'Choice Lite' – Food Politics on the Global Stage
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Power Politics, Agribusiness, and 'Choice Lite' – Food Politics on the Global Stage From Foreign Policy magazine - “The New Geopolitics of Food” and “How Food Explains the World” • “Welcome to the new food economics of 2011: Prices are climbing, but the impact is not at all being felt equally.” • Comparing the current situation with the global food crisis of 2007-2008 • “Civilization can survive the loss of its oil reserves, but not the loss of its soil reserves.” • “Everything from falling water tables to eroding soils and the consequences of global warming means that the world's food supply is unlikely to keep up with our collectively growing appetites.” ◦ What is behind this precipitous rise in demand? • Global food yields are no longer going up, up, up – why not? • Food and water scarcity as a microcosm of the 'coming resource wars' • “As land and water become scarcer, as the Earth's temperature rises, and as world food security deteriorates, a dangerous geopolitics of food scarcity is emerging. Land grabbing, water grabbing, and buying grain directly from farmers in exporting countries are now integral parts of a global power struggle for food security.” Framing International Development: Neoliberalism vs. the Anti-Globalization Movement • It's important to understand that Raj Patel is firmly on the side of the rural poor, and that there are arguments to be made in favor of neoliberal economic globalization ◦ Going back to the start: understanding comparative advantage ◦ Bretton Woods, the international financial institutions, and the Washington Consensus ▪ The World Bank, International Monetary Fund (IMF), and World Trade Organization • The role of Structural Adjustment Programs (Patel 94-95) Stuffed and Starved: Markets, Power, and the Hidden Battle for the World Food System Introduction • “That geography matters so much rather overturns the idea that personal choice is the key to preventing obesity.” (re. Mexican obesity rates and proximity to the US border) (4) • On advertising: “Think of the kiwi fruit, once known as the Chinese gooseberry, but rebranded to accommodate Cold War prejudices by the New Zealand food company that marketed it to the world at the end of the 1950s” (5) • “By virtue of its size, Nestle can dictate the terms of supply to its growers, millers, exporters and importers, and each is being squeezed dry...Yet, Nestle, Starbucks and every other food system corporation has a rock-solid alibi: us...'Convenience' anaesthetizes us as consumers. We are dissuaded from asking hard questions.” (7-9) • The food hourglass, the bottleneck, and economies of scale (Figure 1.1, on 12) • “As consumers we can shape the market, however, slightly, by taking our wallets elsewhere. But the choice between Coke and Pepsi is a pop freedom – it's choice lite.” (17) • Examples of how 'another way is possible' (slogan of the World Social Forum, which is a counterbalance to the powerful World Economic Forum) ◦ the Karnataka State Farmer's Association ◦ La Via Campesina ◦ the People's Grocery in Oakland ◦ the Slow Food movement (and the case of José Bové) (286-9) ◦ The Landless Rural Workers Movement ('Movimento dos Trabalhadores Rurais Sem Terra') (MST) (204-12) 2- A Rural Autopsy: the credit treadmill, organophosphate poisoning, and the case of farmer suicides • The case of Lee Kyung Hae (35-37) 3- You Have Become Mexican: corn, tortillas, and the rural poor • Who does NAFTA help? Who does it hurt? (51) Is it 'worth it'? • Salinas, Cesar Chavez, and the United Farm Workers (UFW) (68-70) 4 - 'Just a Cry for Bread' – a short history of food and power: sugar, tea, and Enclosure • “Of the four things that go into a good cup of tea – water, sugar, milk and tea leaves – only milk and water to be found in any quantity in Britain until the 1600s...to grow tea and sugar required industrial agriculture's single most bloody innovation – the plantation.” (78) • Cecil John Rhodes' observations on poverty, hunger, and rebellion (84) • A bold statement: “through the development of the modern world food system, the poverty that would come to characterize the Global South in the twentieth century was created.” (87) What is Patel's reasoning here? • US Secretary of Agriculture under Nixon, Earl Butz: “Hungry men listen only to those who have a piece of bread. Food is a tool. It is a weapon in the US negotiating kit.” How does Patel expand on Butz's blunt statement? 5- The Customer is Our Enemy: A Brief Introduction to the Food System Business (who said this?) • On Guatemala, the United Fruit Company, and 'regime change'. Why does Patel say that the term 'Banana Republics' is misleading? (101) • The CR4 (=concentration ratio of the top four companies) (Figure 5, on 102) • The revolving door in US agribusiness lobbying (105) 6 - Better Living Through Chemistry • Atmospheric nitrogen fixation • Patel on Norman Borlaug, the Green Revolution, and the proposed second Green Revolution(s) (120-5) ◦ “a technological solution muffled a political problem.” (124) What does Patel mean here? ◦ “The Keralan solution seems to have had a more enduring impact than the Green Revolution?” (127) What is Kerala, and what was their solution? • Amartya Sen on famine and democracy(129-30) • The case of trade-related intellectual property rights (known as TRIPS) (135-9) • Cuban agroecological farming (158-162) 7 - Glycine Rex (the soybean = glycine max) • Candy bar 'scaffolding': soy lechitin (an emulsifier) (166) • Who grows most of the world's soy? Now? In the past? Where does it all go? • “The misperceptions of realities on both sides of the Panama Canal, North and South, seem systematic. US farmers find it easy to believe that all Brazilians are socially and ecologically corrupt slave drivers, and Brazilian farmers believe their US counterparts to be suckled on taxpayer dollars...Agribusiness as a lobby in both the US and Brazil can punch above its weight, largely because of the non-democratic architecture of US electoral politics.” (196) In what sense? 8 - Checking out of Supermarkets • On the origins of the modern supermarket A&P and Piggly Wiggly • 'atmospherics' (224) and customer loyalty cards • Tracking things, tracking us: barcodes and RFID chips • The case of Wal-Mart (231-236) • Food deserts and 'supermarket redlining' (243-5) 9 - Chosen by Bunnies • Food and meaning: Bic Macs, white bread, and 'freedom fries' • On obesity: “We are encouraged to understand obesity to be, at the end of the day, an individual failing, an inability to deal with the farrago of choices offered to us, a deficit of impulse control...in large measure, the solution offered to the social problem of obesity has been an individual one.” (273) • Chicken tikka masala “as a quintessentially British food” (284) 10 - Conclusion: Patel's proposed changes: transform our tastes, eat locally and seasonally, eat agroecologically, support locally owned business, all workers have the right to dignity, profound and comprehensive rural change, living wages for all, support for a sustainable architecture of food, snapping the food system's bottleneck, owning and providing restitution for the injustices of past and present. • “The honey trap of ethical consumerism is to think that the only means of communication we have with producers is through the market, and that the only way we can take collective action is to persuade everyone else to shop like us. It alters our relationship to the possibility of social change.” (312).