Food crises, food regimes and food movements: rumblings of reform or tides of transformation?

Abstract

This article addresses the potential for food movements to bring about substantive changes to the current global food system. After describing the current corporate food regime, we apply Karl Polanyi's ‘double-movement’ thesis on capitalism to explain the regime's trends of neoliberalism and reform. Using the global food crisis as a point of departure, we introduce a comparative analytical framework for different political and social trends within the corporate food regime and global food movements, characterizing them as ‘Neoliberal’, ‘Reformist’, ‘Progressive’, and ‘Radical’, respectively, and describe each trend based on its discourse, model, and key actors, approach to the food crisis, and key documents. After a discussion of class, political permeability, and tensions within the food movements, we suggest that the current food crisis offers opportunities for strategic alliances between Progressive and Radical trends within the food movement. We conclude that while the food crisis has brought a retrenchment of neoliberalization and weak calls for reform, the worldwide growth of food movements directly and indirectly challenge the legitimacy and hegemony of the corporate food regime. Regime change will require sustained pressure from a strong global food movement, built on durable alliances between Progressive and Radical trends.

Keywords:

• global food crisis
• Karl Polanyi
• corporate food regime
• food movements
• food sovereignty

Notes

¹The existence of a third, neoliberal food regime is contested among some food regime theorists – see McMichael (2009), Friedmann (2009) and Burch and Lawrence (2009) for an overview of this debate. For the purposes of this analysis, we adopt the premise that the ‘corporate food regime’ is the third regime to emerge, beginning in the 1980s with the current, neoliberal phase of capitalism, and ‘[expresses] a new moment in the political history of capital’ distinct from the previous regime of state-led development anchored in US hegemony (McMichael 2009, 151). However, adopting the alternate premise (i.e. that the corporate food regime is simply a neoliberal phase of the second global food regime) would not change our analysis.

²Grain giants ADM, Cargill, and Bunge took control of 80 percent of the world's grain (Vorley 2003). Chemical corporations Monsanto and DuPont together appropriated 65 percent of the global maize seed market (Action Aid International Ghana 2006): four companies – Tyson, Cargill, Swift, and National Beef Packing Company control 83.5 percent of the US beef supply (Hendrickson and Heffernan 2007).

³Capitalist agriculture intensified labor productivity, increased overall food production and undoubtedly contributed to the global increase in population. As Bernstein points out (2010, 307) population ‘more than [doubled] across the half-century of the greatest development of productivity in capitalist agriculture’. This has led capitalists (and many Marxists) to assume that only large-scale industrial agriculture is capable of feeding the world. But these productivity increases were largely obtained on prime agricultural land. The inability of capitalist agriculture to provide livelihoods for the 1.5 billion peasants that manage to produce half the world's food on marginal lands means that poverty and hunger will continue to increase, as will agrarian struggles for land and resources. It also means that organic and sustainable agriculture will likely grow as alternatives to industrial farming. Contrary to the conventional wisdom, there is ample literature within the science of agroecology demonstrating that organic agriculture and small farms can easily meet present and future demands for global food production, and that these forms of production are better suited to sustaining rural livelihoods (Rosset 1999, Pretty and Hine 2000, Badgely et al. 2007). Regardless of one's position on productivity, organic, low-external input production is becoming increasingly important to the survival, social reproduction, and political demands of smallholders and modern peasant farmers worldwide.

⁴For a document reflecting the scope these reforms, see the Comprehensive Framework for Action outlining the official response by the G8 and IFIs to the 2008 global food crisis, released at the FAO's High Level Conference on World Food Security in Rome, June 2008. Available from: http://www.un.org/issues/food/taskforce/Documentation/CFA%Web.pdf

⁵The neoliberal fetish, that ‘there is a technological fix for each and every problem’ (Harvey 2005, 68) is apparent in the scientifically unproven assertion that genetically modified organisms are higher-yielding and ‘climate resistant’ and are thus the answer to world hunger (Gurian-Sherman 2009).

⁶Key board members of both Conservation International and the World Wildlife Fund draw from the ranks of the corporate agri-food monopolies. The former CEO of DuPont sits on the board of WWF along with former executives from Coca-Cola and Goldman Sachs. The executive committee chair at Conservation International is the current chairman of the board of Wal-Mart.

⁷Reformism in the food regime is rooted in modernization theories of economic development which saw the path for economic development in the Third World as following the same industrial path as that of the industrial North (Rostow 1960). Modernization theory was a defensive capitalist response to the spread of Marxist economic thought (Baran 1957) and to the related body of dependency theory (Furtado 1964). Central to modernization theory was the notion that continued economic development of the North was essential to finance the development of the South (Isbister 1991). This appears to be a persistent subtext of both Neoliberal and Reformist thought in the corporate food regime.

⁸For the full text of the Global Food Security Act, see http://thomas.loc.gov/cgi-bin/query/z?c111:S.384:[Accessed 6 July 2010].

⁹Published when Gordon Conway was president of the Rockefeller Foundation, the Doubly Green Revolution argued for a new ‘reformed’ Green Revolution that ensured equity and sustainability. After Conway left Rockefeller, his book was used by the Foundation to revive their Green Revolution efforts in Africa. Africa's turn: the new Green Revolution for the twenty-first century advocates hybrid and genetically modified seeds and chemical fertilizers, training of African scientists, local-global market development, agro-dealer networks, infrastructure investments and agricultural policy reforms (Rockefeller Foundation 2007). Based on the premise that the Green Revolution had ‘missed’ Africa, Africa's turn became the guiding document for the Rockefeller and Bill and Melinda Gates Foundations' Alliance for a Green Revolution in Africa (AGRA).

