Books received

Since the early 2000s, the governments in ASEAN (the Association of South East Asian Nations) countries have developed ‘good agricultural practices’ (GAP) as public approaches to field-level quality assurance. Besides the primary goals of consumer food safety and quality assurance, these public GAP programs aim to support small-scale farmer inclusion in mainstream markets. This goal represents the antithesis of the prevailing trend that private GAP approaches have tightened integration with resourceful, large-scale producers in global value chains. This paper examines the compatibility of the goals of safety assurance and social justice in a public GAP approach through comparative analysis of Thailand's Q-GAP between two local contexts of fruit production and marketing. The research findings suggest that while the public GAP scheme could draw the participation of a broad cohort of local small-scale producers and serve to certify their production, its impact on changing producers' on-field practices and catalyzing their access to the global market through food safety assurance is limited. The binding factors include the lack of producers' understanding of the principles of the programme, limited additional economic merits for them, and the influence of extra-local market forces that stress economies of size and food quality rather than food safety.     

The meat of the global food crisis

The global food crisis has been widely described in terms of the volatility of grain and oilseed markets and the associated worsening conditions of food security facing many poor people. Various explanations have been given for this volatility, including increasingly meat-centered diets and rising demand for animal feed, especially in China. This is a very partial reading, as the food crisis runs much deeper than recent market turbulence; when it is understood in terms of the biophysical contradictions of the industrial grain–oilseed–livestock complex and how they are now accelerating, meat moves to the center of the story. Industrial livestock production is the driving force behind rising meat consumption on a world scale, and the process of cycling great volumes of industrial grains and oilseeds through soaring populations of concentrated animals serves to magnify the land and resource budgets, pollution, and greenhouse gas emissions associated with agriculture. These dynamics not only reflect disparities but are exacerbating them, foremost through climate change. Thus, this paper suggests that rising meat consumption and industrial livestock production should be understood together to comprise a powerful long-term vector of global inequality.     

Keeping ‘our’ land: property,agriculture and tensions between Indigenous and settler visions of food sovereignty in Canada

ABSTRACT

This paper situates literature on food sovereignty and land reforms in relation to academic and popular writings about land issues in Canada. We argue that settler Canadian food sovereignty scholarship and activism has yet to sufficiently grapple with the implications of private property ownership in relation to ongoing processes of settler colonialism. We also argue that efforts to advance ecologically sustainable farming practices in Canada need to confront private property ownership in terms of its contribution to both capitalist and colonial violence.     

Race,immigration and the agrarian question: farmworkers becoming farmers in the United States*

As White farmers in the United States retire en masse, the racial and ethnic demographics of US farming are shifting to now include a significant number of Latino farm owner-operators. Yet this population of new farmers, contributing specific technical expertise and knowledge, is not represented in current discussions concerning agrarian transitions. This paper draws on interview-based research conducted in the states of California, Maryland, New York, Minnesota and Washington, with first-generation Latino immigrant farmworkers who have transitioned to farm ownership. The majority are practicing small-scale and diverse crop production, with limited synthetic inputs and mostly family labor, as this form of farming allows them to reclaim control over their own labor and livelihoods, while also earning a cash income. The farmers included in this study, and their rationale for farming despite race- and citizenship-based challenges, cannot be understood simply through a lens of class transition. This contribution provides evidence that Latino immigrants’ ascendancy to farm ownership is instead a result of their struggle to redefine their relationship to land and labor in a country where their race and citizenship status have relegated them to the working poor.     

Commentary: Food regime analysis and agrarian questions: widening the conversation

The central disagreement between McMichael and Bernstein boils down to how each of them analyses food and agriculture in relation to capitalist dynamics. McMichael thinks the main contradictions of capitalism now stem from agriculture, and any positive future will be guided by farmers. Bernstein thinks capitalism has fully absorbed agriculture (including farmers not expelled from the land) into circuits of capital, turning agriculture into simply one of many sectors of accumulation and a major font of surplus labor. They have arrived by different paths to the same deeper question: Granted its illumination of the past, does the food regime approach remain useful for interpreting present contradictions, and if so, how? To invite a wider exploration of this very real and important question, I have tried to shift the debate towards a conversation about the complexity of the current transition. I start by widening the frame of the debate to include other writings by McMichael (his method of incorporated comparison) and Bernstein (his distinction between farming and agriculture). I conclude that food regimes and agrarian changes must be located in a wider set of analyses of agrarian and capitalist transitions, each of which misses something important. Older agrarian thought about urban society has much to offer but misses larger food regime dynamics; socio-technical transitions and new commons literatures offer critical analysis of technics, but lack appreciation of the centrality of food and farming; recent works recovering Marxist thought about human nature in a possible transition to a society of abundance and collaboration also ignore food and farming. Connecting with literatures outside the frame of food regimes and agrarian questions offers a way forward for those literatures and for ours.     

