Geoscience Reference
In-Depth Information
worldwide, transporting animals in Europe, food miles, subsidies and tariffs, trade
disputes, developing trade and fair trade. Cartograms on world food and agriculture
patterns can be found at www.worldmapper.org
So far this section has emphasised the incorporation of agricultural land and
labour into the capitalist system and changes in the physical and production dimen-
sions of agriculture and food. We turn now to the changing political economy of
agriculture and food in which structural forces and large food sector actors are given
prominence. By the beginning of the 1980s, both UK and US food and agriculture
researchers were exploring political economy approaches (Newby and Buttel, 1978).
This fuelled research into the impact of capitalist processes on farming and the
impacts of agribusiness (Marsden et al., 1986). From this foundation new concep-
tualisations allowed agri-food research to explore new frontiers. These included the
study of commodity systems (Friedland et al., 1981), the new political economy of
agriculture and food (Friedland et al., 1991), global commodity chains (Gereffi and
Korzeniewicz, 1994) and food regimes (Friedmann and McMichael, 1989). While
I isolate these threads, it should be remembered that many in the relatively small
community of agri-food researchers attended common conferences (in geography,
sociology, rural sociology, agricultural economics) and that the interdisciplinary
exchanges at these conferences encouraged both disciplinary and interdisciplinary
advances. Throughout the 1990s the focus was more on agriculture and the produc-
tion of food than on the consumption of food.
Agri-food chains
While often used interchangeably the concepts of agri-food commodity, value and
supply chains originate from very different research traditions. Each approach asks
different questions. The commodity chain approach draws upon Marxist political
economy to consider capitalist commodifi cation processes, power asymmetries and
unjust and unfair outcomes that characterise contexts. The long-term vision is criti-
cal, seeking some alternative other than organising production and consumption
around profi ts. The value chain tradition, coming out of business economics and
marketing, focuses on individual actors improving their situation by repositioning
within value chains, so as to increase margins and profi ts. The idea of the supply
chain, in contrast, is more functional and utilitarian, looking at how the job of
providing food gets done through synchronising within and across supply chains,
usually ignoring injustices and maldistribution. Googling the terms in 2008 confi rms
that supply chain management thinking predominates.
Geographers have been among the most adventurous and ambitious in terms of
expanding the agenda of agri-food commodity chain research. First, the simplistic
physical conception from paddock to plate has been advanced by conceptual and
empirical studies revealing the constitutive complexities of the agriculture-food
relation (Bowler et al., 2000; Hughes and Reimer, 2004; Fold and Pritchard, 2005).
This has broken the deterministic and economistic mould of much early work.
These include the delineation of agri-food chains in network terms, so indicating
the geography and temporality of power relations of actor connections (Whatmore
and Thornes, 1997; Freidberg, 2004; Stringer and Le Heron, 2008). Second, inves-
tigations of alternative food networks such as for coffee and a variety of organic
products document the distinctive ethical and moral foundations of many food
networks and the political fi ghts that go into their development, operation and
