Agriculture Reference
In-Depth Information
to support 'multifunctionality'; and 3) the neoliberal model demonstrated in coun-
tries like New Zealand, where unsubsidized, export agriculture has been restructured
in an attempt to reposition Developed World production towards high-value, elite,
quality-defined markets for agricultural products. At least two of these models use
the rhetoric of 'solving world hunger' as a justification, but all are, on closer examin-
ation, actually specifically directed towards supporting or improving farm incomes
in the Developed World. Solving world hunger remains, at best, a side effect of the
central political intent of these models of Developed World agriculture. For this reas-
on, all three models fail to provide a template for solving world hunger on a global
scale.
The Industrial Revolution and food scarcity
At the outset of the Industrial Revolution - somewhere in the later part of the eight-
eenth century - food scarcity, famine, hunger and death by starvation were fea-
tures of all societies and cultures around the world. Climatic variability, the unreli-
able quality of some human paterns of food production, war, unrest, colonization,
slavery and land degradation all contributed to the relatively frequent appearance
of times of famine and hunger in all parts of the world. The ever-present threat of
death by starvation was one of the unifying conditions of humankind. The Industrial
Revolution signalled a dramatic transformation of this universal reality, eventually
banishing food scarcity from the industrial world (even if food availability became
highly uneven across classes) and rendering hunger a problem that was manifest 'out
there', at a safe distance from industrializing societies.
his transition was not merely a side-efect of the fundamental hanges in social
structure that were integral to the Industrial Revolution. Rather, food and global-
scale food relationships were at the heart of the Industrial Revolution. The celebrated
anthropologist Syd Mintz argues in his greatest work
Sweetness and Power
(1985)
that food is the neglected element in many theories explaining the scale and traject-
ories of the Industrial Revolution in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. Using
sugar as his central theme, Mintz outlines how the Industrial Revolution drew in
global-scale webs of food relationships around commodities like sugar. These webs
linked devastated tribal societies in Africa to slave plantations in the Caribbean, to
rum producers and fisherman in New England, through to the emerging working
classes in industrial England (see also Wolf, 1982). Central to this nexus of dynamism
and devastation was a central and compelling concern for the ruling classes of Bri-