私营企业劳资关系治理中的工会绩效

本文以私营企业劳动报酬为例,对私营企业劳资关系治理中的工会绩效进行实证分析。研究表明,工会在当前私营企业劳资关系治理中具有一定的绩效,相对于非工会工人,工会对于工会工人劳动报酬的提高具有一定的影响,但是这种影响小于西方市场化国家。     

浙江构建民营企业和谐劳动关系的“枫桥经验”

如果说“枫桥经验”源自20世纪60年代的农村社会基层治理,那么21世纪以来浙江构建民营企业和谐劳动关系的成功实践,则是“枫桥经验”在工业化时代的创新与发展,可称为“企业劳动关系版枫桥经验”。浙江的基本做法包括：“大调解”挺在前,就近就地预防和调解劳动人事争议,抓早抓小抓苗头;“综治进民企”,强化“基层治理、源头预防”;“非公党建”,以“双强”（党建强、发展强）促“六好”;工会力促劳动者权益保护与企业发展相协调;以对民营企业家综合评价为载体,引领和促进“两个健康”。“五指攥成一个治理拳头”,形塑了浙江构建民营企业和谐劳动关系的“枫桥经验”。在当前复杂多变的经济形势下,强化企业和谐劳动关系,对于预防化解可能出现的社会风险、夯实基层社会治理、促进社会稳定和发展,具有重要意义。     

Green for gold: social and ecological tradeoffs influencing the sustainability of the Brazilian soy industry

In this study we assess the sustainability of the Brazilian soy industry over the past 40 years in comparison to alternative land uses. We conclude that Brazilian soy production performs as well as or better than sugarcane or cattle production in a number of areas, including macroeconomic contributions, local economic development and land use efficiency, though it involves similar tradeoffs between growth and equity, and food production and conservation. While there is no evidence that soy has reduced food security in Brazil, tax redistributions and value-added activities from soy remain limited, particularly in comparison to sugarcane production. Emerging environmental governance measures have helped to reduce the land cover impacts from soy; however, little effort has been taken to minimize the impacts of intensification.     

The trade-ification of the food sustainability agenda

This contribution argues that the food sustainability agenda in global food governance arrangements is becoming ‘trade-ified’. It shows that international trade has become normalized in these settings not only as being compatible with, but also as a key delivery mechanism for, food system sustainability. The paper first explains the rationale for this dominant narrative, which revolves around the efficiency gains from trade. Second, it outlines two important critiques of this approach – one that stresses the need to look beyond food as an economic commodity, and one that reveals the internal flaws of trade theory – which together provide important counterpoints to this dominant narrative. Third, the paper offers three interrelated explanations for why trade continues to be presented as a key ingredient to food sustainability despite the weaknesses of the dominant approach: institutional fragmentation in global food governance; the carryover of previous normative compromises regarding trade and the environment in other governance settings; and the influence of powerful interests.     

‘Stepping back and moving in’: the role of the state in the contemporary food regime

In recent years, a number of middle-income countries and influential multilateral institutions have instigated actions that frame food system governance around social protection and rights. These state-centered mobilizations raise fundamental questions about how to portray the global politics of food. Since the late 1980s, analysts have largely concurred that US hegemony in the global politics of food has given way to diverse and volatile neo-liberalist and corporate-led food system governance. However, what should we make of a situation where state and supra-state actors are flexing their powers to reshape food systems in line with rights-based models? Should this be understood as reflexes which aim to preserve national order, at a time of intensified food and nutrition insecurities? Or, does it lay the foundations of a re-governed system which curbs and molds a corporate-led politics of food within frameworks of justice? This contribution responds to these questions by tracing the evolution of social protection and rights-based approaches to the politics of food at the multilateral level and in two influential jurisdictions (India and South Africa). We argue that these initiatives underline a robust and continuing role of state power in global food politics, albeit in a novel fashion compared to previous entanglements.     

