Agriculture Reference
In-Depth Information
Rather than atempt to counter this critique, we embrace it and turn it on its
head. For us, conventional agriculture is not utopian enough - or, to be more accur-
ate, it is indeed utopic in its assumptions and dreams about how the world
ought
to
look, but its proponents miss this fact because they've bought into the fictions of ef-
iciency and science. Our hoice of the term 'iction' here is intentional. Karl Polanyi
(1965) famously coined the term 'commodity fictions' to refer to artifacts - like prop-
erty and money - that have been divorced from history and have thus been made to
appear natural, self-evident, and objectively given. We argue the same holds for the
so-called gods of science and efficiency: they are thoroughly utopian, in that they are
grounded in conceptions of what the good life is and how we
ought
to ahieve it.
Utopia here implies working for some future state of the world based on certain,
deeply held assumptions. The primary arguments from large-scale conventional food
systems actors revolve around these arguments of tehnology and eiciency that
assumes unlimited resources and unlimited growth potential (in yield and profit).
Van der Ploeg (2009, p19) refers to these assumptions as virtual realities of farming,
where it is assumed that yields and profits will increase, anomalies arise when those
increases do not occur. On the other side we locate those that argue for medium
and small-scale agriculture. Within this camp include those who focus on cultural
ways of farming and traditional food production, who mount their positions with
the assumption that local, traditional, less mehanical and less hemically-depend-
ent farming is beter. Here the focus is on food as a medium for ideal communities
without the involvement of large corporate holdings. This Arcadian utopia assumes
an Edenic relationship to nature and provides a counterweight to the conventional
utopian assumption of efficiency. In both cases, proponents' arguments come from
somewhere.
It's time we began thinking about food production in these terms - that is,
in terms of these bakground assumptions (those unsaid
oughts).
his hanges the
nature of the food debate entirely. Rather than, for example, proponents of organic
agriculture scientifically proving that their system is sufficiently 'efficient' to com-
pete with the conventional model, the debate instead takes a step bak and deals irst
with those underlying assumptions. his brings to the fore suh questions as: 'what
does it mean to talk about “food security?'” and 'what constitutes “efficiency” when
it pertains to food production?' Even a question like 'what is “food”?' needs to be
fleshed out, for, ultimately, competing visions of food production rest in part upon
competing visions of what
ought
to constitute as 'food'; Mihael Pollan (2008, p7),
