Food safety and the political economy of food governance: the case of shrimp farming in Nam Dinh Province,Vietnam

This contribution is a critique of the public and private governance models in response to the food safety crisis in Vietnam. Using shrimp farming in Nam Dinh province as a case study, the paper argues that public food governance has addressed some of the safety issues in the input sector but remains largely ineffective at the production level due to limited financial and human resources. In turn, private governance has had more successes but its impact is limited to the value-chain while food safety can be influenced by both sectoral and cross-sectoral production practices. In addition, it reinforces the subordination of direct producers by keeping them within industrial production, passing down the cost of safety compliance, and forcing them to assume production risks while reducing their profit margins. More importantly, safety governance under industrial farming is likely to open new opportunities for land expropriation and concentration, affecting the livelihood of small farmers and potentially leading to political unrest. The essay thus asserts that food safety needs to be addressed under the integrated framework of Food Sovereignty, which seeks to obtain food quality, including safety together with agroecological production, farmers' control of productive resources and the enabling of local trading systems.     

‘More soy on fewer farms’ in Paraguay: challenging neoliberal agriculture's claims to sustainability

The knowledge claims of sustainable commodity discourses are often presented as ‘fact’ in policy debates. Such claims, however, are better understood as coproduced with neoliberal values and power, in the context of ‘more soy on fewer farms’ – the concentration of land and productive resources – in Paraguay. I analyze five claims that link ‘responsible soy’ to reduced deforestation, good agricultural practices, national economic growth, increased food security and public participation in soy governance. I examine ways in which each of these claims is contingent and contested. With an explicit commitment to equity, I argue that alternatives to ‘responsible soy’, that include rather than exclude small-scale producers in Paraguay's agricultural development trajectory, are likely to culminate in stronger claims to sustainability by redressing the equity issues that have been marginalized by neoliberal agriculture.     

No hay ganancia en la milpa: the agrarian question,food sovereignty,and the on-farm conservation of agrobiodiversity in the Guatemalan highlands

Although they receive little recognition for their contribution, peasant farmers in the global South play a fundamental role in securing the long-term global food supply. Via their self-sufficient agricultural practices, they cultivate the crop genetic diversity that enables food crops to adapt to changing environmental conditions. In this paper I draw upon empirical data from the Guatemalan center of agricultural biodiversity to investigate the concern that market expansion will displace peasant agriculture and undermine a cornerstone of the global food supply. I find that even though peasants' livelihoods involve multiple forms of market provisioning, they also engage in a Polanyian ‘double movement’ to protect their subsistence-oriented agricultural practices from the potentially deleterious effects of markets. I also investigate the so-called ‘agrarian question’ about the effects of market expansion on the viability of peasant agriculture, finding that although new forms of market provisioning are likely exacerbating rural inequality, the income from market activities actually enables rural Guatemalans to reproduce the conditions for peasant agriculture. Ultimately, I observe that the conservation of agricultural biodiversity and, consequently, global food security are contingent upon the ‘food sovereignty’ of peasant farmers.     

Strategies and hybrid dynamics of soy transnational companies in the Southern Cone

Economical liberalization, market globalization and soy expansion stimulated the advance of big transnational companies in the Southern Cone countries (Brazil, Argentina, Paraguay and Uruguay). Currently, the main corporations acting on the last links of the productive chain are ADM (Archer Daniels Midland), Bunge, Cargill and Dreyfus (the ABCD firms), global leaders in the soy trade. The objective of this contribution is to analyze the different strategies these companies articulate in the Southern Cone, and their dynamics in local space through market relations with local producers. The results show the rapid and intense process of denationalization of the firms in the soy productive chain as well as the high level of market internationalization and company concentration. In spite of this, this study shows that all transnational power of ABCD firms, which seems so abstract and intimidating when seen in the global scale, depends on its basis of the formation, maintenance and exploration of relations of proximity, trust and reciprocity with local actors (especially rural producers), including family friendship linkages.     

