Geographies of meatification: an emerging Asian meat complex

ABSTRACT

The ‘meatification’ of human diets has been subject to increasing scholarly attention in recent years, along with its many impacts. While the rapidly expanding meatification in many Asian countries has been noted, the geographies of these processes have been left largely unexplored. This paper maps the changing geographies of meat with special focus on Southeast Asia. We use Tony Weis’ concept of ‘the industrial grain-oilseed-livestock complex’ to analyse how forms of systemic meatification are taking place in Asia. We map and analyse regional trends in meat production and consumption, as well as trade patterns in meat products and dominant feed crops. We argue that the regional meat complex emerges through increasingly regional development processes and capital, as well as through new South-South connections. The geographies of meatification in Southeast Asia thus constitute an empirical manifestation of the emerging multipolarity of the global food regime.

KEYWORDS:

• Meat
• food regimes
• meatification
• Asia
• South-South trade
• emerging economies

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

Notes

1 Meatification is also highly uneven in class terms – an important dimension that space does not allow us to pursue further.

2 It should be noted, though, that such ‘emergence’ is far from unproblematic, as Western companies by no means are readily giving up their oligopolistic control (see e.g. Oliveira, 2018).

3 Three countries dominated: Indonesia (35%), Malaysia (17%), and Vietnam (13%). See FICCI (2015).

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Jostein Jakobsen

Jostein Jakobsen is a Doctoral Research Fellow at the Centre for Development and the Environment, University of Oslo. His ongoing PhD project is centred on India’s role in the contemporary food regime, while his research interests span widely across critical agrarian studies and political ecology.

Arve Hansen

Arve Hansen is a development geographer and a Postdoctoral Research Fellow at the Centre for Development and the Environment, University of Oslo. His research centres on the changing geographies of production and consumption in Asia, with particular focus on Vietnam.