Cook,eat, man,woman: understanding the New Alliance for Food Security and Nutrition,nutritionism and its alternatives from Malawi

The Group of Eight Countries (G8) launched the New Alliance for Food Security and Nutrition to improve nutritional outcomes through private sector involvement in agricultural development. The accession of Malawi to the Alliance reveals the assumptions behind the intervention. We show that while the New Alliance may seem to have little to do with nutrition, its emergence as a frame for the privatization of food and agriculture has been decades in the making, and is best understood as an outcome of a project of nutritionism. To highlight the failings of the approach, we present findings from the Soils, Food and Healthy Communities Initiative in northern Malawi, which has demonstrated success in combatting malnutrition through a combination of agroecological farming practices, community mobilization, women's empowerment and changes in intrahousehold gender dynamics. Contrasting a political economic analysis of the New Alliance alongside that of the Soils, Food and Healthy Communities Initiative shows the difference between a concern with the gendered social context of malnutrition, and nutritionism. We conclude with an analysis of the ways that nutrition can play a part in interventions that are inimical, or conducive, to freedom.     

Contract farming and the reorganisation of agricultural production within the Chókwè Irrigation System,Mozambique

This paper contributes to the discussion about ‘inclusive business models’ as alternatives to large-scale land acquisitions by analysing a case in which a foreign agribusiness investor, within an impact investment paradigm, acquired and rehabilitated a rice processing plant in Chókwè, Mozambique. A contract farming programme drawn up to source raw produce for the factory led to radical shifts in control over land and water resources. The case is set against the background of a large-scale irrigation system that has played an important role in national agricultural policies since colonial times. The private sector-led development approach is strongly supported by the state which portrays it as an opportunity to reduce its dependency on rice imports. The investor redirected the benefits of land and water use through taking a role of coordination and control within the irrigated production system.

The ensuing rural transformation reminds one of earlier periods in the development of the irrigation system: the central control over production, and the very high level of agricultural inputs and mechanisation, remind one of the state socialist period, while the removal of smallholders from their land and its concentration in the hands of a few bears a strong resemblance to the scheme's establishment under colonial rule.     

The food movement in Canada: a social movement network perspective

In the Global North, there has been increasing analysis of the ways that alternative food initiatives (AFIs) are developing viable, place-based solutions that challenge the corporate-led industrial food system; however, there has been little study of the interrelationships among them. In an effort to better understand the possibilities for food system transformation, this paper builds on existing studies to investigate the increasing collaborations among AFIs occurring through provincial food networks in Canada. I pay particular attention to the attempts to foster and maintain these networks by exploring the history of collaboration since the late 1970s and the development of provincial networking organizations (PNOs) as central to this process. Contrary to assumptions that AFIs act in isolation, I demonstrate that they are part of actual and existing mobilizations through robust social movement networks. Together, these collaborative efforts may be illustrative of a new wave in food activism that is represented by the emergence of a multi-scaled and cross-sectoral ‘food movement’ – a network of networks.     

East Asian food regimes: agrarian warriors,edamame beans and spatial topologies of food regimes in East Asia

Recent years have witnessed a burgeoning body of work thinking differently about food regimes. Drawing on the concepts of a corporate food regime and a corporate-environmental food regime, this paper highlights the constituent parts of East Asian food regimes, addressing the food regime transition that has taken place in the region. The first part of the paper addresses the role played by agrarian-scientific institutions in this transition; specifically, it investigates the spatial topologies, political economy, histories and socio-cultural contexts of agrarian knowledge production and practices that have conditioned East Asia’s transition to a corporate-environmental food regime. The second part offers an analysis of a specific food commodity – edamame beans – to illustrate how East Asian food regimes have changed as they have been incorporated into a corporate-environmental food regime. In investigating the evolution of edamame production and trade, I analyze how edamame production and trade has been reorganized under this new regime. My study argues that broadening the conversation about the food regimes approach requires a regional-geographic perspective in order to understand the spatial topologies, uneven development and socio-cultural-ecological differentiation characteristic of food regimes.     

