Local foodscapes: place and power in the agri-food system

Abstract

This article summarizes a decade of research engagement with local food systems, highlighting some key changes in the scholarly perception of their nature and potential. Based on a synthesis of case studies from different countries, the article identifies three key stages that have shaped the research agenda on food re-localizations: (1) an early enthusiasm for the potential of local food networks, which were deemed to embody the environmental and socio-economic objectives of sustainable development; (2) a growing awareness of the fragility of these initiatives, which was followed by the emergence of a powerful critique known as ‘the local trap’; and (3) the recent re-scaling of food policy at the local level, where cities are taking the lead in responding to the current food insecurity crisis. As the article concludes, there is a new research agenda emerging around the role of the multi-level state, the planning system and sustainability research in scaling up and out these governance innovations.

Keywords:

• local food
• embeddedness
• public food systems
• urban food governance

The early days: local as sustainable food

The local food agenda has changed quite considerably in the last decade, both in academic and in political terms. Between the end of the 1990s and the early 2000s, local food products were widely seen as a potential sustainable solution to the many environmental and socioeconomic problems associated with the industrialization and specialisation of agriculture – including loss of biodiversity, increased environmental pollution, rural depopulation and the marginalisation of small farmers. Kloppenburg et al. (2000, p. 18) provide an illustrative example of the normative view of food re-localization that began to take hold in those times when they wrote that a sustainable food system emphasises ‘locally grown food, regional trading association, locally owned processing, local currency, and local control over politics and regulation’.

At the time, there were three main arguments that underlined the assumption that local food systems are more sustainable. First, local production was deemed to be more environmentally-friendly and of higher intrinsic quality. Indeed, on the one hand, the notion of ‘food miles’ had attracted considerable public attention around the energy and pollution costs associated with the transportation and distribution of foods around the world (Pretty et al. 2005). On the other hand, concepts such as ‘foodshed’ and ‘terroir’ were widely used by both academics and activists to emphasise the positive influence of local ‘natural’ factors (e.g., micro-weather, soil fertility, water quality, etc.) on the ‘quality’ and taste of certain local food products (Barham 2003).

Second, it was assumed that local food chains are more socially embedded – in simple terms, they re-establish relationships of trust and accountability between food producers and consumers. As Feenstra (1997, p. 28) stated, ‘the development of a local sustainable food system provides not only economic gains for a community but also fosters civic involvement, cooperation, and healthy social relations’. Some European researchers began to argue that these new relationships and value-adding methods had the potential of creating a new rural development paradigm, capable of resisting the cost-price squeeze on modern agriculture (Renting et al. 2003).

Third, local food products were considered to be fresher and hence more nutritious – a view that was especially influential in countries like the UK, where a long series of food scares and crises (salmonella, E. coli, Bovine Spongiform Encephalopathy (BSE) and mad cow disease) had provoked a heated debate about the consequences of agricultural industrialization (and particularly the lack of food traceability) for human and environmental health. It was indeed in the UK, and in this kind of climate, that a national government released an official endorsement for the re-localization of the food system. It occurred in 2002, when, in a seminal report written to chart a course out of the Foot and Mouth crisis, the Policy Commission on the Future of Farming and Food (2002) stated that local food is ‘one of the greatest opportunities for farmers to add value and retain a bigger slice of retail value’.

In the ‘placeless foodscape’ (Sonnino & Marsden 2006a) of the UK, some local food producers capitalised on the opportunities offered by this new political climate. This was the case, for example, of Steve Turton, a master butcher from the southwest of England who started to manufacture Westaways sausages (today one of the largest regional brands in the UK) in 1997, at the height of the BSE crisis, ‘mainly because … I was sick and tired of people coming into our shops and moaning about it’ (Sonnino 2007a), he explained. One year later, Sainsbury's, one of the largest retailers in the UK, asked Turton to introduce a three-month pilot scheme in their supermarkets. After realising that the butcher's regional product was selling 200% above their leading brand, Sainsbury's invited Turton to manage a meat counter in their stores. It was the beginning of a network of regional meat suppliers that Turton created and cemented around two main values: regionality and traceability (Sonnino & Marsden 2006b). In his words:

Effectively that's a totally regional offer, 100% traceable meat, we have spent 85,000 quid on our traceability system … so when a customer goes to a store they can actually find out where the meat comes from, and that has been solely driven by regionality.

When I concluded my research, in 2004, the network involved 154 farmers, and its business had grown by 500% since 2000. ‘Localness’, as I was beginning to understand, is not an inherent feature of some food systems. Rather, it is an actively constructed feature, which can be created (or recreated) even in countries, like Italy, where ‘local’ and ‘traditional’ tend to be considered as synonymous terms.

