Risk and responsibility in the corporate food regime: research pathways beyond the COVID-19 crisis

Abstract

The COVID-19 pandemic has focused renewed public attention on the risks and harms generated by a globalized, industrialized, and corporatized food system. This crisis reinvigorates the need for a research agenda that identifies compelling ways of holding key actors in the corporate food regime accountable for creating and profiting from systemic risk in the food system. We draw upon theoretical conceptions of “risk,” “rights,” and “(ir)responsibility” to raise questions about how to move beyond narrow liberal notions of responsibility for postpandemic recovery. Redefining responsibility could be transformative in the pursuit of corporate accountability for past and present harms, and in financing pathways towards less risky, more resilient, and more just food systems of the future.

Keywords:

• Corporate food regime
• food systems
• redistribution
• responsibility
• risk society

Introduction: Rethinking “risk and responsibility”

To be a radical critic of existing institutions and social structures is to identify harms that are generated by existing arrangements, to formulate alternatives which mitigate those harms, and to propose transformative strategies for realizing those alternatives.

Erik Olin Wright¹

We begin with a thought experiment. Imagine that following another mass shooting in the United States—which, at the time of writing (November 25, 2020), was the 581st so far in 2020²—lawmakers and the judiciary decisively addressed the conditions of systemic risk that enable these tragic events. To reduce shootings, they approved massive investments in social work, community programming, and confiscation efforts; large sums in damages were ordered to survivors and families of victims; and this response was financed by the country’s largest gun manufacturers and retailers as a form of reparations—scaled proportionately to the profits they accrued by taking advantage of the risk to society posed by a lack of gun control.

Of course, this is not what has happened after previous mass shootings. At present, criminal responsibility is attributed to the shooter for pulling the trigger, making the shooter personally, directly, and solely liable for causing terror, injury, and death. Despite the economic and political structures that allow individuals to purchase deadly weapons—structures that allow gun manufacturers, retailers, and even policymakers to profit from the risk of mass shootings—companies and state actors are rarely held accountable. That is to say, currently, the entities who create, maintain, and profit from the structural conditions that enable the risk of mass shootings are not liable for harm caused, and therefore avoid accountability for their role in recurring, predictable, and avoidable tragedies.

Sociologists Anthony Giddens and Ulrich Beck have articulated key concepts that capture the nature of this problem in a “risk society.”³ Risks introduced by modernization processes (such as industrialization, globalization, and scientific “progress”)—or what Giddens calls “manufactured risk”⁴—have replaced nonhuman forces as defining features of society.⁵ Beck argues that, as modernization occurs, the “logic of [manufactured] risk production” outpaces the “logic of wealth production” such that:

The gain in power [or wealth] from techno-economic ‘progress’ [becomes] increasingly overshadowed by the production of risks…which are revealed as irreversible threats to the life of plants, animals, and human beings. Unlike the factory-related or occupational hazards of the nineteenth and the first half of the twentieth centuries, these can no longer be limited to certain localities or groups, but rather exhibit a tendency to globalization which spans production and reproduction as much as national borders.⁶

In a society defined by manufactured risk, it therefore becomes increasingly difficult to attribute responsibility to any one actor. Beck explored this attributional challenge through the concept of “organized irresponsibility,”⁷ which refers to the risks that are produced by people, but for which no individual actor can specifically be held accountable because of the complexity and cumulative nature of manufactured risk production (as per the gun violence example above). Building upon Beck’s thinking, Giddens raises a number of questions that arise when considering how organized irresponsibility plays out in a risk society:

Who is to determine how harmful products are, what side effects are produced by them, and what level of risk is acceptable? How can ‘sufficient proof’ be determined in a world full of contested knowledge claims and probabilities? If there are damages to be paid, or reparations made, who is to decide about compensation and appropriate forms for future control or regulation?⁸

“Responsibilizing” actors for harms to others in an individualized, liberal sense is therefore increasingly difficult and increasingly insufficient for preventing and repairing harm. These conditions provide opportunities for what Dean Curran calls “risk arbitrage,” or:

A process where actors, whether it be individuals or larger organizations, can produce social risk, appropriate benefit from these risks, and disproportionately avoid the consequences of the risks so as to benefit from the overall ‘cycle of reward and risk’—even if society as a whole is worse off…the organized irresponsibility principle enables relationships of risk arbitrage that intensify contemporary risk and inequality.⁹

In this paper, we bring the concepts of risk and responsibility into conversation with food regime analysis.¹⁰ The main aim of this paper is to advance a theoretical argument and research agenda for responsibilizing corporate food regime actors for risk arbitrage, thereby assigning accountability for creating and profiting from risks and harms (such as pandemics) that are distributed to people and nature. We do this by rethinking responsibility, a concept that is critical to rights-based challenges advocated by the global food sovereignty movement against the corporate food regime,¹¹ but is comparatively understudied.¹² Specifically, this paper addresses the following questions: in a risk society, how can the concept of responsibility be expanded beyond the identification of narrowly defined causes and effects; could responsibility be reworked to include demonstration of disproportionate benefit from structural arrangements that increase risk and/or harm to others; and what are the implications of a refreshed theory of responsibility for the purveyors of the corporate food regime (such as states, the World Trade Organization, corporations, financiers, wealthy philanthropists, and others)? To conclude, we outline a research agenda for responsibilizing and dismantling the corporate food regime, and highlight key questions that emerge for the politics of redistribution, that is, who gets what, how, and who decides?

