The Global Food Economy

The Battle for the Future of Farming

Tony Weis

• Publisher: Zed Books
• Year: 2008
• ISBN:
  9781848136885
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Politica e relazioni internazionali
• Subtopic: Politica pubblica a livello agricolo

The Global Food Economy examines the human and ecological cost of what we eat. The current food economy is characterized by immense contradictions. Surplus 'food mountains', bountiful supermarkets, and rising levels of obesity stand in stark contrast to widespread hunger and malnutrition. Transnational companies dominate the market in food and benefit from subsidies, whilst farmers in developing countries remain impoverished. Food miles, mounting toxicity and the 'ecological hoofprint' of livestock mean that the global food economy rests on increasingly shaky environmental foundations. This book looks at how such a system came about, and how it is being enforced by the WTO. Ultimately, Weis considers how we can find a way of building socially just, ecologically rational and humane food economies.

ONE

The global food economy: contradictions and crises

Uneven bounty

The shocking news is that hunger is increasing … There are now 842 million people suffering from undernourishment in a world that already grows more than enough food to feed the global population …

It is an outrage that in the 21st century one child under the age of five will die every five seconds from hunger-related diseases … Hunger will kill more people than all wars fought this year. Yet where is the fight against hunger? …

Hunger has increased, rather than decreased since 1996. This makes a mockery of the promises made by Governments at the World Food Summits held in 1996 and 2002, as well as the promises contained in the Millennium Development Goals. (Jean Ziegler, Special Rapporteur of the UN Commission on Human Rights, 2004)

Per capita agricultural productivity grew steadily over the second half of the twentieth century, and while this growth has slowed, there has never been more food available per person on a global scale than there is today (FAO 2002a). As the Special Rapporteur of the UN Commission on Human Rights put plainly, and as the Food and Agricultural Organization (FAO) of the UN has persistently emphasized, the volume of food produced cannot explain the persistence of hunger and undernourishment. In fact, the UN World Food Programme suggests that the volume of food produced is more than one and a half times what is needed to provide every person on earth with a nutritious diet. And yet while the percentage of the world’s population living with severe food shortages has declined in recent decades, absolute numbers have grown. Roughly 800 million of the 842 million who suffer from chronic undernourishment live in developing countries. The FAO (2003: 4) calls this a ‘continent of the hungry’ that outnumbers Latin America or sub-Saharan Africa. Yet while severe episodic famines occasionally make the news in rich countries, the enduring famine of the ‘continent of the hungry’ is a near-silent one in rich countries. In addition, more than 2 billion people routinely suffer micro-nutrient deficiencies (ibid.; Pinstrup-Andersen 2000), and it is difficult to enumerate just how many people are in various other states of food insecurity that go unmeasured, such as the routine uncertainty of finding the next meal (Magdoff 2004). It is also difficult to derive statistics on the gendered asymmetries of hunger and food insecurity, though this should not obscure the fact that women and girls in many places are further marginalized within households and cultures. But whatever the challenges of measurement, plainly we live in a world where ‘“hunger amidst scarcity” has given way to “hunger amidst abundance”’ (Araghi 2000: 155).

The widely cited UN and World Bank poverty estimates are that 2.8 billion people live on less than US$2 a day, well over two-fifths of the world’s population, and that 1.2 billion people live in ‘extreme poverty’, defined as less than US$1 a day – and some argue that even these enormous figures are serious underestimates (Sanjay and Pogge 2005; Yates 2004). Virtually all of this population lives in the developing world. While universalizing poverty yardsticks have long been wrought with pejorative cultural assumptions, and used to justify dislocation and social upheaval in the name of Western-guided development and modernization, as subsistence needs are increasingly mediated by the money economy – in other words, non-market access to food, water, land and shelter shrinks – poverty lines defined in dollars have more generalized relevance to an understanding of material deprivation. They also help to give some measure to the scale of global inequality. The annual Human Development Report by the UN Development Programme (UNDP) has drawn consistent attention to the fact that the top fifth of humanity controls more than four-fifths of its wealth.

The crises of hunger and poverty are especially acute in rural areas, and regionally in South Asia and sub-Saharan Africa. There is a broadly inverse relationship between the scale of agriculture in an economy and the prevalence of hunger; of the population of the ‘extreme poor’ and hungry, roughly three-quarters live in rural areas and more than seven in ten depend on agriculture for their survival. Agriculture accounts for 9 per cent of GDP and more than half of all employment for the developing world as a whole, and these averages soar to 30 per cent of GDP and 70 per cent of employment in countries where more than one-third of the population is undernourished. South Asia has the largest total population of chronic undernourished at 303 million, nearly one in four, while sub-Saharan Africa has the largest relative population at 194 million, over one in three (FAO 2003). In sub-Saharan Africa, food insecurity is also deeply entwined with HIV-AIDS, as most of the more than 20 million infected live in abject poverty. While the links are not adequately understood, mounting evidence suggests that poverty, food insecurity and land degradation fuel social instability and violent conflict (Pinstrup-Andersen 2000; Berry 1997).

