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Product Details
| ISBN-13: | 9781780448794 |
|---|---|
| Publisher: | Fernwood |
| Publication date: | 11/15/2013 |
| Sold by: | Barnes & Noble |
| Format: | eBook |
| Pages: | 146 |
| Sales rank: | 779,983 |
| File size: | 2 MB |
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CHAPTER 1
The Food Regime Project
The food regime project is an ongoing analysis by scholars and activists of the political geography of the global food system. At each end of extensive food supply chains producers and consumers are increasingly aware of the global reach of the twenty-first-century food system (Patel 2007). Producers, ranging from contract farmers through migrant and plantation workers to smallholders dispossessed in the name of global food system efficiencies, are keenly aware of how their labor, resources and habitats serve consumers elsewhere. Consumers, dining along the global food chain, from hamburger to beefsteak, are increasingly confronted with disparities between food from somewhere and food from nowhere (Bové and Dufour 2001). How the food chain binds and transforms the world's different cultures via commodification is the subject of the food regime project.
The "food regime" concept was a product of its time: of declining national regulation and rising "globalization." Food regime analysis combined Immanuel Wallerstein's concept of the world system (1974) and Michel Aglietta's concept of regulation of capital accumulation (1979), situating the rise and decline of national agricultures within the geopolitical history of capitalism. It was not simply about food, but about the politics of food relations. An initial definition of the food regime stated that it linked "international relations of food production and consumption to forms of accumulation broadly distinguishing periods of capitalist transformation since 1870" (Friedmann and McMichael 1989: 95). Capitalism was periodized in geopolitical terms and its periodization coincided with two different moments in the life of the nation-state. This analysis interpreted the historical conditions under which the nation-state emerged through the lens of the agri-food trade. It built on the insight that the integrated national economy, absent in Britain's "workshop of the world" strategy, came forth in the settler states of the New World. Here, national agricultural and industrial sectors were mutually conditioning.
The food regime project arose in the late 1980s in a "de-nationalizing" context where states faced the prospect of transformation from within by agri-food restructuring on a world scale, and from without as new multilateral principles were under debate in the General Agreement on Tariffs and Trade (gatt) Uruguay Round (1986–1994). These principles appeared likely to subordinate states to international property relations attending agro-food restructuring. After a decade of neoliberalism this was a moment of significant transition in the organization of states and economies, political systems, empire and the world order. Global strategies of transnational corporations (tncs) were superseding the managed trade of the post-war era of national regulation. The term "globalization" was migrating from the business press to academic and public discourse. Global commodity chains delivering year-round fruits and vegetables from seasonally differentiated world regions were increasingly organized by agribusinesses specializing in agro-inputs, plantation and farming contracts, and processing and distribution. Western diets followed a pervasive grain trade. Agro-food restructuring unleashed powerful integrating forces, standardizing processes across space or reconfiguring spatial relations as differentiated elements of a shared global process (McMichael 1994: 3). In this sense "globalization" was a formative, and contradictory, process — a mechanism of restructuring rather than an inevitable outcome (as often assumed in social scientific and popular discourse).
The food regime project, then, emerged as a methodological initiative to specify relations between world ordering and agro-food trade. It claimed that episodes of restructuring and transition are bounded by periods of stable patterns of accumulation. It is an intrinsically comparative approach to recent world history, insofar as food regimes come and go with political re-ordering, in a mutually conditioning dynamic. The distinctiveness of the first two food regimes lay in the instrumental role of food in securing global hegemony — in the first, Britain's "workshop of the world" project linked the fortunes of an emergent industrial capitalism to expanding cheap food supply zones across the world; in the second, the United States deployed food aid to create alliances, markets and opportunities for its intensive agro-industrial model. Market hegemony defines the third food regime and its role in a broad neoliberal project dedicated to securing transnational circuits of money and commodities (including food) — displacing smallholders into a casual global labor force for capital. The cyclical incidence and transitional footprints of food regimes signal an underlying truth, namely, that the state system is deeply rooted in agro-food relations. As we know now, in the twenty-first century, human civilization has no more important foundation than its ecosystems and food supplies, and contemporary political ordering ignores this at its (and our) peril.
