis as an ‘event’

The common representation of the popular response to rapidly escalating food commodity prices from 2006 to 2008 was that of a crisis event. In this manner, the food crisis invaded our consciousness, newspaper front pages and television screens as a lightning flash that disrupted our sense of complacency and achievement in regard to global hunger. Prior to this event, a general sense had emerged that, at a global scale, hunger was to be associated with environmental disaster, civil and ethnic conflicts, or the actions of despotic rulers. Our capacity to produce sufficient food as a global community and the commitment of ‘responsible’ governments to meet the goals documented in the Millennium Development Goals and the Universal Declaration of Human Rights surely indicated that we were on the road to solving global hunger. In specific situations of need, aid and development interventions led by individual nations provided an answer. Otherwise, new institutions like the World Trade Organization (WTO) helped expand free trade, providing the central mechanism for ‘solving’ world hunger. The outbreak of massive WTO protests in Seattle and Cancun during the collapse of the most recent round of world trade talks was initially interpreted as evidence of failure of the ability of the world’s nations to agree on world trade policies, particularly around food. After 2008, the political courage expressed as resistance to further trade liberalization became aligned with a wider sense of the failure of market solutions to pressing issues like hunger.

It is worth noting that the upsurge in food prices and the fluctuating numbers of chronically hungry, vacillating somewhere between 800,000,000 and 1,200,000,000 people, did not constitute a ‘crisis’. Volatility and the tendency to spike in response to certain market changes are, after all, normal and acceptable features of prices in commodity markets. The reference to crisis only entered the dialogue when people began to protest and threaten political stability. Already, in late 2007, the rumblings of discontent over rising food prices surfaced as public protest in Uzbekistan and Mauritania. A continued sharp rise in food commodity prices the following year evoked similar protests in over 30 countries, ranging from Indonesia and Pakistan to numerous African states and to Latin America and the Caribbean.

The most prominent of these events attracted greater international attention as a result of the associated threats to the stability of governments and the sometimes brutal actions that were employed to suppress the protests. Numerous international experts, including those at the Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO) of the United Nations, and the World Bank, as well as independent scholars such as Jeffrey Sachs, argued for a rapid response to the food crisis precisely because of its potential to destabilize governments in the worst affected countries. Some governments responded to such perceived threats with force. Protesters were arrested and jailed (for example, in Morocco, Burkina Faso and Mauritania) and even killed (in Cameroon and India). Some of the more lasting images of the food crisis are those of Haitian street demonstrations that resulted in the resignation of the country’s prime minister, and those of rioting and repression in West Africa and India. Media representations of the crisis were, to a large extent, defined less by the hunger it engendered than by its political implications.

Additional global concerns were raised as governments responded to the popular uprisings by introducing economic policies – subsidies, wage increases and export restrictions on food – that contradicted ‘best practice’ established by World Bank and International Monetary Fund (IMF) economists. For some countries, this involved increasing government spending to improve access to food; for others, there was a retreat from the free-market principles instilled by the international community. In these cases, such responses demonstrated the potential for high food prices and hunger to unsettle the seemingly well-structured and secure process of incorporating developing countries within broader understandings of economic normalcy and best practice. Responding to a crisis, the World Bank and IMF recommended stop-gap solutions – a response intended to emphasize the necessarily temporary nature of any deviation from the economic policies and structures that they were promoting. The food crisis also exposed the error of a false reliance on ‘cheap food’ as the foundation for continued economic growth. The assumption that inexpensive food would ensure the low cost of labour in developing economies was a further element of the complacency that had taken hold within the global food system.

Our strong conviction that food security was no longer an issue created the need for a cause, for some villainous agent on which to pin this calamity. The list of suspects was substantial, providing targets to appeal to a variety of political and economic perspectives. The first set of suspects involved the demand side of the global food system, beginning with the newly emerging demand for grain to feed biofuel production as a solution to dwindling oil reserves and climate change. Because the introduction of incentives to promote biofuel coincided with the surge in food commodity prices, they were readily branded as a cause of the crisis. Other demand side factors identified as contributing to the crisis included rapid population growth and the escalating middle-class demands for less efficiently produced foods such as meat and dairy products, with China and India noted as specific examples. The impact of population growth was further exacerbated by accelerating urbanization and the increasing demand for imported food commodities in developing countries. These latter processes were the focus of assessments by neo-Malthusian and ‘limits to growth’ proponents including Paul Ehrlich of Stanford University and Lester Brown of the World Resources Institute.

