The Possibilities and Pitfalls of Future Food Systems [Book review] (original) (raw)
Related papers
Eating Our Own: Food Insecurity and the Commodity Logic of As Food in the Age of Climate Change
Food, Environment, and Climate Change, 2019
This essay was published in 2019 as a contribution to an anthology at the intersection of food insecurity and the climate crisis: Food, Environment, and Climate Change. Ed Gilson and Kenehan, Rowman and Littlefield (Lexington Books), 2019. While the majority of scholarly as well as public discourse concerning food security makes its primary focus human welfare, questions about whether nonhuman animals figure into that discourse in any significant way beyond the implications of animal agriculture for human health and atmospheric stability remain undertheorized. I'll argue that nonhuman animals should matter greatly to anyone who works at the thorny intersections of structural inequality and environmental justice, especially feminists and antiracism theorists, activists, and policymakers. Why? • The very ways in which we conceive nonhuman animal bodies as food reinforces a social and economic order whereby the commodifiability of sex, gender, race, and class is made possible. Nonhuman animals are not invisible in this order, but they are also not visible as living creatures capable of pleasure and suffering. This state of affairs advantages the beneficiaries of capitalism, themselves disproportionately white, Western(ized) men, and cannot be corrected without taking every intersection-sex, gender, race, indigenous status, species, and ecology-into account. • As food sets the precedent for the conversion of living sentient entities into commodifiable exchange value, thereby reinforcing a structural inequality not only heteropatriarchal and racialized, but essentially human chauvinistic. On this view, human beings are presumed to be the arbiter of all value, and some human beings, namely some men, determine not only social place but also existential condition. As food means as instrument, consumable, disposable according to a hierarchically ordered worldview that systemically privileges a very few at the expense of the very many. • While the causes of food insecurity include natural events like drought, flood, and disease, its primary (though often elided) cause is structural
White Paper 01: Food/Agriculture
ILA White Paper 01, 2023
The war in Ukraine threatens millions of people with the risk of starvation. What is the third major food crisis in 15 years, however, began long before the conflict. Hunger in the world, which had stabilized since 2014, and food insecurity are increasing again and the causes are not to be found on the side of a shortage of food. They lie in poverty and inequality, global warming, hyper-specialization of land, speculation on agricultural raw materials, market dysfunctions. The conflict in Ukraine cannot hide the observation of the structural weakness of the agricultural and food systems. What will the world look like in 2050 if it did not meet the challenges posed by agriculture and food? What international law do we need in order to prevent historical trends (see panorama below) from continuing and even darker scenarios from unfolding? The purpose of this white paper is not to answer these questions directly, but to draw up an inventory of the challenges to be faced in order to help finding some answers.
Complicating food security: Definitions, discourses, commitments
Canadian Studies in Population, 2014
Food security is now commonly seen as one of the defining global issues of the century, intertwined with population and consumption shifts, climate change, environmental degradation, water scarcity, and the geopolitics attending globalization. Some analysts suggest that food security threats are so urgent that philosophical scruples must be set aside in order to concentrate all resources on developing and implementing radical strategies to avert a looming civilizational crisis. This article suggests that definitions of food security invoke commitments and have consequences, and that continued critical and conceptual attention to the language employed in food security research and policy is warranted.
Journal of Environmental Studies and Sciences, 2015
The purpose of this paper is to explore how socioeconomic and technological shifts in Canadian and American food production, processing, and distribution have impacted resilience in the food system. First, we use the social ecological systems literature to define food system resilience as a function of that system's ability to absorb external shocks while maintaining core functions, such as food production and distribution. We then use the literature to argue that we can infer food system resilience by exploring three key dimensions: (1) the diversity of the food system's components, (2) the degree to which the components are connected, and (3) the degree of decision-making autonomy within the food system. Next, we discuss the impacts of industrialization on these three factors within Canada and the USA. Specifically, we show how processes of corporate concentration, farm-scale intensification, mechanization, and the Bcost-price squeezeĥ ave led to a decrease in ecological and economic diversity, a high degree of spatial and organizational connectivity, and a diminished decision-making capacity for individual farmers. While this analysis is qualitative and heuristic, the evidence reviewed here leads us to postulate that our food system is becoming less resilient to external shocks such as climate change. We conclude by discussing four possible strategies to restore resilience and suggest a more transformational shift in food system politics and practice. Specifically, we argue that publicly led multifunctional policies may support more diversified production while programs to promote food system localization can increase farmer autonomy. However, these shifts will not be possible without social-structural corrections of current power imbalances in the food system. This policy discussion reinforces the value of the social ecological framework and, specifically, its capacity to produce an analysis that interweaves ecology, economy, and power.
Agriculture and Human Values
Agrifood scholars commonly adopt ‘a matter of fact way of speaking’ to talk about the extent of neoliberal rollout in the food sector and the viability of ‘alternatives’ to capitalist food initiatives. Over the past few decades this matter of fact stance has resulted in heated debate in agrifood scholarship on two distinct battlegrounds namely, the corporate food regime and the alternative food regime. In this paper I identify some of the limitations of speaking in a matter of fact way and of focusing on capitalist and neoliberal economies as the yardstick by which to assess all food economy initiatives. Using stories of bananas in Australia and the Philippines I advocate for a new mode of critical inquiry in food scholarship that focuses on matters of concern. Following Bruno Latour I use the term critical inquiry to refer to research methods and thinking practices that multiply possible ways of being and acting in the world. The new mode of critical inquiry I propose centres on enacting three broad research matters of concern. These are (1) gathering and assembling economic diversity (2) human actancy and (3) nonhuman actancy. I argue that through becoming critical minds in the Latourian sense researchers can play a key role in enacting economic food futures in the Anthropocene.