The Food Wars Thesis

.CHAPTER 1 THE FOOD WARS THESIS 'Ifyouknow before you look, you cannot see for knowing.' Sir Terry Frost RA (British artist 1915-2003) CORE ARGUMENTS Different visions for the future of food are shaping the potential for how food will be produced and marketed. Inevitably, there will be policy choices - for the state, the corporate sector and civil society. Human and environ mental health needs to be at the heart of these choices. Three broad conceptual frameworks or 'paradigms' pro pose the way forward for food policy, the food economy and health itself. All make claims to raise production and to deliver health benefits through food. The challenge for policy-makers is how to sift through the evidence and to give a fair hearing to a range of choices. This process is sometimes difficult because the relationship betweenevid ence and policy is not what it seems. The world of food is on the cusp of a far-reaching transition. INTRODUCTION The world is producingmore food than ever to feed more mouths than ever,' For the better off there are more food and beverage product choices than it is possible to imagine - globally 25,000 products in the average supermarket and more than 20,000 new packaged foods and beverages in 2002 alone.? Yet for many people there is a general feeling of unease and mistrust about the 12 FOOD WARS future of our food supply. Food and problems associated with producing and consuming food generate political and policy crises and are regular fodder for media coverage. In addition, along with the food production successes of the past 40 years in reducing famine, hunger continues hand in hand with excess. TIle optimism of the 20th-century food policy planners that, with good management and science problems associated with food would disappear, has not been fulfilled. Food's capacity to cause problems has not lessened. As we will show, new relationships are already apparent throughout the entire food supply chain, from the way the food is produced to its consumption. Increasingly, alternatives to the prevailing structures of the food economy are also being widely mooted. No wonder there are such arguments about food. The pace and scale of change engender reactions; forces within the food supply chain are often at odds with each other about their vision for the future; there are competing versions of what the future could be, over which partisan forces argue. Our simple conclusion is that food policy-making matters more now than ever before. To set the context for the future of food policy over the next two decades, we see the world of food supply currently in the throes of a long-term transition: from a food policy world domin ated by farming and agriculture, agribusiness and commodity style production, to one dominated by consumption: major branded food manufacturers, food retailing and food service. This transition is causing new tensions, challenges, threats and opportunities along the whole food chain, from farm to consumer, which we call the Food Wars: the precursor to what we argue is a fundamental reframing of the assumptions about the way we will come to analyse, research and carry out food production, the Food Wars encompass competing visions and models for the future of food supply driven, in part, by emerging new scientific understanding and accompanying technologies, but also byfood politics and shifting demographics in terms of patterns of diet related disease and illness as well as consumer-lifestyle choices. In this chapter we set out to capture this complex pattern of change by suggesting a new conceptual model of three compet ing frameworks or 'paradigms' for food which we term the Productionistparadigm (the dominant and current model), the newly emerging Life Sciences Integrated paradigm and the THE FOOD WARS THESIS 13 Ecologically Integrated paradigm. But first we need to set out some basic assumptions about food policy and the food supply chain that informs this conceptual model. FOOD POLICY CHOICES Throughout this book, we use the terms 'food and health policy', 'food policy' and 'food and farming policy': those policies and the policy-making processes that shape the outcome of the food supply chain, food culture and who eats what, when and how, and with what consequences. Our task here is to unravel the strands of competing interests and policy objectives. There is no one food policy or one food policy-maker: there are policies and policy-makers, all of which contribute to the overall process. Food policy-making is essentially a social process. The shape of the food supply chain is the outcome of myriad decisions and actions from production to consumption; it can involve people and organizations who may not even call themselves policy makers. For example, the food industry, when it sets specifica tions for food products, is in part determining the nutritional intake of consumers; health-care planners, when facing the burgeoning costs of managing the rise of certain diseases (such as diabetes and some cancers) are making decisions that are 'policy', dealing with the results of how food is produced and consumed. Equally, competition authorities or town planners, when making decisions about retail market share or the siting of supermarkets, are determining issues as diverse as prices, access to food shops and local culture. The value of this very broad conception of food policy is that it helps to make sense of what otherwise remains a disparate, inchoate jumble. Food policy is contested terrain: a battle of interests, know ledge and beliefs. The sort of food economy that exists is the result of a set of conscious policy choices made in the past, including both state and corporate decisions, involving funding for particular types of food production and processing, the setting of research priorities and national and strategic objectives, the provision of education and information, the creation of rules for trade and safe food and law enforcement and sanctions when things go wrong. 14 FOOD WARS Our conception of food policy is that it should embrace decision-making along the whole of what is known as the food supply chain. Figure 1.1 is a simplified version of what is meant by the food system" or food supply chain - a term originally promoted by agricultural economists who now use a different term- 'value chain' - to analyse how, from farm to consumer, raw commodities get value added to them. The important point to note is that analysis from a food-chain perspective assumes that change in one part of the chain, intentionally or not, has an impact on other parts. Increasingly, analysis from a food-chain perspective is used to understand trends and the global restruc turing of the food supply. Supply of AgricUltural Inputs eg fertilizers, pesticides, vet drugs, GMO seeds Primary Production eg farmers, fisherman, fish farmers Primary Food Processing eg on-farm, dairies, abattoirs, grain mills Secondary Food Processing 6g canning, freezing, drying, brewing Food Distribution eg national/international, import/export Food retailing Food Catering eg supermarkets, shops eg restaurants, hospitals, schools Source: WHO Figure 1.1 A simple version of thefood supply chain THE FOOD WARS THESIS 15 KEY CHARACTERISTICS OF THE FOOD SUPPLY CHAIN The model of the food supplychainin Figure 1.1allows us to note some key characteristics of the modern supply system. We can summarize these under four main arguments: Pressures 'off the farm' dominate the food system Traditionally, for the last century, agriculture has dominated food policy thinking and still dominates international budgetary debates (for instance about the rights and wrongs of subsidies). The food supply chain is today driven by forces away from the farm, yet policy still focuses on commodity-producing agricul ture. Pressures off the land are more important in framing the food economy than politicians often like to admit. Today, the main drivers of the food supply chain are the powerful forces of processors, traders and retailers, in turn focusing on capturing consumer needs. Consumption is the key to understanding the food system Power in the modern food economy is increasingly driven by concerns about the consumption end of the food supply chain. With the rise to dominance of food retailing, the retailer is a broker - between primary producers and consumption - and is a powerful figure in the corridors of power. Yetindividual retail consumers are diverse and usually unconscious of their collective influence: they can be badly organized and they carry most of the health costs of currentfood supply, yet they are made responsible for their own diet-related (ill) health since they are ultimately answerable for what they eat- put another way, food production is being posited as a victim of consumer choice! Public and corporate interests do not correspond The pace of development and the structure of the food chain is being increasingly shaped by a small number of powerful food 16 FOOD WARS conglomerates. While this has been an evolving process, con solidation in the food industry has now reached a new level of influence in key markets. These corporate interests see food policy-making as part of their business strategy and are often well represented in the food policy arenas. This can be double edged: on one hand, industry interests are frequently more aware of public objectives and unhappiness than the supposed public guardians themselves, and on the other hand, industry is hardly likely to give due weight to policy that conflicts with its immedi ate financial and market positioning. This raises a problem for what we call food governance - the role of public democratic control, accountability and public responsibility - an issue raised throughout this book but particularly addressed in Chapter 7.

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