Risk and (ir)responsibility in the corporate food regime

The “corporate food regime,” which consists of a “cluster of relations” between the largest corporate actors in the global food system,¹³ is characterized by industrialization, consolidation, concentration, specialization, and, increasingly, financialization.¹⁴ While the environmental and health consequences of these trends are well documented,¹⁵ responsibility for outcomes is not always captured or supported in existing governance systems.

Nationally and internationally, rights frameworks are often used to confer obligations to states to protect people from harm and risk, and to support the basic conditions that allow for a dignified life. Built on international law and drawing chiefly from the International Covenant on Economic and Social Rights,¹⁶ the Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO) Voluntary Guidelines to Support the Progressive Realization of the Right to Adequate Food¹⁷ (adopted in 2004) constitute a set of recommendations on how to implement obligations or responsibilities. Under Article 11, State Parties must take measures to ensure their continuous implementation and improvement. While these guidelines have led to some improvements, they are still not sufficient, as critics have pointed out.¹⁸ For example, Julian Germann contends that the Guidelines act discursively as an instrument to manage and control hunger as an eventual policy goal, rather than an instrument to transform the underlying conditions that allow for hunger and the violation of human rights.¹⁹ Within an overarching productivist paradigm, such a narrow interpretation (or perhaps co-optation) of the Right to Food as the “right to be fed” has enabled and rationalized irresponsible corporate behaviour under the banner of controlling hunger, while taking away the rights of people to feed themselves through a diversity of food systems.

In a highly concentrated agrifood system, this devolution of the Right to Food to the functioning of the corporate food regime has had the net effect of extracting profits from land and people and funnelling wealth to a limited number of corporate actors, yet the risks and costs associated with generating those profits are distributed to the public as negative externalities. Examples of how the corporate food regime manufactures and distributes risk and harm are not hard to find. Negative environmental externalities in the agrifood industry include, among others, habitat destruction, biodiversity loss, pollution and contamination, soil erosion, water overuse and depletion, and toxic and greenhouse gas emissions. Negative social externalities include the harm to workers and eaters who are exploited by the corporate food regime and experience poverty and precarity, food insecurity and malnutrition (despite ample food availability), debt, injury, exposure to toxins, chronic disease, and shortened life expectancies, among others.

Recent cases against pesticide corporations demonstrate that it is indeed possible to link actions or products of specific actors in the corporate food regime to negative impacts on human and/or environmental health. Take, for example, Dewayne Johnson’s precedent-setting case against Monsanto (now Bayer). While pesticide-related health issues are often challenging to causally “prove” because of the complex array of factors that interact to affect health,²⁰ the legal system found that Monsanto’s glyphosate-based herbicides were a “substantial factor in causing harm” to Johnson, who developed terminal cancer after repeated use.²¹ The jury also found that Monsanto was liable for damages to Johnson since Monsanto “fail[ed] to adequately warn of the potential risks” of the herbicides, which “were known or knowable in light of the scientific knowledge that was generally accepted in the scientific community at the time of manufacture, distribution or sale.”^22,23 Indeed, the verdict in Johnson’s case is consistent with the scientific consensus on the risks associated with pesticide use, and the well-documented factors that expose workers to risk and inhibit them from being able to comply with manufacturers’ safety protocols, including poor training, ineffectual warning labels, and a lack of personal protective equipment.²⁴ Similarly, the negative effects of pesticides on the environment have been thoroughly and publicly documented for well over half a century.²⁵

While the Johnson v. Monsanto case might well be a watershed moment with respect to holding a specific actor in the corporate food regime liable for harm, there is currently no legal mechanism in place to address structural arrangements in which a number of actors contribute collectively to and benefit from manufactured risk. In this scenario, due to the complexity and cumulative nature of the risk(s) produced, it is difficult to prove who is responsible, and to what extent, for creating the risk and resultant harm. As a result:

Risks that can be traced back to a single organization or a single set of agents and cases in which the specific cause of the risk or damage is straightforwardly identifiable tend to be attributed much greater levels of culpability for a given level of damage, than are risks that are produced in more complex ways by greater numbers of contributors.²⁶

Just as Monsanto has—only recently—been held liable for cases of “self-beneficial harm-for-others,”²⁷ the agents of the corporate food regime who have structured the global food system have not been ascribed culpability for its role in actively manufacturing the structural conditions of risk and harm—including those related to the COVID-19 pandemic.²⁸ Rather than relying on causal attribution as the only mechanism to prove liability, could what counts as “sufficient proof” be expanded to better address the conditions of “organized irresponsibility” in a risk society? Could responsibility—and liability—be assigned according to how (networks of) actors systematically benefit by externalizing harm across space and time, and, if so, what conceptual, methodological, or practical tools can be used to do so?

