Agriculture Reference
In-Depth Information
topic vary to some extent, but they share a common perspective suh that an im-
proved global food system requires radical hanges to its organization. he following
section introduces some of the theoretical bakground that contributes to the crit-
ical perspectives of the authors. An important element of these perspectives lies in
identifying the crisis as a systemic effect that is likely to recur.
The food crisis as point of departure
Food system critics conclude that business as usual cannot continue or, as Lang
(2010, p97) argues, The crisis in 2005-8 was not a blip, but creeping normality'. The
record food commodity prices and events in North Africa and the Middle East in
early 2011 might bear this out. But just what does business as usual imply? To an-
swer this question, we must briefly examine the historical development of the global
food system.
To unravel the meteorology of the perfect storm we first have to understand how
different our current food system is compared even to a mere 100 years ago. For
the most part, countries and regions were food self-sufficient (or drew heavily on
their colonial territories) and historic food crises related more to catastrophic envir-
onmental events - floods, droughts, disease - or despotic or colonial oppression, or
a not so subtle combination of the two, as demonstrated by the Irish Potato Famine
of the 1840s. he dramatic hanges ushered in through the violent reorganization of
geopolitics through two world wars and numerous other conflicts and the upending
of historical colonialism led to massive structural hanges in the food system follow-
ing World War Two.
Since the late 1940s, the global food system has grown more complex (and volat-
ile) in two major ways. First, countries in the Developed World shifted their policy
towards food security and began a process of massive investment into agricultur-
al intensification and industrialization within their domestic farm sectors. Second,
corporations have consolidated the control of the system they began exercising as
colonial plantations. At the same time, those corporations have grown larger, more
complex and more powerful. Finally, the emergence of international food organiz-
ations (for example, the FAO) to oversee the intricate system implies a humanist-
ic (read: moral) imperative to feed the world. Within the business-as-usual model,
suh organizations act as a moral foil to corporate consolidation. In other words, the
corporations are free to profit from the production of food, leaving the governance
structures to feed those that the markets bypass. Markets facilitate the movement of
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