political economy of food

• Stutted and Starveu
• World Bank and, later, the World Trade Organization. The then-director-general of the World Trade Organization, Renato Ruggiero, put it well in 1996 when he said, 'We are no longer writing the rules of interaction among separate national economies. We are writing the constitution of a single global economy." The new constitution for global economic development wasn't designed to deliver wholesale improvements in the quality of life of the poorest." It sits, rather, as the latest episode in the long history of the generation of supplies of cheap food to prevent insurrection. Lower trade barriers in the countries of the Global South were introduced not as a means to help the poor out of poverty, nor as a means to agricultural development, but as an emergency measure to forestall bankruptcy. Rather than giving choices and opportunities to the impoverished, international food politics has sought control through intervention, patronage and, occasionally, violence. Yet much of the language of these food system policies was suffused with concerns for freedom and security. If the result of the food system policies was that small farmers were denied both of these (as we've also seen in chapter 2), it is not unreasonable to ask for whom, then, the world was being made secure, and whose freedom was being expanded. That is a question for the next chapter.
• Development


  Synonymous with industrialization - a movement signified in Britain's rise to power as workshop of the world
• Development became associated with industrial rationality
• Development viewed nature as an unproblematic human laboratory and rendered rural society as a residual domain
• Food was removed from its direct link to local ecology and culture, and became an input in urban diets and industrial processing plants
• There is a counter-movement towards community agriculture and fresh and organic food that corresponds to the excesses of industrialism and the crisis of development
• Crisis of development


  Breakdown of consensus regarding the feasibility and credibility of "development"
• The crisis of development has been displaced to the global arena, and further debased
• There is a wholesale effort underway to liberalize agriculture on a world scale, including reduction of farm subsidies and agricultural trade protections
• The WTO became vehicle of reform of the system of international trade in foodstuffs
• The specter of a corporate regime organizing world food production and consumption relations via unsustainable monocultures, terminator genes, and class-based diets confirms the limits of development as an inclusive organizing myth of national prosperity, and reinvents it as an exclusive global process premised on eliminating the social gains of citizenship and of national developmentalism
• There is a plethora of alternatives - including community supported and sustainable agriculture, community food security coalitions, organic food, principles of bio-diversity, vegetarianism, fair trade movements, eco-feminism - that constitute the crisis of development, offering alternative solutions and trajectories to the globalist response
• Corporate regime


  A set of power relations where formal rules and operating procedures are subject to continual contention and resistance
• The corporate regime, as institutionalized in the WTO, is incomplete and contradictory - precisely because the world order is authored by competing and unequal nation-states, some of which view multilateral rules as sources of national corporate power
• Globalization is a higher-order version of the development project, with information technologies and bio-technologies as the leading sectors
• Globalism seeks to discard or weaken the public welfare function in order to elevate the logic of the market
• Markets are political institutions - states/multilateral institutions are reconstructing markets by restructuring states and their inter-relations
• The WTO is as close to the institutional foundation of a corporate regime as you can get
• In the US, two percent of the farms grow fifty percent of agricultural produce, the average family farm earns only fourteen percent of its income from the farm, and ninety-five percent of American food is a corporate product
• Food company centralization involves subordination of producers
• Under the dictates of debt rescheduling and market reforms, rural regions across the south are being reconstructed as agro-export platforms, compromising local food security
• The current restructuring of world agriculture intensifies a global division of agriculture labor, where trade in low-value temperate cereals and oilseeds has been historically dominated by the North, and trade in high-value products has distributed increasingly to corporate agro-exporters (or their contract farmers) producing in the South
• Agriculture becomes less and less an anchor of societies, states, and cultures, and more and more a tenuous component of corporate global sourcing strategies
• Since biblical times, government has played a dominant and often a demanding role in food and farming
• The Egyptian pharaoh took 20 percent of all food production from his farmers as a tax
• Some governments in Africa to the present day burden farmers with taxes of comparable magnitude, often collecting the tax indirectly through the price manipulations of state-monopoly marketing agencies or through overvalued currencies that tax the producers of all tradable goods
• The goal of such policies

  To provide the benefit of "cheap food" to urban dwellers, including the employees of the government itself, the army, the police, and the poorly paid civil servants who work, nominally, in the government ministry buildings
• In most wealthy countries, governments tax urban consumers and provide subsidies to farmers
• In postagricultural societies, farmers are far less numerous than urban dwellers, but they are educated, extremely well organized, and capable of using their political clout to extract resources from the government
• Food politics


  The struggle over how the losses and gains from state action are allocated in the food and farming sector
• Food politics is different from other kinds of politics because of the way food and farming sectors change, as each state struggles to make its own transition from being primarily agricultural and poor to being increasingly industrial and less poor and eventually to being largely postindustrial and wealthy
• In the United States and Europe during the peak decades of industrialization in the mid-20th century, it was paradoxically farmers who took the strongest action in the political marketplace for food policy
• Today, as societies in the United States and Europe move into a postindustrial age of much greater urban affluence and many fewer farmers, the policies previously set in place to please and privilege farmers are coming under challenge
• Famines are usually confined to nondemocratic countries, such as those living under colonial rule or authoritarian regimes
• Even in our modern age of globalization, the conduct of food politics remains persistently local
• In Africa today, despite globalization, only 15 percent of total cereals consumption is satisfied from imported supplies
• In South Asia, only 6 percent of wheat consumption is supplied through imports and only 1 percent of rice consumption
• The world's biggest importer of corn is Japan
• Typically, rich countries import from other rich countries