Relational corporate responsibility

While existing legal instruments for attributing liability fall short in a risk society, relational conceptualizations of responsibility appear better suited to handle conditions of organized irresponsibility and mitigate risk arbitrage. Doreen Massey’s concept of “relational responsibility” posits that we are responsible for not only what we do but also who we are—a form of responsibility that recognizes how actors are constructed by and through relationships (past, present, and future—distant and close).²⁹ Bowness and Wittman recently applied the concept of relational responsibility to the food system by arguing that cities, particularly those in the Global North, that disproportionately concentrate resources and transform nature relative to rural areas, are responsible for the harm caused by their social metabolism.³⁰ This line of reasoning also applies to individuals in the process of social metabolism: within cities, the accumulation of wealth and concentration of resources extracted from the broader food system ascribe increased culpability to privileged people relative to the socially marginalized. Since it is nearly impossible to link a given commodity consumed by an individual to specific environmental or social harms, relational responsibility in food sovereignty construction confers an obligation for urban people, particularly those with more privilege, to mobilize collectively in defence of foodlands and food providers in the face of ecological destruction and dispossession from the land.³¹

For our purposes, the disproportionate harm caused in the transformation of nature by actors in the corporate food regime (highly profitable corporations in concentrated sectors in particular) is analogous to the harm caused by cities in their social metabolism. Thinking relationally about (ir)responsibility opens up new pathways for investigating how key actors in the corporate food regime could be held responsible for both exploiting people and nature across spatial and temporal scales, and producing and distributing risks and negative externalities resulting from their metabolism—despite the obscuring effects of “distance.”³²

Who is responsible for a global pandemic?

While assertions around culpability for the emergence and spread of COVID-19 abound, we ask: was the risk of a pandemic structurally manufactured, and if so, by whom?

The corporate food regime and drivers of pandemics

Scholars have documented how the global movement of people, animals, cargo, and capital, coupled with the progressive encroachment of human settlements and agriculture deeper into disease reservoirs, provides conditions that increase the likelihood of epidemics and pandemics.³³ Industrial agriculture—intensive animal agriculture in particular—increases the risk of novel pathogens in terms of both emergence and spread.³⁴ States—predominantly industrialized states—and international trade organizations have allowed transnational agrifood corporations to benefit disproportionately from processes of liberalization and industrialization; yet, responsibility for the risk of the pandemic has not been assumed by, nor assigned to, any particular actor or sector of the economy. At the same time, the costs of the pandemic are being widely distributed in the forms of national debt and public health expenditures, loss of livelihoods, falling incomes (the global income shortfall of the COVID-19 pandemic could be around USD $2 trillion),³⁵ and the loss of millions of lives.

To date, national fiscal measures and associated public sector spending in response to the COVID-19 crisis do not appear to address the underlying structural features of the corporate food regime that contributed to the risk of a pandemic in the first place.³⁶ Furthermore, it is unlikely that the initial wave of stimulus measures will meet most people’s material needs even in the short term. This is readily apparent in the food sector where COVID-19 outbreaks in meatpacking plants and among temporary farm workers confined to cramped living quarters, supply chain disruptions leading to wasted crops and empty supermarket shelves, and surging unemployment and soaring demand at food banks are just some of the acute impacts of the pandemic on food workers, farmers, and the poor. It is precisely among those already marginalized by social inequities that relief efforts are needed most profoundly, but programs to this end remain underfunded.

The corporate food regime and exacerbating effects

With early and likely conservative estimates of the global cost of the pandemic upwards of USD $8 trillion³⁷ and a worldwide recession in tow, who should pay for COVID-19 damages? Key corporate food regime actors are moving quickly to avoid liability. In the United States, for example, meat industry corporations are donating funds to policymakers and attorneys general in an effort to obtain liability protection and legal immunity during the pandemic, thus constraining the capacity of workers to bring lawsuits against their employers for COVID-19-related harms.³⁸ One corporation (Smithfield) has been pushing to stifle the release of COVID-19outbreak data by using workers' right to privacy against them³⁹ when subpoenaed by the Occupational Safety and Health Administration (OSHA) for documents related to the outbreak in Smithfield’s meatpacking plant in Sioux Falls, South Dakota—one of, if not the largest, COVID-19 outbreaks in the United States—Smithfield’s lawyers responded that “Smithfield objects to the subpoena generally on the grounds that disclosure of some of the information sought would violate the privacy interests of Smithfield’s employees, which Smithfield has a duty to safeguard.”⁴⁰ Smithfield’s lawyers also claim that the subpoena’s order to provide photographic or video evidence of working conditions at the plant is objectionable because—as opposed to exposing any violations of occupational health and safety standards—such imagery would reveal “the company’s trade secrets, confidential and proprietary information.”⁴¹

