Resistance
The dominant actors within the current world food economy are aware of some of its shortcomings. Their approach has been to move it forward on more or less the same trajectory that guided it in the past, but with better management to avoid its most obvious pitfalls. But others are less convinced about the merits of the current organization of the world food economy, and are seeking more radical systemic change. Growing awareness of the multiple crises associated with the global food system has fostered a number of movements that seek to resist or fundamentally transform it by reclaiming or reforming governance activity in the “middle spaces” of the world food economy.
In the 1980s–1990s, a number of organizations began to promote the idea of “fair trade” in food and agriculture. An expanding network of fair trade organizations seeks to establish alternative agrifood supply chains that cut out the large TNCs from the middle arena of the world food economy so that the farmers are paid a fair price for their product. These alternative supply chains link farmer cooperatives in developing countries more directly to consumers in rich industrialized countries, reducing the mental distance between producers and consumers, and increasing compensation to farmers.
At a broader level, the idea of “food sovereignty” emerged in the 1990s. Reacting against the imbalanced deal that resulted from the inclusion of agriculture in the WTO, peasant groups in the developing world sought to resist, rather than work within, the current world food economy. Groups such as La Via Campesina, a transnational peasant movement, first articulated food sovereignty as the right of peasant and indigenous communities to determine their own agricultural and food path separately from the global food trading system. This global South movement has dovetailed with movements in the global North that have sought to promote local and indigenous food systems. These relocalization efforts in both the North and South aim to build social and ecological resilience into food systems by stressing the need to develop more sustainable and self-reliant food systems as an alternative to a singular, international trade-reliant global system.
Others have sought to transform the world food economy by forcing improvements to the rules and institutions that govern the food system at the global level. These global food justice advocates have actively campaigned at the international level to bring in strong and legally enforceable global rules to control financialization, to rebalance international trade rules, and to put more stringent global regulations on agrifood TNCs. Whether or not these various initiatives will be successful – some working more squarely within the current system and some working explicitly against the current system – remains to be seen.
Conclusion
The world food economy has been shaped by key forces that have, as the world food system has become more globalized, managed to create and occupy middle spaces in that system. The opening up of these spaces by governments, private foundations, TNCs, and financial actors has created new norms and governance frameworks, including international trade rules, that have shifted control away from farmers and consumers. As this process has occurred, new features of the world food economy have emerged, including the commodification of food and the problems of distance, imbalance, and volatility in world food markets, as well as ecological crisis linked to the industrialization of agriculture. The evolution of the global food system in this direction raises important concerns of a social, economic, and ecological nature. The remainder of this book examines these forces and features in more detail.
References and Notes
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3 3. Fuchs, Richard et al. (2019), “US–China Trade War Imperils Amazon Rainforest,” Nature 567 (28 March), 451–4.
4 4. There are some important exceptions, see Weis, Tony (2007), The Global Food Economy: The Battle for the Future of Farming (London, Zed Books); and Patel, Raj (2007), Stuffed and Starved: The Hidden Battle for the World Food System (London, Portobello Books).
5 5. Plunkett Research, Ltd (2018), Complete Guide to the Food Industry from Plunkett Research 2018. Online at: https://www.plunkettresearch.com/complete-guide-to-the-food-industry-from-plunkett-research-2018/; MarketWatch (2018), The Global Food and Grocery Retail Market Size is Expected to Reach USD 12.24 Trillion by 2020. Online at: https://www.marketwatch.com/press-release/the-global-food-and-grocery-retail-market-size-is-expected-to-reach-usd-1224-trillion-by-2020-2018-08-27; ETC Group (2008), Who Owns Nature? Corporate Power and the Final Frontier in the Commodification of Life (Ottawa, ETC Group). Data in this paragraph came from: World Bank (2019), World Development Indicators. Online at: http://data.worldbank.org/data-catalog/world-development; and FAO (2018), World Food and Agriculture Statistical Pocketbook 2018. Online at: