The Food System

Geoff Tansey, Anthony Worsley

• Editorial: Routledge
• Año: 2014
• ISBN:
  9781135047948
• Edición: 1
• Categoría: Biowissenschaften
• Categoría: Ökologie

Food is a massive industry and the many key players involved have very different interests. In wealthy nations those interests can range from corporate survival and maintaining profitability in a market with limited demand, to promoting a healthy diet and ensuring food safety. For the poor, the emphasis is all too often on simply getting enough to eat. As information technology and biotechnology are set to revolutionize the food system, it is essential to understand the broad context in which the different actors operate, so that all the world's people can enjoy a safe, secure, sufficient and sustainable food supply.

This text provides an overview of today's dominant food system - one developed in and controlled by northern industrialized countries, and one that is becoming increasingly globalized.

1

Introduction

The man and woman in the street know that their world is changing and worry about it.…Nothing is certain except that we face innumerable uncertainties; But simply recognizing that fact provides a vital starting point, and is, of course, far better than being blindly unaware of how our world is changing.

Kennedy, Paul (1993) Preparing for the Twenty-first Century Harper Collins, London, pp344 and 348.

This book is a guide to the entire food system. However, we focus on the rich, industrialized world where the global food system is being developed and promoted. Food issues are linked to the exertion of power, influence and control by the different actors within the system.

Of course, no guide can go into detail about all the topics it covers. In trying to provide a broad sweep across the system in a few hundred pages, we can only give an introduction – each chapter could be a book in itself. We hope to encourage readers to look further and with better informed eyes into the issues and areas that concern them.

Who is it For?

The book will be relevant to you if you are:

a student on a food-related course – from nutrition to dietetics, home economics to catering, agriculture-horticulture to retail management – or a student of the behavioural and social sciences;

concerned about the balance between the public good, private interests and long-term sustainability in the production and consumption of food;

an ordinary citizen interested in aspects of the food you eat, such as its safety, healthiness, and its social and environmental effects.

The Food System

We use the idea of a food system in discussing the how and why of what we eat – ie, how food is produced and reaches our mouths and why we eat what we do. It subsumes the terms ‘food chain’, which is too linear a model for today, and ‘food economy’, which is too narrowly economic. The idea of a system implies that there is an interconnection beneath the surface of things which, as we shall see, is very much the case when we look at any aspect of food today. The food system links three different aspects of life:

Biological: the living processes used to produce food and their ecological sustainability.

Economic and political: the power and control which different groups exert over the different parts of the system.

Social and cultural: the personal relations, community values and cultural traditions which affect people’s use of food.

The modern food system has really come together since the Second World War. As The Oxford English Dictionary defines a system, it is a ‘set or assemblage of things connected, associated or interdependent so as to form a complex unity, a whole’. The food system reflects the prevailing social and economic influences around the world and is a system largely developed, run and promoted world-wide by economic institutions in the rich and powerful industrial nations.

The triumph…

Food and water are our most basic needs. Food is such an obvious need that it often escapes our close attention until it is not there or until we consume an unhealthy mix of it. One of the greatest achievements of this century is the feeding of very many more human beings than ever before. In the industrialized countries, food is available in great variety when and where people want it. For an increasing number of developing countries in Latin America and Asia, famine and food scarcities have become a thing of the past.

…and challenge

Yet, as we write this book:

millions of people still face starvation in Africa owing to conflicts, drought and inadequate policies, while Europe’s farmers are having to set aside land because they produce too much;

the USA and the European Community, after coming to the brink of a trade war over agricultural subsidies, agreed a compromise in the General Agreement on Tariffs and Trade (GATT) world trade talks which made many farmers in rich and poor countries fear for their future;

a large British firm, part of one of the world’s largest multinational food companies, is fined for what trading standards officers reportedly called ‘creeping adulteration’ – ie, putting soya in a product labelled ‘pure ground beef’;

governments struggle to balance consumer and health demands for better food labelling with the more conservative approaches of some industry groups;

food safety remains an issue for consumers in rich countries as reported food poisonings increase;

the decline in biodiversity is speeding up, causing concern about current farming practices and the long-term sustainability of food supplies;

the World Declaration on Nutrition, agreed at the United Nations’ first International Conference on Nutrition in December 1992, states that ‘about 780 million people in developing countries still do not have access to enough food to meet their basic daily needs’ and ‘at the same time, chronic non-communicable diseases related to excessive or unbalanced dietary intakes often lead to premature deaths in both developed and developing countries’;

the world’s human population is forecast to double in size to 10 billion in the next 50 years, yet every year more fertile land becomes desert or is built on.

