Agriculture Reference
In-Depth Information
ous ways. In the US, subsidies for oil and ethanol skew the markets even more. At
the other end, farmers and families are discouraged from the opportunity to grow
appropriate varieties of staple crops for self-sufficiency in order to pursue the prom-
ises of the market and grow for a different audience. While Ricardo might relish the
enactment of comparative advantage in the global food system, producers seduced
by markets now face the volatility of oil prices, transportation costs, ikle consumer
tastes and hanging geopolitics. Here then is one of the moral dilemmas posed by
the food crisis: how do we balance livelihood with the potential benefits of a roaring
global economy?
Food system critiques
Some food system analysts have used a political-economic approah (oten informed
by Marxist critiques of capitalism) to focus critique of business-as-usual on the
power differentials it reinforces. From this perspective, the combination of dispro-
portionate trade regulation (protectionism in practice, free trade advocacy for every-
one else), the range of resource 'peaks' (oil, phosphorus, water, land) and global cli-
mate hange provide a blueprint for diicult times if we continue to run a mode
of agriculture based on infinite resources. Marx's theory of metabolic rift outlines
the contradictions posed by capitalism's insatiable hunger for profit and accumu-
lation and a planet composed of inite resources. he lak of regulation (national
and international) to protect the resources of the commons (e.g. land, air, water) al-
lows corporations, whose only constituency are shareholders, to literally horde, steal
and plunder, while leaving a wake of tailings or bruised bananas in a community,
without consequence. Corporate interests oten contradict public interests as suh.
Countries employing protectionist trade policies in the food sector distort the market
for food elsewhere.
According to political-economic analyses, the current global food system is sus-
tained through an ideology that justifies exploitation of resources and labour. The
underlying ideology of business-as-usual efforts to feed the world assumes that in-
ternational food commodity markets operate on a level playing field. This implies
that best operating procedures are the norm across the board suh that commodity
auctions are not subject to bribery, that truks and roads will facilitate free passage
of goods, customs oicers will allow free thoroughfare for exhanged goods, that
petroleum will be available, that seeds will be healthy and appropriate - these are
assumptions on whih most farmers in developed economies suh as the US, UK,
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