Green grabs and biochar: Revaluing African soils and farming in the new carbon economy

Biochar currently attracts technological and market optimism, promising multiple wins – for climate change, food security, bioenergy and health – not least for African farmers. This paper examines the political-economic and discursive processes constructing biochar as a novel green commodity, creating new alliances amongst scientists, businesses, venture capital firms and non-governmental organisations. Carbon market logics are not only threatening large-scale land grabs for biochar feedstocks but also other forms of resource, labour and ecological appropriation through driving research and development and shaping small-scale pilot projects. In these, soil carbon is ‘chopped out’ of its ecosystem and social contexts and revalued as exchangeable pieces of carbon nature. Farmers are hailed as green actors and market winners, provided they discipline their practices according to these new technical and market logics. These discourses contrast strongly with the farmers' existing conceptual and practical repertoires; a case study from Liberia illustrates how farmers already manipulate soil carbon in creating locally valued anthropogenic dark earths, but within diverse farming repertoires, ontologies of human–nature interrelationship and historical and political ecologies.     

Struggles for autonomy from and within the market of southeast Mexico's small coffee producers

This contribution examines the historically shifting reproduction strategies of southeast Mexico's small coffee producers through the lens of autonomy. It argues that producers attempt to create and occupy spaces of relative autonomy from commodity and labour markets while also struggling to exert a degree of control over their commodity market integration – termed here ‘autonomy within the market’. Recent developments in Mexico's coffee sector – falling real prices for certified coffee, an emerging quality programme led by transnational export firms, and devastating crop disease – are transforming coffee growing regions, threatening producer livelihoods and driving diverse reconfigurations of autonomous struggles.     

Agrarian reform and South Africa's agro-food system

The dominant corporate structure of South Africa's agro-food system has led many to suggest there is limited value in redistributing land as a scarce economic resource, or in providing support to black small-scale farmers when large agribusinesses are capable of meeting food needs. Agrarian reform (land reform plus black small-scale farmer support) is not a necessary component of the existing economic system in South Africa. Yet it has tremendous political importance, especially in the context of a stagnant or declining job market. After considering the development of the corporate agro-food system in South Africa, and its impact on agrarian reform, this paper concludes that agrarian reform as a political project and a vision retains the potential to contribute not only to a more just society, but also to progressive economic transformation.     

Food regimes and the production of value: Some methodological issues

In critically re-examining the concept of food regime this article argues for an alternative formulation thatposits the concept on the foundation of the theory of value, rather than the developmentalist framework of the regulation theory within which it was originally posed. This is possible because while the insights of food regime analysis were rooted in a world historical perspective on global value relations, its presentation always subordinated the latter to the more abstract stage theory of the regulation school. Disentangled from regulationism, the concept of food regime is central for a labour-oriented perspective on imperialism as a relation of production embedded in global value relations. This is part of a broader methodological critique that locates the problematic of development (and consumption, in the postdevelopmentalist era) within the discourses of bourgeois modernity (and postmodernity) and seeks to differentiate these from the problematic of labour and labour emancipation. The article addresses the problem of a conflation of theory and history in connection with a developmentalist/positivist reading of Marx, and suggests 'global value relations', 'global working day', 'global worker', as world historically informed concepts that capture the 'unity of the diverse'. Global value relations include the politics of state relations, the world market, colonization and imperialism, and the (often geographically segregated) labour regimes of production of relative and absolute surplus value. The latter is posed as a contemporary relation of neo-liberal capitalism involving (postmodern) over-consumption on the one hand and (still modern) forced under-consumption on the other hand. 'World hunger amidst global plenty' is an expression of these relations.     

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Food sovereignty, as a counter-movement to the food regime, includes a range of struggles, and is evidently quite elastic as a discourse and practice. Because the food regime itself is evolving and restructuring, food sovereignty embodies movement. In its ‘second generation’ phase it operates on both rural and urban fronts, separately and together, connecting producers, workers, consumers and various activist organizations. Nevertheless, it is important to recognize food sovereignty's origins in the global agrarian crisis of the last three decades. Small producers (peasants, farmers, pastoralists, fishers, forest-dwellers) continue to experience massive displacement by World Trade Organization (WTO)-style ‘free trade’, overlaid with new displacements by fiat, force and finance as land grabbing in various forms proceeds apace. This is a key theme in a response to Henry Bernstein's questions about the character of the food sovereignty movement.     

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.     