I was fortunate enough, in the mid-2000s, to come across the invention of a new local food product, saffron, in the ‘place-based foodscape’ (Sonnino & Marsden 2006a) of Tuscany, one of the Italian regions mostly known for its vibrant local food sector. Again, behind this initiative was the entrepreneurship of a single individual, a woman who happened to come across traces of a yellowish colour in some ancient Roman ruins located in a small village of southern Tuscany. Convinced that this proved that saffron was once grow in the area, she began to acquire (mainly by reading specialised books) the skills and knowledge needed to reintroduce the artisanal production of saffron in the area. After the first successful attempt, the entrepreneur decided ‘to let people know that saffron can grow in this area’ (Sonnino 2007b). It was the beginning of another successful process of territorial and social embedding of a new local food product that attracted the attention of the many small farmers who were seeking to distance themselves from the dynamics of conventional agriculture. As one of them explained:

We can no longer support our families through conventional farming, as it used to be. The price of wheat is the same as it was twenty years ago. […] We are all farmers in search of new markets, but also of opportunities to get together, as it used to be. We want to work together to become stronger, we have realized we cannot go on alone.

In a region renowned in Italy and beyond for its local food production, it was not difficult for the saffron network to rapidly expand its market, which soon began to include a range of ‘quality’ outlets – including local cheese-makers and restaurants. In an effort to meet the growing demand coming from such outlets, the saffron network soon began to change its spatial distribution. As power and control began to move away from the ancient ruins of the small village that was at the heart of the discourse about the ancient origins and traditionality of the product, tensions began to develop, threatening the very existence of this initiative. For me, this story uncovered, for the first time, the enormous fragility of local food networks, which, as I wrote, clearly need support at wider governance levels to remain sustainable (Sonnino 2007b).

Re-thinking place and power in the food system

There were important insights on the nature and power of ‘place’ emerging from this research. The re-localization of the food system appeared to be, first and foremost, an active process of empowerment of a place through a bio-regional discourse that emphasised the unique qualities of locally grown stocks and products (Sonnino & Marsden 2006b). Both in the UK and in Italy, key actors of the local food networks were promoting new forms of cultural and natural hybridity that grounded their identity within a revised symbiosis of plants, animals, grass, even archaeological ruins. Local food entrepreneurs, in short, were active geographers who worked to attach to plants and animals the qualities that appeared to be attainable only from the places governed by the network itself. Constructed as ‘local’, such places provided the food network with a renewed identity that, however, had to be continuously defended and negotiated. Clearly, there was a constant effort to balance cooperation and competition within these local food networks (Sonnino & Marsden 2006b).

From a theoretical and analytical perspective, what emerged here was the need for a new research approach that broadened the notion of ‘embeddedness’ beyond the social dimension of these alternative food networks to account for their territoriality (or lack of) and, most importantly from a practical perspective, for the presence or absence of governance arrangements that can sustain local food networks over space and time. It was at this point that, as I will describe later, my academic attention shifted from local food producers to the role of the State in constructing and supporting markets for local food products.

At the same time, scholars who remained focused on the supply side of local food chains began to mount a very powerful critique of the interplay between place and power in the food system, commonly known as the ‘local trap’. The essence of their argument is well captured by this quote:

Local social relationships, power relations, and environmental management practices are not always positive, and communities can pursue elitist or narrow ‘defensive localization’ strategies at the expenses of wider societal interests. (Campbell 2004, p. 345)

Broadly speaking, the ‘local trap’ critique was based on three powerful counter-arguments about the implications of re-localization. First, local food systems are not always ecologically sustainable. Mass-produced industrial corn from the American midwest or milk sourced from an intensively managed farm in Devon are still local for somebody (Winter 2003; Born & Purcell 2006). Moreover, as Born and Purcell (2006) pointed out, growing food locally in some areas of the world can generate enormous environmental costs (like water depletion in the case of food grown in arid areas) that may well make it more sustainable to import the product from another country. Second, local food systems may exacerbate social injustice; for example, farmers’ markets tend to target middle-class consumers, leaving struggling producers and non-affluent citizens to ‘weigh concerns with income and price against the supposed benefits of direct, social ties’ (Hinrichs 2000, p. 30). Third, local food products are not necessarily healthier. Small farmers often cannot afford rapid-shipment methods and quick refrigeration equipment, which means that their products often spend hours in a truck, losing some of their nutritional qualities (Born & Purcell 2006).

