Agriculture Reference
In-Depth Information
goods and ideas across vast areas of space. Prior to the emergence of market activity
solely for profit (capitalism's defining feature), markets enabled the novel and the
necessary to move like a gas - from constrained space into more open space. But the
privileging of market reasoning for profit ignores the benefits and moral rationales
for ensuring a nourished population. Even Adam Smith, he of the invisible hand, ar-
gued as muh.
Within the business-as-usual model, food operates just like any other commod-
ity. Related to the rhetoric of feeding the world, corporations or farmers-as-subcon-
tractors are responsible for producing enough. And yet, the full picture is muh mur-
kier. he global food system has consolidated, puting more food under control of
fewer irms. In the atermath, the ideal of consumer hoice erodes along with the po-
tential for food self-provisioning.
In addition to the emergence of a powerful corporate sector in global food trad-
ing and the entrenhment of the neoliberal approah to global food relations during
the last half century, other key actors and processes have contributed to the current
crisis. For decades, governments and government-like organizations have negotiated,
measured, assessed, identified and shifted the food landscape as they led us to be-
lieve that they were exterminating small fires of famine and hunger. The era of trust
in government-led food solutions may well be over. The combination of the polit-
ical and the tehnical solutions to feed the world yielded the green revolution and
the subsequent hagiography of Norman Borlaug as a secular saint. A potentially in-
sightful accounting exercise would involve calculating the global balance between
the number of lives Borlaug 'saved' and the number of lives lost, resulting from di-
version of food crops into cash crops, debt-driven poverty as farmers had to borrow
to access more expensive tehnologies, farmer suicides in the Punjab, the lak of in-
ancial support into diferent kinds of agronomic researh, vitamin-A deiciency and
political instability. Absurd, right? But so is claiming that the green revolution saved
so many people while the same number of - if not more - hungry people remain in
the world.
The current state of the world food system therefore has many antecedents in
the twentieth century: a particular trajectory of post-Second World War agricultur-
al development in the Developed World; a steady move towards the centralization
of market relations in the global economy; and governance mehanisms that sought
to liberate the economy while solving those episodic problems that arose. All these
created the historical conditions for a potentially catastrophic failure of the world