Food Regime Analysis
The concept of the "food regime" emerged in an initial formulation by Harriet Friedmann (1987) deriving from previous research on the post-World War II international food order. Here she charted the rise and demise of the U.S. food aid program as a geopolitical weapon in the Cold War (Friedmann 1982). Evidence of a relatively stable world price for grain during the course of this program (1954–1970s) echoed research on a similar episode of a governing world grain price in the late nineteenth century (Friedmann 1978), this time via the food-importing relationship Britain established with its "free trade empire," and especially those settler states exporting grains and meat. Research on the agrarian question and the rise of the settler state (McMichael 1984) suggested a sequential link between these two episodes, centered on the changing of the imperial guard: from Britain to the most powerful settler nation, the United States. Here the pivot of the capitalist world economy shifted from the former to the latter, as Britain's world empire subsided and the American national economy matured with the "taming" of the continent. The ongoing maturation of the nation-state system was evidently bound up with the transformation of agriculture and its role in the world food trade.
Accordingly, in 1989 an exploratory article entitled "Agricultural and the State System. The rise and decline of national agricultures, 1870 to the present" appeared in Sociologia Ruralis, claiming to explore "the role of agriculture in the development of the capitalist world economy, and in the trajectory of the state system" (Friedmann and McMichael 1989: 93). The proximate reason for this focus was the long shadow cast by developmentalism in the post-World War II era, a shadow now receding in the face of critiques from dependency and world-systems analysis. Two key claims in these exchanges animated the food regime project. The conventional, developmentalist school emphasized the dynamic complementarity of agricultural and industrial sectors in the modern "national economy" as the source of development (Rostow 1960). The dependency school argued this complementarity was only evident in the "advanced capitalist" economies, as peripheral economies were shaped by export dependency during the colonial era (Amin 1974; de Janvry 1981). The economic dynamism of the United States certainly derived from such an "internal" dynamic during the period of crisis and transition of the British "outer-directed" model (early twentieth century). Nevertheless, the food regime concept underscored the export agricultural profile of the settler and colonial states, and therefore that national inter-sectoral articulation was an ideal representation of a more complicated historical reality. In fact the postwar U.S. development project proclaimed the "national economy" as the universal (ideal) goal for post-colonial states (McMichael 1996).
Food regime analysis, then, pivoted on the U.S. role in provisioning Europe, and then the Third World, from its extensive and then intensive commercial agriculture across periods of British and then U.S. world-economic hegemony. Food regime analysis was not simply about international agricultural relations of production and consumption, but also about the role of commercial agriculture in the process of state building in the modern age. Across these two periods, this role involved supplying rising urban-industrial complexes (whether domestic or overseas) with raw materials and food, thereby strengthening national industry. And during this time, New World agriculture was decisive in fueling industrialization, first in European states and subsequently in Third World states.
In this sense the food regime nurtures the state/market relationship. It has been associated with the international political-economic orders institutionalized during the periods of hegemony of the British and American states, and, more recently, during the period of dominance of the World Trade Organization as a member state organization responsible for international trade rules. While the former two world orders were governed by the principles of freedom of trade, and development aid (alongside freedom of enterprise), respectively, the latter trading system has been governed by neoliberal principles espousing both freedoms. These principles have applied unevenly, where corporate farmers in the global North have retained significant subsidies at the expense (via world market dumping of surplus food) of farmers in the global South for whom import protections are removed, and where agribusiness (predominantly northern) has enjoyed global mobility.
Food Regime Contours
The first, British-centered food regime (1870–1930s) combined colonial tropical imports to Europe with basic grains and livestock imports from settler colonies, provisioning emerging European industrial classes in general, and underwriting the British "workshop of the world" in particular. Complementing monocultural agricultures imposed in colonies of occupation, Britain outsourced its staple food production in the mid-nineteenth century to colonies of settlement, exploiting virgin soil frontiers in the New World. The establishment of commercial agricultural sectors within the emerging settler states (notably U.S.A., Canada and Australia) modeled twentieth-century "development" as an articulated dynamic between national agricultural and industrial sectors.
The second, U.S.-centered food regime (1950s–1970s) rerouted flows of (surplus) food from the United States to its informal empire of strategic postcolonial states on the Cold War perimeter. Food surpluses stemmed from price-supported farm programs, driving a cheap food aid program that subsidized manufacturing wages for select Third World states, securing anti-communist loyalty and imperial markets. Development states internalized the U.S. model of national agro-industrialization, adopting Green Revolution technologies, and instituting land reform to dampen peasant unrest and extend market relations into the countryside. Meanwhile, agribusiness elaborated transnational linkages between national farm sectors, which were subdivided into a series of specialized agricultures linked by global supply chains (e.g., the transnational animal protein complex linking grain/carbohydrate, soy/protein, and lot-feeding). In other words, while the national model of economic development framed the politics of decolonization, a "new international division of labor" in agriculture emerged around transnational commodity complexes (Raynolds et al. 1993).