Different farming styles behind the homogenous soy production in southern Brazil

Soy is often perceived as a typical example of a homogenous capitalist agricultural model that is responsible for ecological damage and social conflicts. But this monolithic perception of soy production can be challenged: more than 30 percent of the soy producers in Rio Grande do Sul (Brazil) are family farmers. In this contribution, we study soy production, the soy producers and their institutional environment from an actor-oriented perspective. We have uncovered different farming styles behind soy production: the colonial farmer, the niche farmer and the entrepreneurial farmer. The farming styles differ from each other not only in the farming system, but also in attitudes (for example, towards the forest). We found that the institutional environment and the technology are mainly focused on the entrepreneurial farmer. However, also, non-governmental organizations (NGOs) neglect the existence of small-scale soy producers. These results have several repercussions for further analysis of this problematic crop and how it can shift towards a more sustainable agricultural production model as small-scale farmers might produce soy more sustainably.     

The development and agriculture paradigms transformed: Reflections from the small-scale organic rice fields of the Philippines

This article tracks the debate about development in theory and practice, moving from the global level of the development debate to the rice fields of the Philippines. The authors offer a reframing of the development debate through the lens of ‘vulnerability’ versus ‘rootedness’ in social, environmental and economic terms. They argue that food and farming are currently at the leading edge of the development debate and of the vulnerability versus rootedness frame. They demonstrate this through their field notes from research with small-scale, rice farmers in the Philippines who have transitioned from chemical-intensive to organic production. The authors then show how their research results mesh with those of others and examine the significance of this farming ‘revolution’ for a transformation of the overall development paradigm.     

The rise of flex crops and commodities: implications for research

As a concept and phenomenon, ‘flex crops and commodities’ feature ‘multiple-ness’ and ‘flexible-ness’ as two distinct but intertwined dimensions. These key crops and commodities are shaped by the changing global context that is itself remoulded by the convergence of multiple crises and various responses. The greater multiple-ness of crops and commodity uses has altered the patterns of their production, circulation and consumption, as novel dimensions of their political economy. These new patterns change the power relations between landholders, agricultural labourers, crop exporters, processors and traders; in particular, they intensify market competition among producers and incentivize changes in land-tenure arrangements. Crop and commodity flexing have three main types – namely, real flexing, anticipated/speculative flexing and imagined flexing; these have many intersections and interactions. Their political-economic dynamics involve numerous factors that variously incentivize, facilitate or hinder the ‘multiple-ness' and/or ‘flexible-ness' of particular crops and commodities. These dynamics include ‘flex narratives' by corporate and state institutions to justify promotion of a flex agenda through support policies. In particular, a bioeconomy narrative envisages a future ‘value web’ developing more flexible value chains through more interdependent, interchangeable products and uses. A future research agenda should investigate questions about material bases, real-life changes, flex narratives and political mobilization.     

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.     

Reworking the metabolic rift: La Vía Campesina,agrarian citizenship,and food sovereignty

Amidst increasing concerns about climate change, food shortages, and widespread environmental degradation, a demand is emerging for ways to resolve longstanding social and ecological contradictions present in contemporary capitalist models of production and social organisation. This paper first discusses how agriculture, as the most intensive historical nexus between society and nature, has played a pivotal role in social and ecological change. I explore how agriculture has been integrally associated with successive metabolic ruptures between society and nature, and then argue that these ruptures have not only led to widespread rural dislocation and environmental degradation, but have also disrupted the practice of agrarian citizenship through a series of interlinked and evolving philosophical, ideological, and material conditions. The first section of the paper thus examines the de-linking of agriculture, citizenship, and nature as a result of ongoing cycles of a metabolic rift, as a ‘crucial law of motion’ and central contradiction of changing socio-ecological relations in the countryside. I then argue that new forms of agrarian resistance, exemplified by the contemporary international peasant movement La Vía Campesina's call for food sovereignty, create a potential to reframe and reconstitute an agrarian citizenship that reworks the metabolic rift between society and nature. A food sovereignty model founded on practices of agrarian citizenship and ecologically sustainable local food production is then analysed for its potential to challenge the dominant model of large-scale, capitalist, and export-based agriculture.     