Several food systems experts and organizations also emphasized the role of supply side effects on food availability and prices. In some cases, this argument coincided with concerns about global climate change as extreme weather events in Australia, Russia and elsewhere reduced the harvest of staple grains. Others, including Julian Cribb (2010), saw evidence that the lack of investment in agricultural science had resulted in diminishing productivity gains and increased environmental degradation. The World Bank and the IMF, meanwhile, promised greater investment emphasis on agricultural infrastructure in developing countries as a means to encourage increased production through access to markets. Lead economists did, however, acknowledge that it would be naive to expect an instantaneous response to, and benefit from, such policies.

Later explanations of the food crisis accounted for the diverse factors distorting food commodity prices as a perfect storm; in other words, the crisis was not so much the result of a single disrupting influence but rather, a result of the compounding effects of coincidental factors. Early references to a perfect storm came from those faced with disgruntled populations such as President Elías Antonio Saca of El Salvador. The metaphor was soon taken up by representatives of international organizations (including the UN World Food Programme) in order to emphasize the gravity of the situation and the improbability of a simple and fast resolution. The perfect storm metaphor implied, however, that the global food system functions well under normal conditions and that the real failure during the crisis was the unfortunate and ill-timed simultaneous pressures on food commodity supplies and prices. Thus, rather than acknowledging a fundamental flaw in the global food system, the crisis was seen as a situation that could be alleviated without revising existing approaches to food security.

More recently, both the media, and global food system experts have begun to reassess the food crisis and its causes as an event with identifiable boundaries. These analyses generally argue that one or more of the suspected causes of the crises may have been overemphasized at the time. Some of these reassessments, for example by the International Food Policy Research Institute (IFPRI), refer to comparisons to the earlier food crisis in 1972–74, resulting from a rapid increase in oil prices and pressure on commodity stocks due to increased purchasing from the Soviet Union and Eastern Europe. The general conclusion of such analyses is that the contributing factors in 2007–08 were substantially different from those in the early 1970s and, thus, involved new factors to which the global food system would eventually adjust. Additional causes of food insecurity external to the food system included the interrelation of the global financial crisis and food commodity prices. At one level, the dynamic of ‘financialization’ – where previously more tangible economic assets are converted into financial instruments and traded accordingly – is one of the signal characteristics of the world economy in the twenty-first century. In the case of 2008, however, the relative insecurity of traditional investment targets led to increased speculation on food commodity futures, exerting further upward pressure on prices. Such speculation represents the most extreme effect of the transformation of food into a commodity as its ‘value’ is determined on the basis of its potential return to investment relative to other commodities, with no recognition of its quality as an essential element of life. This situation, we argue, raises the essential issue of whether we treat food as a vital part of community, family and tradition, or as just another thing to be bought and sold.

In this book we also wish to suggest that the representation of the food crisis as an event, has undermined our ability to respond to global food security in positive and meaningful ways. To the extent that it assumes the capacity to maintain and reinforce a particular set of power relations in global society, the representation or descriptive narrative of a food crisis might be referred to as discourse. This discourse is then used as a rational basis to promote an inflexible, defined set of responses and policy solutions – in other words, the fact that a crisis occurred means that something is not working as it should. There has been a rupture. For the food crisis of 2008 the packaging of its causes within a descriptive phrase – the perfect storm – assumes that we know exactly what is not working. The result is a failure to acknowledge, let alone address, the injustices inherent to the existing food system. In the concluding chapter, we will argue that the concept of utopia – that is, envisioning an alternative food system founded in the recognition of the qualities of food, including the moral value of the right to food – offers a means to begin restructuring the food system in more just and flexible terms.

