theme 8

• In the developmentalist era, industrialization has simultaneously transformed agriculture and degraded its natural and cultural base
• Food production and consumption

  Embodies the contradictory aspects of this transformation
• The crisis of development has generated two basic responses

  1. Attempt to redefine development as a global project, including harnessing biotechnology to resolve the food security question

  2. Series of countermovements attempting to simultaneously reassert the value of local, organic foods, and challenge the attempt on the part of food corporations and national and global institutions to subject the food question to market solutions
• The power of food


  Lies in its material and symbolic functions of linking nature, human survival, health, culture and livelihood as a focus of resistance to corporate takeover of life itself
• Food poses an interesting paradox as the world slouches toward the twenty-first century
• Food (and its security) looms as a force that threatens the current hegemony of the market
• Just as international monetary relations today are fragile, requiring continual ad hoc adjustments, and countered by the expansion of alternative currency movements


  The world food order is increasingly fragile, supplemented by ad hoc food assistance programs, and countered by alternative agricultures
• Food consumption relations are somewhat less fictitious than monetary relations, and their deterioration may well generate more powerful dissent than the ongoing volatility of currency relations in selected world regions
• The series of IMF food riots over the last two decades attest to the power of food to generate substantial critique of the myth of free markets
• The fiction of what the corporate world chooses to call "genetically-improved" foods is only sustainable through the complicity of governments, scientists, and agro-chemical corporations in concealing ingredients from consumers and biological hazards from citizens
• The power of the food question is imminent
• Development was synonymous with industrialization - a movement signified in Britain's rise to power as workshop of the world
• Development became associated with industrial rationality. It 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
• The crisis of development

  Refers to the breakdown of consensus regarding the feasibility and credibility of "development"
• It is usually argued, by international relations scholars as well as by development specialists, that food aid donation is motivated solely by the economic and political self-interest of the donor, and that it is efficient in furthering these interests

  
• This article argues that both these statements are wrong, and goes on to develop an alternative interpretation, centering on the operational relevance of a developmental international food aid regime

  
• Food aid


  Transfer of food (mainly cereals, as well as oils, dairy, and other products) on concessional terms from one country to another

  
• Forms of food aid

  • Emergency food aid
  • Project food aid
  • Program (structural) food aid

  
• The Agricultural Trade Development and Assistance Act (PL480 or "Food for Peace") was passed by the U.S. Congress in 1954, institutionalizing international food aid

  
• The crisis of development, as a national project, has been displaced to the global arena, and further debased
• PL480 Title I


  Offers concessional sales to LDC governments for sale on their domestic market
• Through the enlistment of multilateral institutions, and the pressure to maintain currency credibility in a global money market governed by speculation and securitization (credit management), national governments are busy co-authoring the rules of a global market order
• PL480 Title II


  Donates food to NGOs based in the U.S. and to the UN World Food Programme, for emergency aid or targeted feeding programmes

  
• This hasty and short-sighted pursuit of globalization expresses the crisis of development
• PL480 Title III


  Food donations to low-income food-deficit countries, with the exclusive aim of contributing to food security

  
• There is currently a wholesale effort underway to liberalize agriculture on a world scale
• The EEC started donating food aid in 1968, with a complex decision-making structure initially, which was later simplified

  
• The recent Uruguay Round, which prepared the rules for the global economic order, included agricultural reform as a prominent and original initiative in the GATT
• Other long-standing food aid donors

  • Canada
  • Australia
  • Argentina

  
• Reduction of farm subsidies and agricultural trade protections defined this initiative, which was overwhelmingly authored by states and agribusiness corporations who stood to benefit from agricultural trade deregulation
• In the 1990s, the WTO became vehicle of reform of the system of international trade in foodstuffs
• New food aid donors since the end of the 1960s

  • Almost all other OECD countries
  • Spain and Greece (upon joining the EEC)
  • China
  • Saudi Arabia
  • India
  • Turkey
  • OPEC countries

  
• 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
• Around 25% of global food aid has been channeled through the UN World Food Programme since the last decade, making it the second largest single agency providing food donations after the U.S.

  
• 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 also constitute the crisis of development, offering alternative solutions and trajectories to the globalist response
• The size of food aid donations varied significantly among donors and between different years, both in volume and in value, with the U.S. by far surpassing the other donors in both categories, but its predominance is declining

  
• As a proportion of cereal production or of cereal stocks ("surpluses"), the U.S. gives no more food aid than the EEC, Japan, Australia, Canada, or even Sweden

  
• Whether and to what extent a corporate regime comes to dominate world food systems will depend on its political sustainability