Food. Jennifer Clapp

Чтение книги онлайн.

СКАЧАТЬ health issues more broadly. Taking a step back to the bigger picture, to look at the wider forces that shape the world food economy and how they reinforce one another, helps to build a richer understanding of these other important dimensions of food systems. While there is always a risk of missing the specificity of the dynamics in particular locations or the impact on certain groups when stepping back to take a global perspective, gaining an understanding of the big picture helps to contextualize the local. Indeed, diverse local level food initiatives that seek to provide alternatives may be difficult to scale up and out precisely because the world food economy creates conditions that push against those efforts. In other words, both place-based local studies and global overviews of broader structural dynamics are needed to gain a comprehensive picture. This book aims to contribute to a deeper understanding of the global political and economic dimensions of food, with the hope that it will complement studies that are grounded in more local case studies or which are more focused on specific issues or groups.

As outlined in the chapters of this book, the expansion of the world food economy did not just emerge on its own overnight. It was shaped by a variety of forces over an extended period of time. Although global food markets emerged well over a century ago, they were given a further push by industrialized countries, and the United States in particular, from the 1940s and 1950s onwards. This phase of expansion in the world food economy saw the promotion of a global adoption of the industrial agricultural model, as well as the development of major international markets for foodstuffs. These developments paved the way for subsequent forces that reinforced the spread of the world food economy in more recent decades. These additional forces include the establishment of new global norms for the liberalization of international agricultural trade; the rise of transnational corporations (TNCs) as dominant agents of global food production, processing, trade, and distribution; and the dramatic increase in the transformation of agricultural commodities, farmland, and agrifood firm shares into financial products bought and sold by investors.

But the expansion of the world food economy is not the entire story. These forces, as they have unfolded, have opened up a greater number of what I call “middle spaces” within that economy, where control and influence over how it operates has become concentrated in the hands of powerful actors who have an interest in seeing that system expand. More intermediaries in the world food economy have become involved in a multitude of activities related to the business of food along expanded food supply chains. It is within these middle spaces of activity where norms, practices, and rules that govern the world food economy are shaped by the very forces and actors that are leading to its expansion. The economic forces and powerful actors that shape the governance systems that guide the expansion of the global food system may seem far removed from the big questions of compensation to agricultural producers; who has access to food in a particular location; and with what effect ecologically and socially. But understanding the influence of global economic forces and the middle spaces they have opened up for powerful intermediaries to set the rules of the game is essential for explaining food outcomes in rich and poor countries alike.

      The world food economy today is characterized by growing distance, as powerful actors in its middle spaces increasingly treat food like any other commodity, where its profit generating abilities are prioritized over its other essential functions such as nourishment, livelihood, and culture. It is also characterized by asymmetry and volatility, and as a result is susceptible to crises where the world’s poorest and most marginalized people are typically affected the most. Finally, it is also characterized by increasing ecological fragility, putting at risk the very foundation on which food and agriculture is based. These features of the world food economy have not gone unnoticed. Resistance movements that seek to promote alternatives to the current world food economy are on the rise. Although still small in scale compared to the global trend in world food markets, these movements signal a momentous shift in thinking on a broad scale about the implications of the food we eat every day.

Going Global

Before providing a more detailed overview of the key forces that shape the world food economy, it is important first to outline some of its basic facts and features. Most estimates put global food sales at around US$8.7 trillion in 2018. The world market for food, in other words, is huge. Indeed, the food and agriculture sector accounts for some 10 percent of global GDP (which was approximately US$80 trillion in 2018) and around one third of the world’s active workforce depends on it for their livelihood. The weight of agriculture in national economies varies widely between countries, however. In developing countries as a whole, agriculture accounts for around 10 percent of GDP. In poorer agriculture-based developing countries, it accounts for a much higher proportion of GDP, often over 30 percent and as much as 50 percent or higher for some countries, such as Sierra Leone or Chad. In these poorer agriculture-based economies, most of which are in sub-Saharan Africa, typically over 60 percent of the population is engaged in agriculture as part of their livelihood. This contrasts sharply with industrialized countries where agriculture averages less than two percent of GDP, with the percentage of the population working in the sector averaging around three percent. Again there is variation, with agriculture accounting for less than one percent of GDP in Germany, for example, and three percent in Australia.⁵

      Throughout history, world food markets have had an international dimension to them. Salt, sugar, and spices have been traded over long distances for centuries. Colonial powers invested in plantation agriculture for certain key crops – such as sugar, coffee, tea, and tropical fruits – in their colonies, and established international trade routes for food and agriculture items in the 1800s – mainly as imports to wealthy nations. In some cases, such as the United Kingdom (as is discussed in more depth in Chapter 2), the import of food items from the colonies provided an important source of its calories, particularly as the country industrialized and needed to feed an expanding urban population with affordable grains and other foodstuffs.

After the Second World War, the United States sought to dominate international food trade flows as a major exporter of food to countries around the world that were short of sufficient food supplies. As Chapter 2 outlines, the United States sought to export its agricultural surpluses to Europe and then to Africa, Asia, and Latin America in this period, a practice followed by other countries that grew surplus food, including Canada, Australia, and eventually Europe once it recovered from the war. The globalization of the food system began to intensify in the post-war period, with recent decades seeing particularly heightened global integration including trade within and among major agrifood companies.

      The total volume and value of agrifood trade has increased dramatically in the past thirty years. Agricultural trade as a percentage of total trade in goods and services has declined from around 20 percent in 1980 to around 10 percent today, but this is largely because trade in other items has grown more than trade in agricultural products. Food trade, however, has grown significantly in absolute terms, from around US$315 billion in 1990 to approximately US$1.5 trillion in 2017, experiencing a nine percent increase in 2017 alone. Food trade has also grown faster than food production in recent years, signaling the increased importance of global markets in the food system.⁶

The share of agricultural production that is exported varies by country and by crop. The United States, for example, exports about half of its wheat and rice production and Canada exports three quarters of the wheat and 90 percent of the canola it produces. While overall rich industrialized countries tend to export a high proportion of their agricultural production, some less industrialized countries also export significant amounts of the crops they grow. Latin American countries, for example, export around a quarter of their agricultural production. This compares with Asia, which exports around six percent of its agricultural production. These figures, however, mask wide variation and the fact that some countries rely heavily on agricultural exports for their income. Although agricultural exports average around 10 percent of all exports, in many developing countries agriculture makes up a very large percentage of total exports. In 2017, for example, 94 percent of Guinea-Bissau’s exports, 64 percent of СКАЧАТЬ