In addition, agrifood corporations continue to promote tropes of productivism for purported public benefit in attempts to garner public support for their concentrated hold on the life science, agriculture, and health industries. This is clearly visible in responses such as the following, issued by the Canadian arm of corporate agrifood giant Bayer:

What Bayer does can’t and hasn’t stopped due to COVID-19,” says Alok Kanti, President and CEO of Bayer Inc. in Canada. “The pandemic has put a spotlight on the importance of our two sectors—healthcare and nutrition. Canadian farmers rely on us to help them grow successful crops, doctors rely on our medicines and technologies to treat their patients, and consumers rely on us to help them live healthier lives.⁴²

The emergence of COVID-19 thus meets the criteria for risk arbitrage: corporate food regime actors played a significant role in producing and amplifying risks “in ways in which they are structurally placed to benefit from the returns from this additional risk while also being able to avoid being held responsible for the losses emerging from these risks.”⁴³ The public narratives promoted by key agrifood corporations, as well as their active lobbying efforts to roll back regulations and protect themselves from being held liable for damages, suggest that a re-entrenchment of the corporate food regime is likely. Yet in his assessment of the second food regime—from the 1950s to the 1970s—Campbell describes how agricultural intensification and the resulting breakdown in socioecological feedbacks led to the co-occurrence of ecological crises and escalating food safety scares—a “key threshold” that contributed to a legitimacy crisis for the second food regime.⁴⁴ Rather than re-entrenching the corporate food regime, could the COVID-19 pandemic instead become its “tipping point”?

Outlining a research agenda: responsibilizing and dismantling the corporate food regime through redistribution

Risk society is industrial society which has come up against its own limitations, where those limitations take the form of ‘manufactured risk.’ Modernisation in this sense, cannot simply be ‘more of the same.’

Anthony Giddens⁴⁵

What does this current crisis demand of food systems researchers? We suggest that further research on dismantling the corporate food regime could be advanced along two lines of inquiry: who (or what) is responsible, and how should they be held accountable?

Who or what is responsible?

First, there is clearly a need for new analytical and methodological approaches to understand the complexities of risk, and therefore responsibility, in food systems. Rethinking responsibility in relational terms transcends liberal conceptions of accountability by expanding the narrow focus from individual actors to also include collective and structural accountability.

Food regime analysis makes it obvious that corporations do not exist in a vacuum; they act as a network of relations bound by their political, economic, and environmental contexts and are tied together through flows of capital, labour, information, and materials, creating a web of power in the process. The cumulative harm caused by these networks across scales and jurisdictions through negative externalities has been well documented, but the principle of organized irresponsibility has prevented the attribution of liability. However, reconceptualizing responsibility as relational opens up new possibilities to articulate which corporate food regime actors—by virtue of their embeddedness in flows of capital and the resulting material transformations—are responsible to the point of being required to pay for harms introduced by manufactured risk. Some questions that flow from this include:

• What are (un)acceptable thresholds for risk, harm, and benefit, and how do these vary across contexts? What methods for accounting for harm (for example, true cost accounting) and establishing (un)acceptable thresholds (for example, precautionary principle, limits to growth) could be used to this end? What counts as “sufficient proof”?

• What analytical frameworks or methodological approaches, such as social network analysis or relational quantitative approaches,⁴⁶ are best positioned to link specific agrifood corporations, extractive corporations, and financial investors into (harmful) structures?

• Once specific structures are identified, how is the relative extent of their responsibility for risk and harms to people and nature to be determined?

• What legal mechanisms could provide insights into holding structures accountable for systemic risks and/or harms? For example, what can be learned from the US Racketeer Influenced and Corrupt Organizations (RICO) laws (or similar laws in other countries), which link specific actors involved in criminal activity to larger patterns of criminal activity and organized crime?

• What other legal (and extra-legal) possibilities exist for practically linking structures to the negative externalities associated with profit accumulation, and what are their strengths and limitations? For example, could the legal concept of disgorgement be reshaped to counter risk arbitrage?

• How would existing insurance and actuarial instruments need to change to account for risk arbitrage and relational responsibility?

• How can responsibility be traced through complex food regimes involving not only corporate food sector actors and states but also asset management firms and other financial actors?

• Finally, on a more theoretical level—and perhaps counter to, or disruptive of, traditional political economy approaches—what insights to the above questions might be gleaned through critiques of liberal ontological assumptions about what constitutes a “responsible actor” in the context of the corporate food regime? In particular, how might relational ontologies and analytical frameworks—such as accounts of more-than-human agency, assemblage theory, or actor-network theory—inform new lines of investigation into the multiplicity of food regime agents (including nonhuman viral agents) and their relationships and relative impacts for destabilizing or dis-assembling and/or re-organizing or re-assembling food regimes?⁴⁷

How should “they” be held accountable?

