Agriculture Reference
In-Depth Information
lands, Indian floodplains and the Russian steppes. By the 50th anniversary of the re-
peal of the Corn Laws, the map of global food production had been transformed with
the creation, incorporation and mobilization of vast empires in the service of provid-
ing the means to avoid food scarcity in the expanding industrial/imperial core.
Mike Davis argues in
Late Victorian Holocausts
(2001) that the true brutality of
this reconfiguration of global food production was only vaguely visible from the core
industrial empires driving this process. The elimination of hunger within Victorian
society in Britain provided a legitimate moral justification for ignoring tens of mil-
lions of deaths by famine in the distant edges of the Empire. The success of that mis-
sion was suh that, by 1900, Britain was supporting an urban population some six
times larger than that of 1800; while over the subsequent decades, structural hunger
and food deficits were only infrequent visitors.
In summary, the century that strethed from the Hungry Forties to the Second
World War saw the establishment and entrenhment of a patern of global food pro-
duction, trade and consumption that effectively ended food scarcity as a structural
feature of societies in the Developed World. At the same time, on the periphery, hun-
ger and famine continued (and in Mike Davis's analysis became considerably more
entrenhed) as a feature of life. he previously universal experience of hunger and
food scarcity was no longer, it seemed, something common to all humankind.
This century of stable configuration of world food relationships did not endure.
What happened next was the subject of a highly influential article by Harriet Fried-
mann and Philip McMihael. Writing in 1989, these two authors sought explanations
as to how (and why), after a long period of stable configuration of global political
and agri-food arrangements, food relationships, global trade paterns and agricul-
tural policy were completely reconigured (Friedmann and McMihael, 1989). heir
idea of transition between historically configured 'food regimes' highlighted a dra-
matic transformation of global food arrangements in the period between the start of
the Great Depression and the immediate post-Second World War years. This trans-
formation was partly caused by dramatic shifts in economic policy and goals during
the Great Depression, and partly by the traumatising effect of food scarcity and ra-
tioning in Britain during the mid-years of the war as German U-boats effectively cut
Britain off almost completely from its colonial food supply.
The agricultural policy shift in the Developed World that emerged during this
period - accompanied by multiple transformative shifts in political orientation, eco-
nomic goals and foreign policy during the early decades of the Cold War - estab-