As the ‘local trap’ critique began to unfold, the celebration of the local began to be replaced by its detraction (Sonnino et al. 2013). Central to this critique is a quite narrow view of ‘devolution’, which is essentially interpreted to be a displacement of responsibility for filling the gaps created by neo-liberalisation to smaller-scale institutions. As such, devolution is deemed to create ‘inevitable disparities’ (Allen & Guthman 2006), ‘marginal, safe spaces for the privileged’ (Allen 2008).

While this may be true for the North American context, my involvement with research on the multi-level context of agri-food governance in the UK, in particular, suggested something very different (Marsden & Sonnino 2005, 2008). If accompanied by democratic leadership and local empowerment, devolution can indeed turn the local into a site of experimentation, where sub-national units, as Meadowcroft (2007) convincingly argues, can address issues that are not yet mature on the national scene. To progress the debate on the benefits (or dis-benefits) of re-localization, I suggested, we need to focus on the tangible outcomes of different discursive practices (Sonnino et al. 2013) – i.e., their concrete implications for local communities.

Beyond provenance: sustainability in the food system

The ‘local trap’ critique has dismantled the theoretical assumption that the re-localization of the food system has inherently positive outcomes, calling into question the role of local politics. The new research agenda emerging here was invoking an inductive, rather than deductive, analytical approach that unpacked the nature, meanings, and goals of re-localization in different contexts. Do different food-system actors have different views of re-localization? Do these views promote defensive, parochial, and autarkic tendencies? Or are they embedded in a more relational and porous view of the local that takes into consideration its connections and potential synergies with other locals?

These questions raised the need to develop a more systemic research approach – one that integrates the conventional (and often dichotomized) focus on local food producers and consumers with a new attention for the role of the State as a food-chain actor. Indeed, with its ‘general mandate to promote the collective good […] with clear lines of accountability to the general population’ (Meadowcroft 2007, p. 308), in democratic societies the State has a crucial and unique (albeit neglected) role to play in the design and implementation of food systems (including local food systems) that deliver the environmental and socioeconomic objectives of sustainable development. At the most immediate level, the uniqueness of the State's role is linked to the enormous economic power of the public pursue, which can create important markets for quality food producers that are marginalised (when not even displaced) by the forces of globalisation. Equally significant and unique, however, is the educational power of the State – its capacity to set in motion consumption habits and trends that can convince others to follow suit (Morgan & Sonnino 2005, 2007; see also Day 2005). Our research on school food reform demonstrated the fallacy of thinking about devolution and localization in monolithic and abstract terms. In different areas of the world, the local State is striving to use the power of public procurement to embed ideals of economic equity, environmental integrity, and social justice in the food system (Morgan & Sonnino 2008).

One of the most powerful examples of the power of local action comes from East Ayrshire, a deprived rural county in the devolved country of Scotland. The East Ayrshire Council – depending largely on the work of its dedicated Head of Catering – re-envisioned the school meal service as a platform on which to tackle many of the region's most glaring problems: to improve the population's health, to develop the local economy and to fulfil a broader mandate for global ecological responsibility. One of the Council's primary strategies to achieve these ambitious goals was local sourcing and partnership with local producers through the adoption of a ‘creative’ tendering model. Specifically, the Local Authority loosened some of the strict ‘straightness’ guidelines for class 1 vegetables (in order to attract more small organic producers); it divided the contract into nine smaller lots instead of the four larger ones used previously (in order to enable more small producers); and it reached out to small local suppliers to encourage their active participation (Morgan & Sonnino 2008).

As the programme evolved, so too did its reach and the comprehensiveness of its approach. Begun initially as a pilot of a single primary school in 2004, by 2011 the reform came to include all 45 of the district's primary schools and two of its secondary schools, where 70% of the ingredients utilised are now local, 30% are organic, and 90% of the food sourced is fresh and unprocessed. The measureable results of East Ayrshire's school meals reform offer impressive testimony in support of the role that the re-localization of the school food system can play in progressing sustainable development. Economically, the reform has created new opportunities for local suppliers; the first 12 schools involved in the reform delivered a multiplier effect of £160,000 to the local economy (Sonnino et al. 2013). In terms of environmental impact, the programme's effectiveness is corroborated by several external assessments. The first, commissioned by the Scottish Environmental Protection Agency in 2007–2008, evaluated one primary school and projected an annual savings of 37.7 tons of CO₂ emissions for that single school due to a reduction in food miles; as a whole, the meal service reduced its food miles by 70%. The second study, a Social Return on Investment (SROI) analysis also conducted in 2007–2008, considered environmental, economic, health, and other factors (including food miles and agricultural externalities; the value of increased local employment and production; and the reduction in overweight children and probability of future disease) and estimated a return of £6 for each £1 invested in the programme (Sonnino et al. 2013).