Secondly, there is a need for reinvigorating research about possible pathways for redistribution and their justification. A relational responsibilization of the corporate food regime—recognizing that structures of corporate actors are responsible not only for what they do but also for what they are—points to redistribution as the legitimate and necessary response for risk arbitrage. Once structures are identified and linked to risks and harms, the framework for redistribution must be considered carefully, in terms of both reparations for the past and mitigation for potential future harms. This calls for a number of different questions on the nature of redistribution: redistribution of what, by whom, to whom, and how?

Redistribution of what?

Some lines of inquiry into how components of food sector corporations could be redistributed in an effort to shift resources and power are as follows:

• Assets (capital and property, including land and infrastructure owned by a corporation): which assets could be redistributed through expropriation and transfer, or through regulatory mechanisms like fines, penalties, and licences?

• Liabilities (debt): under what circumstances could debt be redistributed through forgiveness or transfer?

• Corporate equity (assets minus liabilities): what possibilities exist for transferring ownership shares, or for the creation and distribution of new shares? How might the redistribution of equity shift power through shareholder voting rights and profits? What would be the implications of transferring a majority of shares to the state or other entities, thus providing the power to make structural changes to a corporation (such as winding down operations)?

• Personal wealth (value accrued by individuals through equity and profit shares): by what mechanisms could profits and/or wealth be redistributed, that is, through corporate taxes, the institutionalization of worker or public profit shares, wealth taxes, limitations on inheritance transfers, etc.?

• State subsidies: what programs, incentives, taxes, and other instruments can be redistributed? For example, what energy sector and agrifood sector subsidies could be eliminated, and/or how might they be redirected to subsidize regenerative agriculture and food systems?

Redistribution by whom?

While historically the state has facilitated commodification (thereby fulfilling the capital accumulation function),⁴⁸ states can also intervene to protect precarious workers and the environment (the legitimation function).⁴⁹ As such, the state plays multiple and contradictory roles in (de)constructing the corporate food regime.⁵⁰ On one hand, states play an important role in dismantling the corporate food regime because “only the state has the authority to mobilise state resources,” (en)force compliance, and expropriate and redistribute assets.⁵¹ At the same time, we can ask whether this is necessary or inevitable. Deep theorizing on and questioning of the role of the state in both assigning responsibility and implementing redistribution would involve historical analysis of past social transformations as well as envisioning how the state’s role would, could, or even must change:

• Who should facilitate the process of redistribution – for example, the state, nonstate institutions, or hybrids? What new governance arrangements are needed in order to challenge transnational corporate power?

• At what scale should redistribution occur?

• Who should decide whether and how reparations or future compensation should be made, to whom, and how?

Redistribution to whom?

The unequal distribution of risk exacerbates existing class inequities. The concept of “risk-class,” which refers to an actor’s structural risk position,⁵² provides one possible pathway for investigating which social groups are structurally and disproportionately exposed to the risks posed by the corporate food regime. To provide an example in the context of the finance sector, Curran argues that senior financial employees occupy structural positions that allow them to benefit from the production of financial risk—that is, through risky but high-return investments such as subprime mortgage lending, where senior employees personally accrue much of the returns through their salaries, despite the distribution of that risk—that is, of financial collapse—being widespread. As such, he suggests that senior finance employees are part of the elite risk-class and occupy “a key risk position that is contributing to the intensification of existing class-based inequalities.”⁵³ As such, class privilege not only protects elites from risk, but also shapes and increases risk production itself, thus further exacerbating class inequalities.⁵⁴

Identifying risk-classes entails using sociological concepts and analytical categories to define social groups according to their positionalities and relative risks. Risk-class analysis could then provide a basis for directing redistribution in the form of reparations and mitigation payments in anticipation of future harms, such as those related to climate change. In the context of the food system, research into how class intersects⁵⁵ with risk-class as well as race, gender, nationality, citizenship, ability, age, and generation, among others, to shape the inequitable distribution of risk and harm would be highly useful for orienting studies and debates on redistribution. Questions in this field of inquiry could include:

• Which social groups are disproportionately exposed to systematic risks? How do various levels of marginalization expose these groups to different risks (that is, inform different risk-classes) according to geographic locations, sectors of the food system, vulnerable ecosystems, etc.?

• Hinting at relational responsibility, Giddens notes that when society was characterized by external risk, responsibility towards future generations “was relatively limited: nature was largely intact. [But] our responsibilities to future generations now are thoroughly infused with decisions we have to take resulting from our transformation of nature.”⁵⁶ What does this mean for how responsibility should be assigned intergenerationally, that is, to account for present actions that may lead to future risks or damages? How can risk be minimized and more equitably distributed across space and time?

