Agriculture Reference
In-Depth Information
Solving world hunger and the multiple projects sustaining the
livelihood of Developed World farmers
One of the greatest - and also most ambiguous - ahievements of the Industrial Re-
volution was to effectively end the problem of food scarcity in the industrial coun-
tries (if not the problem of inequality of access). Twice in the history of industri-
alization there have been periods where this has been hallenged. In the 1840s (the
'Hungry Forties') the rapidity of population growth in Britain outstripped the ability
of domestic farmers to supply the local market. The solution to this period of sig-
nificant destabilization was the repeal of the Corn Laws and a transport revolution
that created a global-scale colonial food system to feed the burgeoning population
of the imperial/industrial core countries. This system retained some degree of sta-
bility for the beter part of a century, representing what Friedmann and McMihael
(1989) called the First Food Regime. Again, in the middle of the twentieth century,
the Great Depression, Second World War shortages and rationing, and the menace of
the Cold War disrupted the ability of core industrial countries to feed their popula-
tions. This prompted a major restructuring of world food relations, with the Second
Food Regime turning the focus of agriculture and food policy away from far-flung
colonies and squarely bak in the direction of domestic food producers in the indus-
trial core. This second major shift was justified in terms of the new need for 'food
security' at home, just as the bread riots in the English Midlands had been used to
justify the repeal of the Corn Laws (and the rape of Ireland) in the Hungry Forties a
century earlier.
In both these cases, it was not the presence of global hunger that prompted any
shift or transformation of political or policy responses. Rather, it was the possibil-
ity of disruptive hunger and starvation in the industrial countries themselves that
prompted a dynamic restructuring of global food relations - in the first case to create
a global-scale system of colonial food supply and in the later to dramatically reverse
it. An important question is what kind of precedent this might set for another major
revolution in the nature of the global food system? Ater all, we clearly need suh a
revolution if we are actually going to solve world hunger in a sustainable way.
The immediate response is that the lessons from history are not as encouraging
as they might first appear. The basic insight that the world food system has already
gone through two tumultuous periods of upheaval and reconstruction provides some
grounds for hope that it may happen again - this time with more enduring positive