The argument that underlies the analysis in the following chapters is that, rather than an isolated event caused by a perfect storm of factors, the crisis was indicative of problems in the global food system as a whole. This is not a novel argument, but it is one that bears repeating with the essential need to shift away from business-as-usual. The approaches and positions utilized by the contributing authors to the book vary to some extent, but they share a common perspective such that an improved global food system requires radical changes to its organization. The following section introduces some of the theoretical background that contributes to the critical perspectives of the authors. An important element of these perspectives lies in identifying the crisis as a systemic effect that is likely to recur.

The food crisis as point of departure

Food system critics conclude that business as usual cannot continue or, as Lang (2010, p97) argues, ‘The crisis in 2005–8 was not a blip, but creeping normality’. The record food commodity prices and events in North Africa and the Middle East in early 2011 might bear this out. But just what does business as usual imply? To answer this question, we must briefly examine the historical development of the global food system.

To unravel the meteorology of the perfect storm we first have to understand how different our current food system is compared even to a mere 100 years ago. For the most part, countries and regions were food self-sufficient (or drew heavily on their colonial territories) and historic food crises related more to catastrophic environmental events – floods, droughts, disease – or despotic or colonial oppression, or a not so subtle combination of the two, as demonstrated by the Irish Potato Famine of the 1840s. The dramatic changes ushered in through the violent reorganization of geopolitics through two world wars and numerous other conflicts and the upending of historical colonialism led to massive structural changes in the food system following World War Two.

Since the late 1940s, the global food system has grown more complex (and volatile) in two major ways. First, countries in the Developed World shifted their policy towards food security and began a process of massive investment into agricultural intensification and industrialization within their domestic farm sectors. Second, corporations have consolidated the control of the system they began exercising as colonial plantations. At the same time, those corporations have grown larger, more complex and more powerful. Finally, the emergence of international food organizations (for example, the FAO) to oversee the intricate system implies a humanistic (read: moral) imperative to feed the world. Within the business-as-usual model, such organizations act as a moral foil to corporate consolidation. In other words, the corporations are free to profit from the production of food, leaving the governance structures to feed those that the markets bypass. Markets facilitate the movement of goods and ideas across vast areas of space. Prior to the emergence of market activity solely for profit (capitalism’s defining feature), markets enabled the novel and the necessary to move like a gas – from constrained space into more open space. But the privileging of market reasoning for profit ignores the benefits and moral rationales for ensuring a nourished population. Even Adam Smith, he of the invisible hand, argued as much.

Within the business-as-usual model, food operates just like any other commodity. Related to the rhetoric of feeding the world, corporations or farmers-as-subcontractors are responsible for producing enough. And yet, the full picture is much murkier. The global food system has consolidated, putting more food under control of fewer firms. In the aftermath, the ideal of consumer choice erodes along with the potential for food self-provisioning.

In addition to the emergence of a powerful corporate sector in global food trading and the entrenchment of the neoliberal approach to global food relations during the last half century, other key actors and processes have contributed to the current crisis. For decades, governments and government-like o...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Table Of Contents
• Food Systems Failure
• Food Systems Failure
• 1 Introduction: shocking the global food system
• PART 1 The contradictions of the ‘feed the world’ ideology
• 2 Agriculture and food systems: our current challenge
• 3 Let us eat cake? Historically reframing the problem of world hunger and its purported solutions
• 4 Trading into hunger? Trading out of hunger? International food trade and the debate on food security
• 5 Biofuels and the financialization of the global food system
• 6 The right to food: a right for everyone
• 7 Plentiful food? Nutritious food?
• 8 A Utopian perspective on global food security
• PART 2 The condition of neoliberal agriculture
• 9 Climate change and the resilience of commodity food production in Australia
• 10 Food security and the de-agrarianization of the Indonesian economy
• 11 ‘Soyization’ and food security in South America
• 12 Negotiating organic, fair and ethical trade: lessons from smallholders in Uganda and Kenya
• 13 Food for thought? Linking urban agriculture and local food production for food security and development in the South Pacific
• 14 Conclusions: Towards a more just and flexible global food system