Concluding note: responsibility and redistribution for food systems transformation

The scale and impacts of the COVID-19 pandemic are unprecedented, as are state responses. This historical moment—indeed, what could be a tipping point—provides an opportunity to take stock of a corporate food regime that drives, exacerbates, and is susceptible to multiple shocks and stressors. At a global level, awareness of the fragility and vulnerability of the food system has never been higher. This should prompt a rethinking of who should be held accountable for creating and benefitting from the structural conditions of risk and harm, and which governance mechanisms—both state-led and grassroots-generated—are best positioned to rebalance rights and responsibilities.

Beyond the palliative state-administered emergency measures and stimulus programs being currently rolled out in response to COVID-19, policy and legal mechanisms for more transformative forms of redistribution could take many shapes. We see an important role for food systems researchers in exploring and considering the possible pathways and mechanisms by which a reparations-oriented redistributive research agenda could occur, in line with what grassroots actors have long been demanding. An example is the “5Ds of Redistribution” framework—decolonization, democratization, decarbonization, decommodification, and diversification—which represents just one attempt at establishing a set of organizing principles for redistributing the food system.⁵⁷ In practice, there will be tensions between these 5 D principles—for example, between decolonization and democratization—but investigating the synergies, tensions, and trade-offs between these principles in practice is likely to prove generative as part of a research program for food systems transformation. Other frameworks might similarly stimulate or refine debates on the strategic dismantling of the corporate food regime and the rebuilding of alternatives.

In this respect, a rethinking of risk and responsibility is critical, and raises both theoretical and practical questions. There is a need for scholarly work that systematically and carefully documents risk creation and further explores the possibilities for responsibilization, proposes strategies for redistribution, assesses the potential impact, and identifies tensions and contradictions between different redistributive priorities and mechanisms. It is crucial that discussions about redistribution must be rooted in a world-historical perspective, recognizing not only inequities within the experiences of risk and harm across social groups in a given context, but also the disparities between the Global North and South. As such, calls for redistribution must also entail research about social and ecological debt (from the local to international scale), and how approaches to global food systems governance could evolve or adapt.

Raising questions about how to link risk, reward, and responsibility has potentially radical implications for transitioning away from a food system that “privatizes profits and socializes losses” towards one that socializes both benefits and risks. We call for food systems researchers to further investigate how these linkages could be made in pursuit of less risky and more just food systems. This research agenda requires contributions from transdisciplinary teams of legal scholars to re-engineer legal concepts, institutions, and doctrines more appropriate to a risk society⁵⁸; political scientists to design redistributive policies; historians to identify the reparations due in partnership with affected communities; and economists for true-cost accounting of agrifood system impacts and the advancement of alternative economic models (for example, doughnut economics,⁵⁹ among others). Critically, research must be grounded in relationships with community-based organizations and social movements who are on the frontlines of risk exposure and who have long demanded various forms of reparations and redistribution. The COVID-19 crisis demands an exploration of radical and far-reaching measures to dismantle the corporate food regime, rather than those that serve to prop up a risky and dysfunctional food system.

Acknowledgements

The authors would like to thank Dr. Philip McMichael, Dr. Hugh Campbell, and Dr. David Boyd for thoughtful and encouraging feedback. This paper is an output of the collaborative and interdisciplinary Working Group on Redistribution for Food Systems Transformation, supported by the Peter Wall Institute for Advanced Studies at the University of British Columbia.

Disclosure statement

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

Notes

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Evan Bowness

Evan Bowness is a PhD Candidate and Public Scholar at the Institute for Resources, Environment and Sustainability and the Centre for Sustainable Food Systems at the University of British Columbia in Vancouver, British Columbia, Canada.

Dana James

Dana James is a PhD Candidate, Public Scholar, and Vanier Scholar at the the Institute for Resources, Environment and Sustainability and the Centre for Sustainable Food Systems at the University of British Columbia in Vancouver, British Columbia, Canada.

Annette Aurélie Desmarais

Annette Aurélie Desmarais is Canada Research Chair on Human Rights, Social Justice and Food Sovereignty at the University of Manitoba in Winnipeg, Manitoba, Canada.

Angela McIntyre

Angela McIntyre is an Associate Director at the Centre for Collaborative Action on Indigenous Health Governance at Simon Fraser University in Burnaby, British Columbia, Canada.

Tabitha Robin

Tabitha Robin (Martens) is a mixed ancestry Cree researcher and PhD Candidate at the University of Manitoba in Winnipeg, Manitoba, Canada.

Colin Dring

Colin Dring is a PhD Candidate in Integrated Studies in Land and Food Systems at the University of British Columbia in Vancouver, British Columbia, Canada.

Hannah Wittman

Hannah Wittman is a Professor in the Institute for Resources, Environment and Sustainability, and Academic Director of the Centre for Sustainable Food Systems at the University of British Columbia in Vancouver, British Columbia, Canada.

