Securing participation in global pork production networks: biosecurity, multispecies entanglements, and the politics of domestication practices

ABSTRACT

Since the 1980s, East Asian regions have gradually grown into the biggest importers and producers of animal products in the world. Among them, Taiwan has become the world’s biggest pork exporter since 1990 but the export market suddenly crashed owing to the outbreak of Foot and Mouth Disease in 1997. Since then, biosecurity has been increasingly deemed necessary to manage animal lives. While food regime theory has been steadily employed by critical scholars to examine this rapid ‘meatification’ process in East Asia, it has suffered from ‘inclusionary bias’, paying less attention to the consequences of market failure. Informed by social studies of economisation and marketisation and work on multispecies, I contend that the studies of global agri-food production need to be more attentive to the issue of disarticulations: the ‘dark sides’ of network incorporation. With a specific focus on the Taiwanese pork sector after 1997, this paper argues that ‘politics of domestication’ emerged as markets broke down. I outline three characteristics which have shaped the politics of domestication: disentanglement, marginalisation, and co-becoming. While biosecurity seeks to manage life by separating hog bodies from other species, this paper points out that this enclosure strategy is always subject to threats from within.

KEYWORDS:

• Pork
• East Asia
• animal diseases
• marketisation
• multispecies

Acknowledgment

I dedicate this article to Ching-Ho Wang and Ruey-Jiuan Horng, who passed away recently. Without their love and support, this article would not have been possible.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Additional information

Funding

This work was supported by the Ministry of Science and Technology, Taiwan [grant number MOST 108-2628-H-002-010-MY2].

Notes on contributors

Chi-Mao Wang

Chi-Mao Wang is an Assistant Professor at the Department of Bio-Industry Communication and Development, National Taiwan University. His research interests include food geographies, volumetric politics, and more-than-human geographies. He is currently undertaking research on animal geographies and food politics in East Asia.