Introduction The Global Environmental Politics of Food • Jennifer Clapp and Caitlin Scott* This special issue seeks to expand our understanding of the complex inter- linkages between the politics and governance of the global environment, on one hand, and the global food system on the other. The articles in this issue explore insights that the field of global environmental politics can bring to questions of food system sustainability, while at the same time considering what the relationship between food systems and the environment reveals about the nature of global environmental politics. The authors examine how issues at the intersection of environment and food are framed in international political settings; the articles explore the political and economic dynamics surrounding different actors—including states, corporations, civil society organizations, and marginalized populations—in shaping debates around how best to govern these issues. This focus on the global environmental politics of food is, in our view, much needed. In the decade since the 2007–08 global food crisis, people have become increasingly more aware of the linkages between food systems and envi- ronmental systems. The industrial production, distribution, storage, and market- ing systems that provide much of the world’s food utilize large amounts of water and fossil energy and contribute significantly to deforestation, biodiversity loss, soil erosion, chemical exposure, depletion of fisheries, and climate change. The extent of the ecological crisis associated with the global food and agriculture system is widely understood in the scientific community and backed by growing volumes of empirical data that have enormous policy significance (e.g., Foley et al. 2011; Garnett 2013). However, academic analysis of the political dynamics at the intersection of environmental systems and food systems has thus far re- ceived far less attention. Important work in the field of GEP has begun to emerge on some specific aspects of the intersection of agriculture and the environment, and on the chal- lenges associated with developing effective governance of these issues. This work * We thank the participants in this special issue for comments and feedback on this framework document. We would also like to thank Susan Altman and Rachel McQuail for their superb editorial support for this special issue. Global Environmental Politics 18:2, May 2018, doi:10.1162/glep_a_00464 © 2018 by the Massachusetts Institute of Technology 1 Downloaded from http://www.mitpressjournals.org/doi/pdf/10.1162/glep_a_00464 by guest on 29 September 2021 2 • The Global Environmental Politics of Food includes studies about the rise of biofuels (e.g., Bastos Lima and Gupta 2013; Neville 2015; Stattman and Gupta 2015), unsustainable fisheries (e.g., Havice and Campling 2010; Gulbrandsen and Auld 2016), the implications of geneti- cally modified organisms (e.g., Falkner and Gupta 2006; Stephan 2012), and the ecological damage caused by palm oil production (e.g., Visseren-Hamakers et al. 2011; Schleifer 2016). These studies add helpful insights to the GEP liter- ature, highlighting cases of environmental problems that arise from activities related to food and agricultural production. These studies typically examine these issues through the lens of environmental problems such as deforestation, bio- diversity loss, biosafety, and resources depletion. They also tend to focus on specific governance regimes that have emerged to address those environmental problems. This focus is understandable for a field that emerged in an era of grow- ing concern about global environmental problems and the governance regimes that have emerged to address them. However, the focus on specificenviron- mental outcomes and environmental governance regimes risks downplaying the multiple interconnected environmental effects of food system activities, many of which do not have an established governance regime to address them. Meanwhile, other fields of study, such as geography, sociology, and inter- disciplinary food studies, have increasingly focused their analyses on problems present in the food system, including questions of sustainability and social justice. Researchers in these fields often make the case that the environmental damage associated with the global industrial food system is an outgrowth of the capitalist expansion of agriculture (e.g., Weis 2010; McMichael 2011; Sage 2012). Many of these studies call for resistance in the form of local food systems that are por- trayed as less environmentally damaging and more socially just. Although they provide important analysis on the broader economic structures and dynamics that drive many problems in the food system today, such academic research is often less concerned about questions of power, legitimacy, political discourse, and governance, which are at the center of GEP analyses. Thus, they often dismiss political dynamics as part and parcel of the broader economic system that they argue needs to be replaced. This approach tends to leave the politics of the environmental dimensions of the food system, and attempts to govern it, underexplored. The articles in this special issue seek to address the limitations of both the GEP and food studies literatures by taking the broader food and agriculture system as a starting point, and connecting its functioning to questions of envi- ronmental politics and governance. The novelty of this approach is that it opens up space for a deeper conversation on the political dynamics surrounding the multiple and interconnected environmental implications of the ways we provi- sion food, and invites analysis of these linkages even where no discrete environ- mental governance regime exists. Below, we map out a conceptual framework for analyzing the global environmental politics of food in this broader way. Drawing from both GEP and food studies literatures, this framework focuses on four key features of the food system writ large that matter for sustainability Downloaded from http://www.mitpressjournals.org/doi/pdf/10.1162/glep_a_00464 by guest on 29 September 2021 Jennifer Clapp and Caitlin Scott • 3 politics and governance. Each contribution speaks to these features and the dynamics that surround them in various ways. First, the current global food system is highly complex and distanced. Food provisioning is deeply intertwined with global economic relationships, including farm input markets, production, agricultural commodity trade, food processing, retail and distribution, as well as consumption. Today’s agrifood supply chains are typically elongated in terms of the physical distance food travels and the number of agents involved. The average plate of food in North America, for example, travels approximately 1500 miles before it is consumed, and little information is typically conveyed to buyers about associated production methods, labor conditions, or environmental dynamics. This lack of information about globally sourced “food from nowhere” (Campbell 2009) has sparked enormous debate over “food miles” in the past decade (Iles 2005) and has promoted a widespread reaction in the form of food localism. Complexity is exacerbated by unpredictable weather as well as the growing role of financial actors in commodity markets, which contribute to highly unstable markets (Jarosz 2009; Ghosh 2010). Agricultural commodities also serve multiple functions beyond food, such as ingredients for fuel and other industrial uses, making it increasingly challenging to untangle the multiple supply-and-demand dynamics in food markets and their effects on food security and sustainability (Dauvergne and Neville 2009). The phenomena that make this system so complex lead to physical as well as mental separation between production and consumption (Princen 2001, 2002; Clapp 2015). Highly complex and distanced food supply chains have important impli- cations for the global environmental politics of food. Distance makes it easier for powerful agents in the supply chain to externalize costs, as feedback loops become severed with the lack of informationexchangeasproductschange hands (Princen 2002). In such a context, it is difficult to situate responsibility for environmental damage in the food system or to mount campaigns of resis- tance (Clapp 2014). Long and complex supply chains also create the opportunity for multiple entry points through which to frame problems at the intersection of environmental systems and food systems—from the environmental con- sequences of how food is grown, to the ecological effects of its distribution, to the impacts of consumption. Not surprisingly, governance initiatives have emerged at various places along supply chains: from those targeting the farm level, such as the promotion of climate-smart agriculture by international organizations (Newell and Taylor 2018); to efforts to mediate corporate activity along agrifood supply chains, such as certification schemes (Fortin 2013; Auld 2014); to policies aimed at changing individual food choices (Garnett et al. 2015; Wellesley et al. 2015). Second, there are multiple, and often competing, scientific models for how to foster greater sustainability in the food system. Some analysts promote the idea that we need to retain large-scale production and distribution systems, albeit with adjustments on the margins to make them more sustainable, if we are to achieve sustainable food security. This approach advocates models such as Downloaded from http://www.mitpressjournals.org/doi/pdf/10.1162/glep_a_00464 by guest on 29 September