Notes

1 Wright, “Guidelines for Envisioning Real Utopias.”

2 Gun Violence Archive, “Mass Shootings in 2020.”

3 Beck, Risk Society.

4 Giddens, “Risk and Responsibility.”

5 Beck, Risk Society.

6 Beck, Risk Society, 13, emphasis in original.

7 Beck, Gegengifte: Die Organisierte Unverantwortlichkeit.

8 Giddens, “Risk and Responsibility,” 8.

9 Curran, “The Organized Irresponsibility Principle and Risk Arbitrage,” 595, emphasis added.

10 McMichael, “A Food Regime Genealogy.”

11 Claeys, Human Rights and the Food Sovereignty Movement.

12 Compare with Bowness and Wittman, “Bringing the City to the Country?”; Wittman, “Reframing Agrarian Citizenship”; Lambek, et al., (eds.), Rethinking Food Systems: Structural Challenges, New Strategies and the Law.

13 Campbell,“Breaking New Ground in Food Regime Theory,” 314.

14 Clapp, “Distant Agricultural Landscapes”; Clapp, “The Trade-ification of the Food Sustainability Agenda”; Clapp, “Mega-Mergers on the Menu”; Hendrickson, “Covid Lays Bare the Brittleness of a Concentrated and Consolidated Food System”; Howard, Concentration and Power in the Food System; Murphy, “Globalization and Corporate Concentration in the Food and Agriculture Sector.”

15 Campbell et al., “Agriculture Production As a Major Driver of the Earth System Exceeding Planetary Boundaries”; Nestle, Food Politics: How the Food Industry Influences Nutrition & Health; Ramankutty et al., “Trends in Global Agricultural Land Use”; Tilman and Clark, “Global Diets Link Environmental Sustainability and Human Health”; Whitmee et al., “Safeguarding Human Health in the Anthropocene Epoch: Report of the Rockefeller Foundation-Lancet Commission On Planetary Health.”

16 United Nations, “International Covenant on Economic, Social and Cultural Rights’”

17 FAO, “Voluntary Guidelines to Support the Progressive Realization of the Right to Adequate Food.”

18 Claeys, Human Rights and the Food Sovereignty Movement.

19 Germann, Voluntary Guidelines on the “Right to Food”; Germann, “The Human Right to Food.”

20 Elver and Tuncak, “Report of the Special Rapporteur for the Right to Food”; Kim, Kabir, and Jahan, “Exposure to Pesticides and the Associated Human Health Effects.”

21 Johnson v. Monsanto Company, 2018; see also the potential effects of this in Canada, Meyer, “Dying from Cancer, This Man’s Case Has Stunning Repercussions in Canada.”

22 Johnson v. Monsanto Company, 2018.

23 Despite Monsanto's recent appeal, the original verdict was upheld, although Monsanto's payment to Johnson for damages was reduced from the original $289 million to $20.5 million, in part because California law limits compensatory damages to only those that would occur during the injured party's lifetime (Johnson v. Monsanto Company, 2020). Because use of glyphosate products has led to terminal cancer for Johnson, the net effect of this is to, in the words of the trial lawyer, “reward a defendant for killing a plaintiff, as opposed to just injuring him” (Gillam, “Appeals Court Upholds Groundskeeper's Roundup Cancer Trial Win Over Monsanto”). It is also worth noting that around 125,000 similar cases are in motion against Bayer/Monsanto, and that Bayer has recently threatened to file for bankruptcy – a move that would greatly delay and reduce the value of payouts it would have to make to plaintiffs (Gillam 2020b). This in effect distributes the risk back to the plaintiffs, who might not receive any compensation if they don't agree to Bayer's currently proposed settlement, which equates to only $160,000 per plaintiff, less trial costs (Gillam, “Some U.S. Roundup Plaintiffs Balk at Signing Bayer Settlement Deals; $160,000 Average Payout Eyed”). Simultaneous to these proceedings, another California judge has declared that Monsanto (in partnership with a slew of industry association co-plaintiffs) is not required to include a warning label on glyphosate products (National Association of Wheat Growers v. Becerra).

24 Elver and Tuncak, “Report of the Special Rapporteur for the Right to Food.”

25 Carson, Silent Spring; Elver and Tuncak, “Report of the Special Rapporteur for the Right to Food”; Horrigan, Lawrence, and Walker, “How Sustainable Agriculture Can Address the Environmental and Human Health Harms of Industrial Agriculture.”

26 Curran, “The Organized Irresponsibility Principle and Risk Arbitrage,” 598–99.

27 Curran, “The Organized Irresponsibility Principle and Risk Arbitrage,” 596.

28 Fang, “Meat Industry Campaign Cash Flows to Officials Seeking to Quash Covid-19 Lawsuits”; Garcés, “COVID-19 Exposes Animal Agriculture’s Vulnerability”; Hendrickson, “Covid Lays Bare the Brittleness of a Concentrated and Consolidated Food System”; Wallace et al., “COVID-19 and Circuits of Capital.”

29 Massey, “Geographies of Responsibility.”

30 Bowness and Wittman, “Bringing the City to the Country?”

31 Bowness and Wittman, “Bringing the City to the Country?” See also Ajl, “The Hypertrophic City Versus the Planet of Field.”