Farming for Walmart: the politics of corporate control and responsibility in the global South

To analyse corporate social responsibility (CSR) as a business tool and as a way to promote food security in the global South, this article draws on 65 interviews with supply chain personnel and a 2013 survey of 250 smallholder farmers in Nicaragua. Contrary to private governance literature, Walmart's efforts to control supply chains in Nicaragua are not advancing rural sustainability; feelings of mistrust and unfairness persist among farmers, and many are returning to local markets to regain independence. This analysis extends our understanding of why CSR is failing to help agrarian societies and confirms CSR as principally a business strategy.     

Meeting peasants where they are: cultivating agroecological alternatives in neoliberal Guatemala

ABSTRACT

Social movements increasingly embrace agroecology as an integral part of food sovereignty. This essay has two related aims: first, to highlight the barriers to agroecology and explore how these can be overcome; second, to deepen understandings of how agroecology can strengthen movements for food sovereignty or extend neoliberal governance. I ground these questions by examining state and social movement agroecological programs in Guatemala. I argue that strict rejection of conventional inputs and market production, in addition to insufficient state investment and redistribution, creates barriers to participation among a rural peasantry whose livelihoods have been transformed by decades of scientific, market-led development. Facing these limits, agroecology can work to strengthen food sovereignty movements, but can also reinforce the neoliberal food regime by promoting resilience and indigenous agriculture as sufficient to resolve the food crisis.     

Family farming in Brazil: evolution between the 1996 and 2006 agricultural censuses

This article compares the main findings of Brazilian agricultural census data of 1996 with the same of 2006 by applying the methodology known as ‘FAO/INCRA’ (Food Agriculture Organization/Instituto Nacional de Colonização e Reforma Agrária) which allows the characterization of family farms in relation to the total universe of farms. In this comparison several variables are shown, including the share of family farming in the total value of production, in the total number of farms, utilization of modern technology and partial factor productivity. Census data shows that family farming has changed from 37.91 percent of total production value to 36.11 percent during a decade of strong expansion of agriculture as a whole, demonstrating the economic relevance of this segment which, besides producing food, is integrated in the most important productive agricultural chains of the Brazilian agribusiness. Family farming is a heterogeneous segment, with different sub-segments. During the studied period of ten years the most rich of these sub-segments (A) has increased participation in total production, while the poorer sub-segments (C and D) have only grown in absolute terms without a corresponding increase in production.     

Developing the meat grab

‘Meat grabbing’ describes actually existing land deals undertaken for industrial meat production, either directly in the form of animal housing and stocking (confined animal feeding operations, or CAFOs), or indirectly in the form of monocrop grain and oilseed production for livestock feed. Meat grabbing is also a concept for analyzing the relationships between industrial meat regimes, food security politics and the global land rush, relationships which have not yet been sufficiently considered in research or in policy. Using China's reform-era meat revolution as an analytical case, this paper proposes meat grabbing as a concept with three broad goals: (1) to show how industrial meat complicates notions of food security and of food security land grabs, (2) to incorporate social inequalities and environmental injustices into the conceptualization and measurement of land deals and (3) to expand dispossession's domain to include relationships between people and agroecosystems. This is an initial exploration of the content and framing of meat grabs, intended to synthesize its core features and raise questions for further study.     

欧盟的社会对话与公共治理

20世纪90年代以来,随着新的产业革命进程的蓬勃发展,信息化、全球化的时代到来了。在新的历史条件下,如何通过提高公共行政的质量,增强国家竞争力,是发达国家的首要战略任务;正是在这样的历史条件下,在西方兴起了公共治理的浪潮。社会对话,正是公共治理理念在劳动关系领域的体现,是欧盟实现劳动关系现代化的重要途径。     

The politics of private farming in Russia

This article seeks to explore why private farming in Russia has fared so poorly even after private farming was designated the centrepiece of Russian land reform and political capital was invested in its success. The underlying causes for the lack of success extend beyond economic and social factors. While the entire agricultural sector has been adversely affected by reform policies undertaken since 1992, private farmers have been hurt the most because they were more vulnerable. Private farmers have not been successful in defending their interests because they are politically weak, a fact that led them to seek out urban alliances whose interests differ from private farmers, and because of intra‐rural divisions that have weakened the efforts by agrarians to defend their interests.