How Is Food Political? Market, State, and Knowledge - The Oxford Topic of Food, Politics, and Society - page 20

crops among farmers globally suggests that the net effects on income are on the whole
positive, not negative—unless we assume farmers are incapable of choosing technolo-
gies that work for them.48
The North-South framing of biotechnology has proved politically important, but in
fact the fault lines are not structured by geography or national income. After the United
States, the leading producers include Argentina, India, Brazil, China, and Canada.
Farmers growing biotech crops in the United States and Canada often operate large
holdings as commercial businesses; biotech farmers in India and China operate hold-
ings tiny by world standards. Though associated with wealthy economies historically,
genetically engineered crops grown in “developing countries” exceeded total hectares
grown in the so-called developed countries for the first time in 2012 (James, Annual).
The framing of GMO controversies illustrates the power of ideas to drive politics.49
There is less and less a question of “do ideas matter,” and more a question of “how ideas
matter.” In food politics, the ideational component is weighty in identifiable ways.
How Ideas Are Central to
Food Politics
Ideas matter in all spheres of politics; John Maynard Keynes famously said that “the
world is ruled by little else.” Though political economy usefully centers interests, and
thus structures from which interests are derived, Mark Blyth reminds us that “structures
do not come with an instruction sheet” (2003). The relationship between one's position
in a structure and political behavior is mediated in complicated ways. In some politics,
even recognizing an interest requires cognitive processing: No one recognized inter-
ests in global warming prior to the science that connected future outcomes to present
human behaviors. Ideas about other environmental risks define interests in controver-
sies over legislation and practice (Lomborg 2001; Specter 2009). The financial crisis after
2007 induced consequential clashes over what policies would serve common and par-
ticular interests, opposing variants of Keynesian to neoliberal ideas (Blyth 2002, 2013).
Likewise, many disagreements in food politics are rooted in different ideas about how
best to answer the inescapable questions of political economy: whether through tradi-
tion, state, or market.
Some effects of ideas in food politics are apparent: Ethics drive politics around food
entitlements, treatment of animals as livestock, and claims of future generations for
sustainability, for example. To be sure, ethical agreement is only the beginning of food
politics on any issue, as doing the right thing may or may not be politically possible—
but it is a necessary condition (see Korthals, this volume). Ethical arguments are largely
about end states—the way things ought to be. The ethicist observes that with sufficient
food in the global production system, malnutrition afflicting something like a billion
people should not exist. Agreement on first principles is much easier, however, than