How Is Food Political? Market, State, and Knowledge - The Oxford Topic of Food, Politics, and Society - page 13

of “stealth seeds” reached unknown but clearly significant proportions (Herring 2007b).
Seeds as genetic material resist surveillance and control, much as peasant history is
one of resistance to the corvée, the tax collector, the record keeper. The spread of illicit
seeds under the radar of firms and states offered new examples for James Scott's (1985)
Weapons of the Weak . Despite an international control regime, actual diffusion of agri-
cultural biotechnology departed radically from formal bio-safety regulations or patent
regime dominance posited in international agreements and transnational advocacy.
The reassuring political narrative of institutional bio-safety controls on an increasingly
global food supply turned out to be more symbolic politics than meaningful regulation;
as often, market logic and material interests competed with state preferences. A food
Panopticon was conjured but proved astigmatic.
In both episodes of mobilizing against technological change in agriculture—the
Green and the Gene Revolutions—much of the political heat came from transnational
social movements, advocacy networks, and public intellectuals in urban areas. Food
production technologies diffuse globally, along with techniques for processing, mar-
keting, and retailing; political positions on what constitutes acceptable ways of grow-
ing food are now global as well. International flows of information enable ideational
cross-hatching of micro-level farm production questions with broad critiques of sci-
ence, risk, and corporate control of the world food system as integral to opposition to
globalization.26
How is it to be distributed?
Politics of distribution within rural societies and between rural producers and the
state have historically been contentious, sometimes cataclysmic. What Eric Wolf called
“peasant wars” (1969) rocked the twentieth century far more than the anticipated prole-
tarian revolutions predicted by nineteenth-century Marxist thought. Property institu-
tions in agriculture have produced distinctive and often volatile politics, as classic works
on variation across types of agrarian systems by Arthur Stinchcombe (1961) and Jeffrey
Paige (1985) demonstrated. Residues of these conflicts fundamentally altered political
economies: Barrington Moore Jr. subtitled his classic Social Origins of Dictatorship and
Democracy “Lord and Peasant in the Making of the Modern World.” Michael Lipton's
theory of “urban bias” (1977) explained underdevelopment itself in terms of the superior
power of urban political forces to skew taxes, prices, and public investments so as to
milk the countryside of surplus for the benefit of cities.27 In the monumental transition
of peasants to farmers, both the place of rural producers in society and their political
levers have undergone a great transformation.28
Once a distinct cultural, economic, and political tier in many societies, the peasantry
was to produce the surplus on which better-born elites could develop themselves, and
with which states could wage wars, expand territory, pay off debts, and reward loyal
officials. Rejection of these distributive systems was both subterranean and overt (Scott
1985). Because nations have been intermittently convulsed by politics around food,