How Is Food Political? Market, State, and Knowledge - The Oxford Topic of Food, Politics, and Society - page 9

breeding, are winning; the trees are losing out. In recent decades, societies have rec-
ognized that there are trade-offs in this choice. Recognition came late on the species
learning curve: roughly the 1970s. The discovery of ecology—the interrelationship of
all biophysical processes—as a science undermined the notion that either tradition or
markets could be sole determinants of land and water use. Nature had a claim; in assess-
ing that claim, both culture and science had political standing (Herring 2007d). A few
decades after the global cognitive investment in ecology as science and sustainability
as goal, climate change unsettled much of the technical and political wisdom around
agriculture and its environment. Emissions of paddy fields and livestock turned out
to matter, along with the burning of forests to enhance fertility, tractor fuel consump-
tion, and long-distance transport of foodstuffs.17 Not only are ecological services criti-
cal for robust agriculture, but also nature itself provides great variety and quantities of
“wild foods,” as Pretty and Bharucha document in this volume. Destruction of natu-
ral systems to grow more food destroys opportunities to gather existing food. Societies
simultaneously recognized that it mattered in ways previously unrecognized whether
answers to these questions were left to the market, to tradition, or to authority (Blaikie
and Brookfield 1987; Shapiro 2001). Maximization of commercial production per unit
of land yields one outcome, preservationist values written into law another, and tradi-
tional swidden cultivation another. Yet interdependencies are still not fully understood.
Derrill Watson illustrates in his chapter of this volume the theoretical possibilities of
“win-win” strategies of agricultural intensification without environmental damage, but
future ecological challenges are difficult to anticipate.
Land-extensive, water-absorptive, energy-intensive technologies are increasingly
challenged as unsustainable in the light of new understandings of species-interests, as
mediated by science (The Royal Society 2009). Achieving sustainable balances in pro-
duction and conservation raises the stakes in choosing mechanisms. It is clear that mar-
kets rarely accord sufficient value to either conservation or preservation; eco-system
services are posited but difficult to measure or pay for. Use of the state as alternative
mechanism to protect ecological services of natural systems foundered on the absence
of a global Leviathan, on the one hand, and divergent interests of nation states, on the
other (Herring 2002). Moreover, political coordination presupposed consensual knowl-
edge, but political divisions within and between nations have often rendered ecological
science impotent. Even if public goods in ecologies were politically obtainable, disagree-
ments emerged on what they are and how to get there (Lomborg 2001; Specter 2009).
Though markets and states have demonstrated obvious limitations, tradition may
be an unreliable mechanism as well, however popular a simpler agriculture remains in
modern yearnings. Livestock provide a poignant example. The raising of animals has
long been an integral part of agriculture and a prominent source of food, currently
contributing about 40 percent of the global value of agricultural output. Livestock sup-
port the livelihoods and food security of almost a billion people, especially in poorer
countries.18 Yet a contemporary global debate now challenges these traditional patterns
on multiple dimensions: the extravagant inefficiency of feeding grain to animals when
people are malnourished; the ethical implications of confining animals fed only for