How Is Food Political? Market, State, and Knowledge - The Oxford Topic of Food, Politics, and Society - page 8

analysis underlies much contention in food politics: No one advocates for unsustainable
agriculture or the ruination of farmers, but prescriptions from that agreement diverge
markedly.
If Polanyi is right, movements toward increased market determination of outcomes
will produce counter-pressures to reinstate limits on markets; there is a dialectic. In the
current era, politics are often framed around opposition to neoliberalism as zeitgeist—
the retreat of state authority in favor of market hegemony. Demands for “food sover-
eignty,” for example, challenge the power of markets and corporations and privilege
instead civil society and “culturally appropriate” norms. This framing of countermar-
ket objectives is promoted by Via Campesina, a transnational advocacy network that
aspires—and often claims—to represent a global peasantry.11 Because of boundary poli-
tics over time, all economies represent, and have long represented, some mix of mecha-
nisms for answering economic questions. Markets are never fully hegemonic, cultural
influences never fully disappear, and politics intermediates disputed terrain. Dogs will
not be marketed as meat in the United States, whatever the market says; the question of
beef in India is not so straightforward, but it is still charged politically in a way not true
in Argentina. Regulating a market for “organic” produce is a political act rooted in a
specific understanding of what constitutes good food and good farming—what makes
agriculture sustainable and consumers healthy. Though consumer choices in markets
determine success or failure of preference politics, states matter fundamentally. First,
standards vary for the making and regulating of markets for “organic.” Second, states
may be convinced to support initiatives for organic farming materially, both domes-
tically and through foreign aid projects. The global movement for organic agriculture
reflects successful cultural mobilization, transnational advocacy, and responsive state
authority to reset and regulate markets.12
Current food politics is everywhere entangled in prior framings of answers to these
fundamental choices: is food treated as simply another commodity to be buffeted by
market dynamics?13 Or as an entitlement guaranteed as a basic right of citizenship?14 Or
as a cultural marker outside the provenance of the state but important to local identities
and strategies?15 Efforts to depoliticize food in favor of technical expertise founder on
these societal divisions. So, for example, advocates of suppressing a market for beef in
India evoke a cultural tradition of nonviolence, vegetarianism, and special respect for
cows; the mechanism is to be a state-enforced ban on cow slaughter, decommodifying
cow flesh and removing it from the market. Market forces have moved in the opposite
direction. Ironically, India is close to being, or is already, the largest exporter of beef in
the world.16
What is to be produced?
The physical surface of the planet is to some extent fungible, though transitions have
costs. In the war between the trees and the grasses, humans have intervened deci-
sively on the side of the grasses. Grasses, much modified by centuries of selection and