How Is Food Political? Market, State, and Knowledge - The Oxford Topic of Food, Politics, and Society - page 14

states are pressured to placate the productive underbelly of society. Regimes reacted
to uprisings, insurrections, famines, and tax revolts with such varied responses as land
reforms, selective patronage, repressive war, abolition of slavery, make-work schemes,
and, in more modern terms, development.29 Some states, unable to respond, were swept
away by rural revolutions.30 Reciprocally, urban rioters held food to be governed by an
inviolable moral economy of the kind Polanyi saw at risk from market commoditiza-
tion: There is a “just price” for food. John Walton and David Seddon (1994) traced this
tradition into modern times in Free Markets and Food Riots ; the Brandt Commission
called these uprisings “IMF riots” for the role of orthodox stabilization policies in rais-
ing prices in food-importing economies. Price rises of food globally in 2008 sparked
riots in dozens of countries and renewed urgent debates on food security. Mobilization
against the global “land grab” of recent years is a more global response to the exercise of
power in land markets (Deininger 2011; Robertson and Pinstrup-Andersen 2010; Thaler,
this volume).
Distributive contentions around food largely reject market logic, as Polanyi
noted: There are some things markets should not decide. Of special importance to
this volume will be the connecting of the historical themes of distributive politics to
the impact of new technologies on security and well-being. Both the Green and the
Gene Revolutions introduced technologies that opponents attacked as having adverse
effects on income distribution. Distribution of gains from higher yields from new tech-
nologies in both cases depend on access to cash resources, credit, political connec-
tions, and, most of all, secure land holding.31 The Gene Revolution raised new politics
around both international distributive effects and intra-rural consequences: a rhetori-
cally North-South global rift. The Green Revolution was driven by public-sector invest-
ment in plant breeding internationally; the Gene Revolution has been concentrated in
private-sector research and development. Will multinational firms from relatively few
wealthy nations capture the lion's share of benefits from technical change?32 Or will
public-sector investments in transgenic technology allow autonomous advances in
those agricultural nations with strong science and technology capacity, such as China,
India, and Brazil (Cohen 2005) or humanitarian organizations (Lybbert 2003)? Are the
new seeds scale-neutral, and thus little differentiated between large and small farmers,
or are they subject to economies of scale?33 Intellectual property mediates the impact
of technology on distribution. Ravi Srinivas notes in his contribution to this volume
that global attempts to harmonize property in seeds have only notionally incorporated
“farmers' rights,” while buttressing claims of breeders and producers of seeds, though
prospects for an open-access global commons for biotechnology knowledge continue to
attract attention and some development.34
Intellectual-property disputes around seeds resonate with previous conflicts around
distributive justice growing out of landed property, but they add significant new ana-
lytical and empirical puzzles.35 In a perfect storm of objections to genetic engineer-
ing, a new question of what should be produced emerged from a social construction
based entirely on how it is produced, with implications for concern about how accept-
able distribution could be. We will return to these issues as a prelude to a discussion