How Is Food Political? Market, State, and Knowledge - The Oxford Topic of Food, Politics, and Society - page 10

slaughter; over-and undernutrition aggravated by rising meat consumption; contribu-
tions to greenhouse gases and thus global warming; opportunity costs in land that could
be used for other purposes; externalities of animal wastes; environmental damage;
and zoonotic diseases originating in farmed animals. Much of this critique emanates
from richer countries, where subsistence problems have been solved and populations
have moved up the Maslovian hierarchy of needs. Ethical preferences of relatively rich
people—those of animal rights activists, for example—have implications for relatively
poor people, both in markets and in politics. But more than ethical preferences are at
stake: Material interests of the species depend on the science of global warming. If the
livestock effect is as large as some critics claim, the material interests—whatever their
ethical preferences—of both rich and poor human beings are affected by livestock
choices driven both by food markets and cultural traditions.
What is to be produced entails an answer to how much is to be produced. Conversion
of lands to the plow must at some point reach limits. Where are the limits? Paul Roberts
wrote The End of Food in 2008 as an exploration of vulnerabilities around these lim-
its at the level of a global food system; his conclusions sketch elements of doomsday
scenarios. Will there be enough food to go around? Any answer immediately raises
questions of distribution. This is the resilient Reverend Malthus: The race between pro-
duction and production per capita as population increases exponentially.19 Conclusions
vary by ideology. Biotechnology firms argue that genetic engineering is necessary to
“feed the world.” Opponents counter on grounds of distribution: There is enough to go
around, but it is unfairly distributed. The linkage is logically tight: How much needs to
be produced surely depends on how it is distributed. Debates around distributive jus-
tice and technology then interact with political feasibility. Turning diets of the global
rich from meat to grain and implementing redistribution across and within countries
seem implausible; mechanisms are hard to conjure. “ How is it to be produced ” then ener-
gizes debates around choices of technology. Among the possible paths forward, which
ones might be sustainable and more productive with fewest externalities? What path
offers the best prospects? One path is “more of the same”: could productivity increases
in low-income country agricultures to levels equal to those of the Netherlands or Japan
succeed with conventional technology? Or is the unsustainability of conventional
approaches sufficient cause to concentrate research and incentives on agroecology?20
Are agroecological approaches incompatible with, or complementary to, those of
genetic engineering?21 Given ecological imperatives, and the underlying crisis of exten-
sive and crippling malnutrition, how do societies—of whatever scale—answer ques-
tions of how food is to be produced?
How is it to be produced?
How food is produced extends beyond narrow questions of technology. Contention
around production techniques engages both political economy (who gets what and
how? whose ox is gored?) and cultural framings of food—its symbolic place in society,