The view from below: Cuban agriculture in the ‘special period in peacetime’

This article examines the changes taking place in Cuban agriculture at the local level as a result of the demise of the socialist trading bloc and Cuba's subsequent economic crisis. Based on fieldwork in three municipalities of Cuba, the authors describe new developments in each of the three main sectors of Cuban agriculture: state farms, production co‐operatives and individual peasant producers. They conclude that the dominant trend of this period is the tendency toward decentralisation of the state farm sector ‐ culminating in the historic September 1993 decision to form production co‐operatives on the state farms — counterpoised to renewed attempts to impose greater state control over peasant producers. Overall, they find a good deal of experimentation and heterogeneity in the actual implementation of state policy at the local level.     

Plain tales from the rice trade: Indications of vertical integration in foodgrain markets in Bangladesh

Through a series of case studies of the interactions between foodgrain traders and between traders and producers, this article questions the widespread belief that foodgrain markets in Bangladesh are characterised by low trading margins, no vertical integration and a general competitive health. The article indicates that merchant's capital plays two key roles in the market (i) in some areas of the country, the provision of merchant's credit deprives the poor producer of access to the market price for his or her output; (ii) working capital extended to subordinate traders may also enable a small group of large traders to influence prices. Further case studies of the interaction between traders and the state food distribution system indicate ways in which the private market may be able to frustrate or limit policies intended to regulate its operation. These insights suggest that the domination of merchant's capital may be one factor explaining low levels of productivity in the Bangladesh countryside. They also raise questions about the consequences of policies intended to increase the role of private trade in the economy.     

What role for trade in food sovereignty? Insights from a small island archipelago

The food sovereignty movement has been gathering momentum in advocating the rights of individuals and nations to control their own food systems. Alongside this is a mounting critical engagement regarding its privileging of local food production as the means through which to achieve this goal. Adopting a place-based approach, we explore the foodways of diverse communities across a small island archipelago – the Turks and Caicos Islands in the West Indies. Based on interviews and focus groups, we unpack narratives relating to islanders’ changing food practices and aspirations. These are understood as two competing but inter-related themes of disruption and reification of current practices shaped by wider food regimes in interaction with ecological challenges. Given that conditions of historic dependency implicate the islands in a myriad of dependent trade relationships, we argue that small island economies offer, and require, unique cases for understanding how sovereign conditions for trade might be developed in line with a food sovereignty framework. We underline the importance of an inter-disciplinary focus for bringing forth a nuanced understanding of what might be required to shape more sustainable, sovereign and secure food futures. Doing so is necessarily rooted in an appreciation of islanders’ accounts of social, economic, political and ecological change over time.     

Food sovereignty and new peasantries: on re-peasantization and counter-hegemonic contestations in the Basque territory

This paper contributes to debates about the potential of re-peasantization and its contribution to food sovereignty with a case study from the global North, where such questions are relatively under-studied. I examine how Euskal Herriko Nekazarien Elkartasuna (EHNE)-Bizkaia, a Vía Campesina member organization from the Basque Country (Spain), advances food sovereignty through re-peasantization. I also analyze the motivations of new peasants engaged in agroecology, their understandings of food sovereignty, and the challenges that they face. Using a Gramscian political ecology framework, I argue that whereas re-peasantization contributes to a shift from corporatist to counter-hegemonic struggles, the political-economic and biophysical contexts structure agroecological production in ways that limit the extent to which new peasantries can become ‘agents of their own history’. I conclude that closer attention to peasants’ messy practices of making a living is needed to address questions of political agency.     

Globalization,Labor and the ‘Polanyi Problem’

As a consequence of the global economic crises of the 1970s, in Australia, micro-economic reform of the economy, and in particular the labour market, was seen as a key catalyst in providing a more competitive industrial base for the country. Underpinning this was a fundamental change in the conflictual industrial relations structure that had framed work patterns and practices since Federation. The Williamstown Naval Dockyard in Melbourne was the Australian Federal Government's premier dockyard. It had a long-standing reputation for poor productivity, inefficient work practices and industrial unrest and had been described as Australia's worst worksite. After several failed attempts to reform the dockyard, the Federal Government privatised this utility as a catalyst to reform the work culture. On 1 January 1988, the dockyard was transferred to the highly competitive private shipbuilding sector. As the first public utility sold by an Australian Federal Government and the first workplace to adopt micro-economic labour reforms, including enterprise bargaining, the dockyard provides an opportunity to examine the nature of workplace restructuring in the most radical time of change for labour and trade unions in Australia's history. The dockyard was seen at the time as at the vanguard of this change. This paper explores the reforms undertaken in the dockyard.