¹⁰Progressivism emerged in the US during the 1920s, as a reaction to increased industrialization and capitalism. Progressives advocated for economic and social justice through government regulation of large corporations. The contemporary progressive movement has become increasingly pluralist, encompassing issues such as religious freedom, environmental protection, women's rights and labor rights. A key theme anchoring progressivism is political reform in the public interest to prevent the political system from being dominated by elite and corporate interests. The progressive movement attempts to regulate corporate control over society, such as limiting the privatization of social security and providing stronger public protection of civic and environmental common goods This is achieved through deepening democracy and making the government more accountable and responsive to the needs of its citizens. Progressives strive to create public policy that enhances social and economic justice and decreases inequity through prioritizing public interests (Dierwechter 2008). The progressive discourse is flexible, change oriented and pragmatic, providing a lens for social problem solving and reform (CAP 2010). As a result, progressivism is not associated with a political party, and adapts to the changing socio-economic landscape.

¹¹Service Employees International Union.

¹²Though the SEIU has not made any official announcements, a leaked memo indicated the union's plan to organize fast food workers should the pro-labor Employee Free Choice Act pass. The memo is available at http://www.scribd.com/doc/31364789/SeiuRestaurantOrgzngPlanDec2009.

¹³The Food Chain Workers Alliance (to which the Restaurant Opportunities Center belongs) is a radical coalition of worker-based organizations whose members seek to improve conditions for laborers at all levels of the food value chain. They have infused the progressive food movement with a call for healthy and affordable food access with radical demands for workers rights within the food system. See http://foodchainworkers.org/. The Coalition of Immokalee Workers is a farmworker organization of primarily indigenous and latino immigrant tomato pickers in Immokalee, Florida. Their innovative campaigns against modern-day slavery in the fields and ‘a penny more a pound’ for tomato pickers have mobilized the faith community and university students, successfully targeting fast food chains like Burger King, McDonalds and Taco Bell with successful boycotts. See http://www.ciw-online.org/.

¹⁴See the Detroit Black Community Food Security Network's ‘Creating a Food Secure Detroit: A City of Detroit Policy on Food Security’. Available from: http://detroitblackfoodsecurity.org/policy.html.

¹⁵Farmer Jim Cochran, co-founder of Swanton Berry Farms in Northern California, as quoted in Shuman (2009).

¹⁶See for example the Civil Society for the Committee on World Food Security (available from: http://cso4cfs.org/) and the Declaration of Civil Society Organizations participating at the CSOs/NGOs – FAO Consultation for Europe and Central Asia, Yerevan, 10–11 May 2010 (available from: http://www.foodsovereignty.org/new/[Accessed 6 July 2010]).

¹⁷With the advent of the post-Washington Consensus, the World Bank Group has led several global assessments, engaging experts and stakeholders in high-level reviews of controversial industries, for example, the Report from the World Commission on Dams (2000) and the Extractive Industries Review (World Bank 2004). Findings and recommendations from these studies have been coolly received by the Bank (World Bank 2004), and generally ignored by industry and other IFIs. The IAASTD (International Assessment on Agricultural Knowledge Science and Technology for Development), a four-year, $15m exercise initiated by Monsanto corporation and the World Bank in 2003 and carried out with some 400 scientist-stakeholders, was no exception (Scoones 2010). Though signed by 57 governments (excepting the US, Australia, and Canada), the IAASTD was rejected by scientists from the powerful pro-industry group CropLife, largely because findings did not profile genetically engineered crops as a solution to world hunger (CropLife 2008). The IAASTD was ignored by the High Level Task Force and the Comprehensive Framework on Agriculture, and receives no mention by the World Bank in its New Deal for Agriculture. Repeated efforts by anti-hunger groups to obtain official recognition of the IAASTD from the US Department of Agriculture have been met with silence.

¹⁸For definitions and discussion of food sovereignty see Patel et al., Journal of Peasant Studies, 36(3), July 2009, ‘Grassroots voices: food sovereignty’.

¹⁹See www.viacampesina.org

²⁰See http://usfoodcrisisgroup.org/

²¹See http://africanbiodiversity.org/abn_old/documents_SSL_items/AFSA_declaration

²²See for example the portrayal of the food movement in Michael Pollan's (2010) recent New York Times Magazine piece on food movements.

²³See http://detroitblackfoodsecurity.org/policy.html [Accessed 2 July 2010].

²⁴At the US Social Forum in Detroit in June 2010, the US Working Group on the Food Crisis began a process of expanding its leadership to grassroots food justice groups and changed its name to the US Food Sovereignty Alliance. In Africa, the Alliance for Food Sovereignty in Africa (http://africanbiodiversity.org/abn_old/documents_SSL_items/AFSA_declaration) brings together farmers' federations from around the continent with women's organizations and NGOs to organize against a new Green Revolution for Africa.

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Eric Holt Giménez

We would like to thank Tanya Kerssen for her contributions to an earlier version of this article as well as the anonymous reviewers for their helpful comments. All the usual disclaimers apply.