Opposing the problem of hunger and food insecurity is that of obesity. Globally, the population of obese people now actually outnumbers the population of the undernourished. In 2000, the World Health Organization (WHO) identified obesity as a ‘global epidemic’ given this scale and the fact that it is the main cause of heart disease, the primary risk factor for diabetes, and is a major contributing factor in some cancers and other diseases. The contradictions of obesity and hunger in a world of aggregate surpluses are reflected clearly in the literal and proverbial belly of the global food economy’s beast, the United States. Today, 12 per cent of Americans (roughly 35 million citizens) are considered to be food insecure, 4 per cent ‘with hunger’ (over 11 million) (Nord et al. 2005), while 65 per cent are considered ‘overweight and obese’ and 30 per cent ‘obese’, roughly double the levels from 1980, as diet-related diseases are pervasive (Hedley et al. 2004; for a more popularly oriented account, see Crister 2004). The US Surgeon General recently warned that obesity would soon be responsible for killing as many Americans each year as smoking (Economist 2003). These perverse poles of the global food economy, obesity and hunger, reflect the basic reality that while food is elemental to life and health it is conceived as a commodity and not a right – food aid and food banks, which reflect a minimalist conception of food rights, notwithstanding – and the motive force of profit prevails over concerns about equity and nutrition.

The place of agro-TNCs in the US food economy, and a fast globalizing model, is likened by Heffernan (2000: 66) to an ‘hourglass which controls the flow of sand from the top to the bottom’, reflecting how a small number of massive firms are situated between many producers and even more consumers, a position that gives them ‘a disproportionate amount of influence on the quality, quantity, type, location of production, and price of the product at the production stage and throughout the entire food system’. On one side, fast-consolidating agro-input TNCs are increasingly controlling seeds, fertilizers, agro-chemicals and livestock antibiotics and compelling the standardization and industrialization of farming techniques, while a handful of very large-scale manufacturers also dominate farm machinery. On the other side, agro-food TNCs are controlling, refining, combining, distributing and marketing what is being produced on farms in expansive new ways, and systematically detaching food consumption patterns from time, space and cultural traditions with long-distance sourcing and distribution networks, sophisticated processing and packaging systems that reduce perishability, and marketing tactics that forge strong consumer loyalty (Friedmann 2004: 1993), part of a more generalized phenomenon Klein (1999) dubs ‘branding’. Globally, the rise and spread of processed and pre-prepared meals have implicitly served to undermine the cultural significance of food preparation and consumption, while the marketing efforts of agro-food TNCs in many parts of the world have explicitly aimed to ‘downgrade not only local diets per se but also the symbolic value of traditional foods … as culturally inferior’ (George 1990: 148). Also related to branding strategies and the de-spatialization and de-culturation of food is the corporate manipulation of place and culture, with many packaged items given an exotic façade that often bears little or no connection to where the food was actually produced and processed: ‘Mexican’ corn chips, ‘Moroccan’ soup, ‘Mediterranean’ pizza, ‘Caribbean’ fruit punch, ‘Cantonese’ spring rolls – the list is long. Where food is not so easily decoupled from culture, agro-food TNCs have employed nuanced strategies to conceal global sourcing patterns, such as using various localized brand names in different places (Fagan 1997). As Western entertainment and media exports expand throughout the world they are another nebulous but significant influence on cultural change, lifestyle aspirations and, at some level, diet. Dietary change also relates to increasing urbanization and the desire or need for convenience and pre-prepared foods in fast-paced, fragmented lifestyles (Sexton 1996).

In short, ‘consumers’ maps of meaning’ are being reshaped (Cook 1994: 236) and diets are converging – taking on a ‘“food from nowhere” character’ (McMichael 2004a: 11) as they bear less relation to seasonal rhythms and local productive bases. As Friedmann (1994, 1993) has emphasized, the global food economy is characterized by distance and durability, something which is highlighted by the useful concept of ‘food miles’. Food mile calculations account for the distance that food has travelled from land to mouth, which has steadily increased in industrialized nations (Lang and Heasman 2004; Halweil 2002) to the point where estimates of food miles for the average food item in the USA and Canada typically range between 2,000 and 2,500 kilometres. And further, these estimates do not generally include the distance that the inputs which went into producing the food have travelled, which are especially significant for bulky fertilizers, or the petroleum involved in fertilizer and agro-chemical production.