32 Clapp, “Financialization, Distance and Global Food Politics”; Clapp, “Distant Agricultural Landscapes”; Friedmann, “Distance and Durability.”

33 Dobson et al., “Ecology and Economics for Pandemic Prevention”; Jones et al., “Global Trends in Emerging Infectious Diseases”; Rogalski et al., “Human Drivers of Ecological and Evolutionary Dynamics in Emerging and Disappearing Infectious Disease Systems”; Wallace, Big Farms Make Big Flu; Wallace et al., “COVID-19 and Circuits of Capital.”

34 Dobson et al., “Ecology and Economics for Pandemic Prevention”; Rogalski et al., “Human Drivers of Ecological and Evolutionary Dynamics in Emerging and Disappearing Infectious Disease Systems”; Wallace and Wallace, “Blowback: New Formal Perspectives On Agriculturally Driven Pathogen Evolution and Spread”; Wallace, Big Farms Make Big Flu: Dispatches on Influenza, Agribusiness, and the Nature of Science; Wallace et al., “COVID-19 and Circuits of Capital.”

35 UN, “Coronavirus: Can Policymakers Avert a Trillion-Dollar Crisis?”

36 James et al, “Dismantling and Rebuilding the Food System after COVID-19.”

37 Dobson et al., “Ecology and Economics for Pandemic Prevention.”

38 Fang, “Meat Industry Campaign Cash Flows to Officials Seeking to Quash Covid-19 Lawsuits.”

39 Fang, “Meat Industry Campaign Cash Flows to Officials Seeking to Quash Covid-19 Lawsuits.”

40 Wiltsie, Exhibit 5: Objections of Smithfield Packaged Meats Corp. to OSHA’s Subpoena Duces Tecum to South Dakota Department of Health.

41 Wiltsie.

42 Bayer Canada, “Bayer Canada Taking Action Against COVID-19.”

43 Curran, “The Organized Irresponsibility Principle and Risk Arbitrage,” 602, emphasis added.

44 Campbell, “Breaking New Ground in Food Regime Theory,” 314.

45 Giddens, “Risk and Responsibility,” 6.

46 Bergmann and Holmberg, “Land in motion.”

47 See, for example, Bawaka Country et al., “Co-becoming Bawaka: Towards a Relational Understanding of Place/Space”; Bennett, “Edible Matter”; Campbell, “Breaking New Ground in Food Regime Theory”; Darnhofer, “Farming from a Process-Relational Perspective”; and Elton, “Posthumanism Invited to Dinner.”

48 O’Connor, The Fiscal Crisis of the State; Tilzey, “Food Regimes, Capital, State, and Class.”

49 Siegmann and Schiphorst, “Understanding the Globalizing Precariat: From Informal Sector to Precarious Work,” 116–17.

50 Desmarais, Claeys, and Trauger, Public Policies for Food Sovereignty; McMichael, “A Food Regime Genealogy”; Roman-Alcalá, “(Relative) Autonomism, Policy Currents and the Politics of Mobilisation for Food Sovereignty in the United States: The Case of Occupy the Farm*”; Roman-Alcalá, “Agrarian Anarchism and Authoritarian Populism: Towards a More (State-)Critical ‘Critical Agrarian Studies’”; Schiavoni, “The Contested Terrain of Food Sovereignty Construction: Toward a Historical, Relational and Interactive Approach”; Trauger, “Toward a Political Geography of Food Sovereignty: Transforming Territory, Exchange and Power in the Liberal Sovereign State.”

51 Borras, Franco, and Suárez, “Land and Food Sovereignty,” 612.

52 Curran, “Risk Illusion and Organized Irresponsibility in Contemporary Finance: Rethinking Class and Risk Society.”

53 Curran, “Risk Illusion and Organized Irresponsibility in Contemporary Finance.”

54 Curran, “Beck’s Creative Challenge to Class Analysis: From the Rejection of Class to the Discovery of Risk-Class”; Curran, “Environmental Justice Meets Risk-Class: The Relational Distribution of Environmental Bads.”

55 Crenshaw, “Demarginalizing the Intersection of Race and Sex: A Black Feminist Critique of Antidiscrimination Doctrine, Feminist Theory and Antiracist Politics”; Crenshaw, “Mapping the Margins: Intersectionality, Identity Politics, and Violence against Women of Color.”

56 Giddens, “Risk and Responsibility.”

57 James et al., “Dismantling and Rebuilding the Food System after COVID-19.”

58 Giddens calls this legal evolution “reflective modernization”: “Modernity does not disappear with the arrival of manufactured risk; rather modernisation, which continues, takes on new meanings and subtleties. Reflexive modernisation presumes and generates a politics. That politics cannot unfold completely outside the parliamentary domain. Social movements and special interest groups cannot supply what parliamentary politics offers—the means of reconciling different interests with one another, and also a balance of different risks in relation to one another. [These issues] demand to be brought more directly into the political arena.”

59 Raworth, “Doughnut Economics.”