A third, corporate food regime (1980s–2000s) has deepened this process, incorporating new regions into animal protein chains (e.g., Brazil/China), consolidating differentiated supply chains into a "supermarket revolution" (Reardon et al. 2003), and subdividing quality and standardized foods to provision bifurcated class diets. Dumping of northern-subsidized food surpluses (e.g., grains, milk powder, animal protein parts) intensified under WTO liberalization rules, displacing "inefficient" farmers, generating populations of displaced slum-dwellers, and fueling a global counter-movement of farmers, fisherfolk, pastoralists and landless workers. A unifying principle of food sovereignty advocates democratic policy regarding rights for farmer/peasants, local food security and ecological farming for soil and human health. Whether inspired by alternative social visions, or political (and ecological) exigencies of a food system dependent on fossil fuels, such counter-movements register the deepening crisis of industrial agriculture.
Each period, and the transitions between them, have reframed the politics of development and the scope and significance of agricultural and food technologies, including future implications (concerning environmental sustainability, food access and security, energy relations, intellectual property rights, population displacement, nutrition and public health). In this sense, the food regime concept offers a unique comparative-historical lens on the political and ecological relations of modern capitalism writ large.
While each regime has its own institutional profile, it is the case that elements of former regimes carry over into successor regimes, in reformulated fashion. Thus, where the late nineteenth-century food regime was critical to world market development via British manipulation of the gold standard, its early twentieth-century crisis culminated in completion of the inter-state system (with decolonization) under U.S. hegemony — via a new food regime integrating an anti-communist bloc with aid and investment initiatives to secure post-colonial nation building. A successor, corporate food regime combined elements of each of the former regimes, restoring the world market principle via a contradictory nexus of northern farm protectionism and liberalization of southern farm sectors and food markets. The new, neoliberal organizing principle involved the explicit subordination of states to markets and a regime based on the commodification of food provisioning. It is this latter resolution that informs Araghi's concept of "capital's food regime" (2003), based in global value relations — first appearing in the British-centered food regime and then reappearing in the late twentieth century (cf. McMichael 1999). While food-exchange regulation, enabled through international currencies (sterling/gold and dollar/gold), may have been the initial focus of food regime analysis, it begs the question of the underlying value relations, or accumulation dynamic, that conditions the state/market nexus in each world food order, including technological, financial, labor and ecological relations.
Food Regime Method
To say the food regime is constituted through state/market relations is simply to underline the political dimensions of markets. But this is an abstraction unless we specify the state/market relation in time and space. So far food regime analysis has focused on time and space coordinates associated with Anglo-American temporal and spatial relations — arguably because these coordinates have shaped recent world orders and/or how we think about such ordering. These coordinates are losing their salience in today's multi-polar world, and, accordingly, the original food regime conception is undergoing a transformation as we experience transition and massive global uncertainty.
Whether food regime analysis is up to the task of interpreting current developments depends on how it is deployed. It has been largely deployed as a periodic marker of relatively stable agri-food orders. Bill Pritchard views it as a "tool of hindsight. It can help order and organize the messy reality of contemporary global food politics, but its applications are necessarily contingent upon an unfolding and unknowable future" (2007: 8). Such contingency nevertheless is open to interpretation, particularly as transitional periods express an unraveling of a prior regime as a consequence of its structural (and discursive) tensions. Given the origins of food regime analysis in state/market relations, transitional periods will entail transformations in these relations as they condition the organization and uses of global agriculture. While social and political contention may be contingent, the food regime attention to unfolding political-economic relations and their tensions nonetheless helps to organize our understanding of the parameters and what is at stake. This is the point of historicization.
(Continues…)
Excerpted from "Food Regimes and Agrarian Questions"
by .
Copyright © 2013 Philip McMichael.
Excerpted by permission of Practical Action Publishing Ltd.
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Table of Contents
ICAS Agrarian Change and Peasant Studies Series, vii,
Acknowledgements, ix,
Preface, xi,
1 The Food Regime Project, 1,
2 Historical Forms of the Food Regime, 21,
3 The Corporate Food Regime, 41,
4 Food Regimes and the Agrarian Question, 62,
5 Food Regime Reformulations, 84,
6 Crisis and Restructuring, 109,
7 The Food Regime and Value Relations: Which Values?, 131,
Glossary, 159,
References, 165,
Index, 189,