It would be naïve, however, to use such powerful examples of public food reform to conflate re-localization with sustainability, which is never just a matter of food provenance. The hospital food system in Wales provides an illustrative example of the complexity of sustainability and of the importance of addressing it through a systemic approach that takes into account the connections and dis-connections between different stages of the food-supply chain. Embedded, as it is, in a ‘cost-cutting’ public procurement culture that prioritises quantity over quality and costs over values, the hospital menu in Wales has no emphasis on the provenance and freshness of foods. Our detailed analysis of a sample dinner menu revealed that 40% of the ingredients utilised are frozen and that none of the vegetables are sourced fresh (Sonnino & McWilliam 2011). Moreover, only 8 of the 22 ingredients that we are able to trace back to the source (3 items were of unknown provenance) came from the UK – but none of them from the region.

The most shocking findings from this research concerned the amount of food wasted in the three hospitals we selected for our fieldwork. Against official figures of 1–12% plate or main course waste, we recorded total levels of food waste that ranged between 36 and 54% of the total food purchased for patients. The reasons behind this had partly to do with the quality and provenance of the food served, which, as mentioned, is mostly tinned, frozen and processed (all features that are commonly contrasted with the nutritional and organoleptic properties of fresh local products). The poor quality of the service also played a major role in the generation of waste. Briefly, hospitals in Wales (as in many other countries) have lost the infrastructure to cook fresh food. The meals arrive frozen, often packaged in bulk, and often too many of them are ‘regenerated’ for the number of patients who actually eat. Staff's lack of competence in preparing and presenting the meal to patients is also a defining factor responsible for the generation of such high levels of waste (Sonnino & McWilliam 2011).

The question is: Does it really matter where the food comes from when 60% of it becomes wasted? Arguably, a focus on the production stage of the food chain has very little to say, per se, about the sustainability of the food system – its real and potential capacity to progress the economic, environmental, and social goals embedded in the concept of sustainable development. In an era of growing food-insecurity, when one billion people are hungry and a similar number are overweight or obese, the issue of citizens’ access to healthy and nutritious food is (and should remain) of paramount importance for both academics and practitioners interested in sustainability. In this sense, as I will explain in the next section, food re-localization today is acquiring new meanings and, perhaps, a new development potential.

Some conclusions: re-localization and the ‘New Food Equation’

The global food scenario has recently been undergoing major changes, linked to the emergence of what we have termed a ‘New Food Equation’ (Morgan & Sonnino 2010). This is the result of the interplay of five negative and interrelated trends: a food price surge that reached its peak in 2007–2008, when wheat prices almost doubled and rice prices nearly tripled; a sharp increase in an increasingly ‘bimodal’ food insecurity (Ashe & Sonnino 2013); the spread of urban food riots in a large number of countries; the imponderable effects of climate change on eco-systems, which tend to be especially serious in countries that have done the least to cause the problem in the first place; and the emergence of new land conflicts as rich but food-stressed countries like Saudi Arabia and South Korea seek to buy or lease fertile land in the developing South.

In this context, there is a new type of re-localization that, in my view, deserves full scholarly and political attention: the re-localization of food governance. Indeed, one of the most extraordinary phenomena of this new decade is the emergence of cities as food-policy actors. Faced with the failure of decades of national and global policies that have attempted to promote food security through a focus on the production of (rather than access to) food, pioneering urban governments in both the global North and the global South are now devising their own place-based solutions to the current global food crisis, largely through strategic documents and governance arrangements (e.g., the establishment of food policy councils) that aim to forge new alliances between food producers and consumers and between urban centres and their rural hinterlands (Sonnino 2009). As even FAO (2011, p. 6) has recently recognised, what we are witnessing here is the emergence of a new ‘paradigm for eco-system based, territorial food system planning [that] seeks … not to replace the global supply chains that contribute to food security for many countries, but to improve the local management of food systems that are both local and global’.

It is too soon to even try to assess how successful these urban initiatives will be in reshaping the global food system. However, in theory at least, these new place-based initiatives provide a vibrant alternative to conventional approaches to food security and sustainability – a new and more integrated vision that emphasises new forms of connectivity across urban and rural landscapes. To become more mainstreamed and sustainable over time, they will require far more innovative institutional support at higher governance levels. As we know from the past, ‘sustainable transitions in the food sector are spatially created and maintained’ (Marsden & Sonnino 2012). For academics, there is a new and exciting research agenda emerging here – one that requires a more integrated focus on the role of the multi-level state, food planning and sustainability research in stimulating, scaling-up and scaling out initiatives and niches that are redefining the role, meaning and development potential of local food systems.