Clearly, there is a long way to go before the food system serves the needs of all the world’s people, either now or in the future. From farm to mouth, the health, safety, honesty, availability, equity and environmental impact of today’s food system is ringing some alarm bells.

But we must look beyond today. The present food system serves best people in the rich industrialized countries – that 20 per cent of humanity that uses about 80 per cent of the world’s resources. The questions are: can such a division of the world be sustainable and will the food system meet the needs of ten billion people in 2050? To answer such questions, we need to see the connections that exist, and how change in one aspect of the food system can affect others. As we discuss what the major actors in the food system are currently doing, these are the questions to bear in mind. A much greater debate is needed about our food future, and it is one to which everyone, either as a worker in the food system, or as a politician or consumer, can contribute.

A changing world

The 1990s are bringing major and rapid changes. Six societal changes world-wide will have great influence on the food system:

1. Increasing longevity – people are living longer – and the numbers of people are increasing (see Figure 1.1). Current trends will reduce the diversity of species and put greater strains on the earth’s ecosystems – from increasing desertification and deforestation of land to pollution of the atmosphere and the seas and destruction of the ozone layer.

2. Increasing urbanization – Europe and North America are no longer the only major urban regions of the globe. It is becoming an urban world. The number of large conurbations has increased rapidly throughout Latin America (Mexico City is the world’s largest), Asia and Africa. Urbanization has extended the food chain, linking farmer to eater, and the spread of supermarkets has been spectacular. In Japan, for instance, in the early 1980s only 10 per cent of consumers shopped at supermarkets; in 1992 the proportion rose to 60 per cent. Urbanization fuels the rise of a consumer monoculture – urban people buy food produced for and carried to cities from all parts of the globe. Centralized buying by supermarket chains can lead to smaller producers being squeezed out of the market as they are unable to produce the quantities required.

3. Globalization of the food market – large companies have expanded to control larger and larger shares of trade in agriculture, manufacturing or retailing, with smaller businesses from farms to grocers’ shops being squeezed out of business. The effects of the Third World debt crisis, the dominance of free-market ideologies, plus the collapse of communism in Eastern Europe and the former Soviet Union are helping the globalization and marketization of economies all over the world, drawing even the most isolated self-provisioning peasants into a global market. Business life has never been as corporatized.

Source: UK World Population Prospects 1993, quoted in Nygaard, David F (1994), ‘World Population Projections, 2020’ 2020 Brief 5, IFPRI, Washington DC.

Figure 1.1 UN population projections, 1990–2020 by region, medium variant

Global companies owe scant allegiance to particular nation states. Frequently, profits made in one country end up in the parent company’s country; national taxes can be avoided through creative accounting schemes, such as transfer pricing or repayment of loans, so that real profits are turned into paper losses. Co-operation between nation states or their citizens, however, does not match the size and power of these global companies, so their activities are largely of their own choosing. The concentration of economic power into a smaller number of boards of management and the limited power of shareholders to control executives are leading to a concentration of food power of concern to governments and citizens.

4. Increasing technological change – major changes, particularly in biotechnology and information technology, offer different actors varying kinds of control over their parts of the food system. Genetic engineering, for example, may allow plant and animal species to be redesigned, and patent laws permit the patenting of seeds, plants and animals, thus transforming previously public goods into private property. These and other possibilities are generating much controversy over what should be done and how, and who should receive the benefits and bear the costs of change.

5. Changes in attitudes and values – market researchers in countries like the USA, Germany and Australia report that increasing numbers of citizens and companies are becoming more interested in community values such as honesty, ‘substance’ and environmental sustainability. The ‘Me’ generation may be rethinking its self-centredness. There is also an attempt to remove overt discrimination in many societies, shown by, for example, the increased sensitivity over the use of nonsexist and non-racist written language, and Equal Opportunity and Affirmative Action legislation in various countries. Such changes are reflected in food advertising – for example, one Australian advertisement for lean meat now focuses on the advantages of meat for women (‘plenty of iron’) rather than for men, as found in older advertisements. There is some debate about the desirability and effect of these changes. Are they cosmetic or do they represent real changes in the power balance between social categories?

6. The decline of the traditional ‘housekeeping’ role – an increasing number of women are entering the job market or returning to full- or part-time paid employment after their child-bearing years. The traditional role of the house-wife, which was largely a time-consuming occupation concerned with the preservation, preparation and serving of food and requiring many skills to process basic food in...