Agriculture Reference
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Therefore arguments formed and forged in one context may become relevant for the food
system more widely. Before addressing that discussion this paper considers the academic
critiques of organic food and farming, as well as the web of relationships within which the
movement operates. The paper concludes by considering how the emerging configuration of
the movement may start to reshape the socio-spatial relations of food production and
consumption.
“
The crisis in 2005-8 was not a blip, but creeping normality
(Lang 2010:95)”.
As Tim Lang has persuasively argued, many of the features of the current crisis of food are
not novel but extensions of the trajectory of the food system in the twentieth century (Lang
2010). Yet there are developments, some of which are the outcomes of that trajectory that
mean the context within which these changes are taking place needs to be understood
(Castells 1997,1998). Lang emphasises the increasing environmental pressures that are
potentially going to limit the volumes of food produced. Yet, as will be discussed below, his
style of critique shares elements that are common with those who would generally oppose
his positions. By using the analytical tools derived from the social sciences we can perhaps
mark those trends and interventions that are of lasting significance and those that the
transitory. The challenge is to do so in a way that does not use meta-theory to produce
narratives that mask differences and moments of resistance. Under the rubric of 'neo-
liberalism' and those trends in 'resistance' to it, are flows and possibilities that suggest a
more nuanced picture.
2. Social movements
Social movements like the social networks that they constitute and are created by, are
conceptually mid-level phenomena (Crossley 2002, Melucci 1996). For several influential
theorists they are important agents of change, Castells argues that they are 'symptoms of
who we are' in the Information Age. Whilst Charles Tilly argued that they mark a particular
form of the contentious politics and the presence democratic opportunities (Castells 1997,
Castells 1998, Tilly 2004). Most germane to this paper is the role that social movements play
in theories of the contemporary food system, and hence global capitalism, as analysed in the
food regime approach (McMichael 2009a, McMichael 2009b). Food regime theory accounts
attempt to analyse the stabilities that constitute originally the political economy but
increasingly the political ecology of a globalised food system that is based on inequalities
both within and between nations and communities (Campbell 2009). Through periodising
the operations of the trade in food products as well as the consequences of different forms of
agricultural production, processing and distribution, food regime theory seeks to
understand the tensions and paradoxes within a regime of accumulation (Burch & Lawrence
2009). In doing so it aims to locate sites and agents of resistance to, as well as mechanisms of,
the exploitation of people, animals and eco-systems.
Social movements act in regime theory to either validate or challenge the food cultures of
particular food regimes. They can act at moments in the transitions between food regimes
either against, or in concert with, other powerful actors. Friedmann in her accounts
identified durable food products transported over long distances as central to the food
regime of the 1990s, so she saw movements taking 'local' and 'seasonal' as offering a
possible locus of resistance. Although she argued that these could also be appropriated in a
regime based around corporate dominance, as observed by Guthman (Guthman 2004a).
McMichael more recently has identified the globalised peasant and small farmers'
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