The FAO (2002a) notes how dietary convergence is especially marked in the rich countries of the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD), commenting that change in diets has closely followed income growth and has occurred ‘almost irrespectively of geography, history, culture, or religion’. But the increasing detachment of diets from space is occurring almost everywhere to some degree, with the populous and booming economies of China and East Asia, South-East Asia and India seen by agro-food TNCs as having the biggest capacity for market growth. This process has clear class dimensions, and is most extreme at both ends of the world’s economic spectrum: for the world’s poorest, who depend on food durables like flour, cornmeal and rice shipped from temperate breadbasket regions, and in affluent supermarkets, North and South, which possess a dizzying selection of fresh and packaged items sourced from around the world – Reardon et al. (2003) discusses the growth of supermarkets in the developing world. And as the health implications of industrial foods become better understood and organic production commands premium prices, given the cost-accounting system in which food produced by machinery, fossil fuels and chemicals appears so much more cheaply than food produced by labour-intensive organic methods, the world’s wealthy consumers are those poised to better access the most fresh, nutritious and chemical-free food baskets (Friedmann 2003).

As the globalization of food brings wealthy consumers greater access to more diverse and healthy foods and the poor more refined food durables, there is one especially conspicuous space of dietary convergence between these classes: the proliferation of junk food – soft drinks, packaged snacks and so-called convenience foods that are full of fats, sweeteners, artificial flavours and colouring. Many of the same small farmers in the developing world who cannot earn a decent livelihood on the land can now find a can of Coke, a tin of Nestlé Milo or a bag of Doritos in their rural shops. Fast-food restaurants, so ubiquitous in the American cityscape (Schlosser 2002), are another clear embodiment of this corporate-led dietary convergence and the uneven bounty of the global food economy. Fast-food restaurants are spreading rapidly on a global scale, especially in wealthy urban areas of Asia and Latin America and the Caribbean. The exuberant forecast of one of the world’s fast-food giants, Yum! Brands, gives a broader suggestion about the corporate strategizing involved in dietary change:

From Hong Kong to Malaysia, a Customer Mania revolution is taking hold – driving customer loyalty and differentiating the brands … And there’s one thing for certain – this maniacal focus on the customer is driving global growth – growth in sales, growth in profits and growth in new units … We also had big wins with new product launches last year … New promotions, such as the ‘Hot & On Time or It’s Free,’ guarantees in Australia and Korea, and the introduction of the Colonel’s famous KFC bucket in China have added to our revenue growth … in China, our fastest growing and most profitable country outside the US … [our] business volumes and margins continue to be off the charts, and KFC has been rated the number one brand in the entire country!¹

In short, as food production and consumption become bound increasingly tightly within an integrating and uneven global system, small-farm livelihoods are becoming less viable, traditions surrounding harvest, preparation and mealtimes are severed and agriculture is rapidly losing its place as ‘an anchor of societies, states and cultures’ as it is transformed into ‘a tenuous component of corporate global sourcing strategies’ (McMichael 2000a: 23).

The industrial grain-livestock complex

The 12,000-item supermarket noted in the Preface presents a compelling impression of diversity, but apart from the globally sourced fresh produce, the majority of the shelves are packed by what George (1990: 44) aptly calls ‘commercial pseudo-variety’. The global food economy is increasingly dominated by a small range of crops and farm animal products, with the basic same core of ‘raw materials’ reconstituted in myriad ways with a range of standardized additives and fabricated flavours. Schlosser’s (2002) description of the secretive corporate laboratories cooking up flavours in test tubes helps illuminate one dimension of this very vividly.

As many as seven thousand plant species have been cultivated or collected for food in human history, but this diversity is shrinking precipitously. There was a drastic decline in both the diversity of crop species planted in agricultural systems and the genetic diversity within species (called ‘genetic erosion’) during the twentieth century, with these declines as great as 75 to 90 per cent according to FAO estimates. Thirty crops now essentially feed the world, providing 95 per cent of humanity’s plant-based calorific and protein intake. The world’s top ten crops (rice, wheat, maize, soybeans, sorghum, millet, potatoes, sweet potatoes, sugar cane/beet and bananas) supply over three-quarters of humanity’s plant-based calories and dominate the world’s cultivated lands, and the ‘big three’ cereals alone (rice, wheat and maize) account for more than half of all plant-based calories and 85 per cent of the total volume of world grains produced (FAOSTAT; FAO 1997). Though the growth of soybeans (an oilseed) has been spatially concentrated in the USA, Brazil, Argentina and China, its scale and central role in the industrial fusion of grain and livestock sectors is such that it is now part of a ‘big four’ of global crop production. Soybean cake, the hardened mass after the oil has been pressed, provides a protein-intensive feedstock, and this now comprises almost t...