The World Food System: Recent Episodes
A. Haroon Akram-Lodhi
Food is central to our identity. It helps us to define who we are, and our place in our home, our community and our world. It shapes the social interactions in which we engage, with our friends, with our families, and with our community. In so doing, food connects us, to ourselves and to each other.
But contemporary access to food presents some of the most stark examples of human inequality that we witness on a regular basis. All of us need food to survive, day in and day out. Most of us want more from our food than just survival: we seek pleasure in taste, texture, smell and sight. We seek pleasure in sharing food with others. When we walk into a supermarket, we are confronted with a cornucopia of choice from around the world that enables us to seek this pleasure. Most of us have no idea where the food in the supermarket comes from, and most of us give this no thought, focusing merely upon what we need to acquire to seek the pleasure that we want to get from the food that we buy to eat.
We know, of course, that many of us cannot afford to seek that pleasure from food and its sharing, and have to settle for surviving. We know that far too many in our communities cannot afford to make the choices that we can in a supermarket, having to rely upon the charity of food banks to survive. Indeed, many of us face profound difficulties in doing even that. We know that we live in a world in which unparalleled hunger can be found, in places both far and near, as too many simply don't get enough food.
The world food system is designed to enable you to understand how our food system, with its unparalleled abundance and immense scarcity, came to be, unpacking the key factors shaping contemporary production, distribution, access to and consumption of food, both here and elsewhere. After all, if we want the world to become a better place it seems that a good place to start would be on our plates.
Agroecology in action demonstrates its capacity to feed people, cool the climate, and produce a living wage.
The principals of agroecology are reviewed and the ways in which it meets the challenges that need to be met by contemporary agriculture are established.
The multiple crises of the corporate food regime suggest that an alternative food system needs to be developed. However, the rapid growth of transnational organic suggests that organic agricultural systems are not necessarily the basis by which an alternative food system might be envisaged. As a food production system, a rural development programme and a political movement agroecology has the potential to feed the world, cool the planet, and generate a living wage for all.
An agro-food complex constructed upon the basis of organic agriculture need not be sustainable.
The mechanisms by which industrial agriculture increases the likelihood of zoonotic diseases are reviewed.
The ways in which emerging constraints upon the production of food might impact upon food prices is reviewed, before evaluating the relative merits of both demand- and supply-side explanations of rising food prices.
The ways in which changing patterns in the demand for food might impact upon food prices is reviewed.
The challenges produced by the corporate food regime have been amply demonstrated in the 21st century by rising food price inflation since 2007 and the COVID-19 pandemic of 2020. Food price inflation reflects a combination of demand dynamics and supply constraints that are unique to the corporate food regime, while the marked rise in zoonotic disease reflects the prevalence of industrialized agriculture and the marginalization of small-scale farming in the corporate food regime.
Food price increases in the 21st century have been greater than at any time since the 1970s and have dramatic implications of the living standards of those most marginalized by the world food system.
The contemporary world food system has seen the entrance of global finance in an historically-unprecedented way. Since the deregulation of financial contracts in the United States in the 1990s and the rise in global food prices following 2007, global finance has been using a range of financial instruments to seek to make profits from the food system on the basis of speculative investment, while asset management companies discipline the activities of agri-food corporations in order to realize shareholder value.
The configuration of the production, distribution and consumption of food within the contemporary world food system produces planetary challenges that must be addressed
The corporate food regime has witnessed a remarkable and historically unprecedented concentration and centralization of agro-food transnational corporations.
With 10 supermarkets controlling one-quarter of all of the value created in the world food system, supermarkets shape and structure the operation of the corporate food regime.
In the last 50 years the human diet has undergone the most profound shift in its history, as meat assumes an ever-greater role.
The contemporary world food system has been labelled by many observers as the “corporate food regime”. By unpacking the key characteristics of the corporate food regime it is possible to better understand why a food system that is so productive continues to produce widespread hunger. Most notably, transnational supermarkets and the ongoing spread of meatification results in a food system that is a reverse protein-calorie machine, in that fewer calories emerge from the food system than go into it.
By summarizing the critical components of the corporate food regime it is immediately possible to grasp some of the contradictions that it engenders.
Since 1994 the North American Free Trade Agreement has played a central role in governing the international trade of food and agricultural products between the United States, Mexico and Canada, in ways that have not brought benefits to small- and medium-scale farms in any of the three countries.
Since 1995 the Agreement on Agriculture has played a crucial role in organizing the terms and conditions governing the international trade of food and agricultural products.
Agri-food commodity chains that operate across national borders are regulated by agreements monitored and enforced by the World Trade Organization.
The world food system witnesses unprecedented flows of food and agricultural products across national frontiers. International food and agricultural trade has been integral to the world food system since the first food regime was established, but has only grown more important over time. Yet such trade takes place on the basis of a set of rules that have been agreed by states and which need to be understood if the implications of food regime dynamics for the world food system are to be recognized.
One way of thinking about the international trade of food and agricultural products is as a series of stages that sequentially add value to the product being traded.
As the second food regime unravelled it set in motion a series of economic changes in the developing countries that laid the basis for the emergence of global agriculture.
The second food regime set in motion a number of fundamental changes in the global production and consumption of food that reverberate to this day.
Farm subsidies and food aid were pivotal in establishing the second food regime, which reconfigured food production and diets around the world.
In the 1870s a stable world food system emerged as farmers in the United States starting exporting their food surpluses to Europe.
A world food system started to emerge in the 19th century. In order to untangle the complexities that might be associated with trying to understand the production, distribution and consumption of food on a world scale, the idea of “food regimes” can be used to explain how global agro-food complexes are organized. In this Episode we will explore the historical emergence and evolution of food regimes from the 19th century in order to better comprehend what might be meant by a “world food system”.
Although food has travelled over long distances for millennia, it took a political struggle in England in the mid-19th century to lay the foundations for the development of a world food system.
Undernutrition, micronutrient deficiencies, overnutrition and ample food supplies point to a series of failures in the capacity of the world to feed itself.
What are the common characteristics of those who are food insecure, and do these characteristics say anything about the state of the food system?
If there is significant malnutrition in the world, is it because the world does not grow enough food?
Malnutrition is a far more complex idea than how we use the word in everyday life, and we need to better understand what it means if we are to grapple with the state of global food insecurity.
In the 1870s a stable world food system emerged as farmers in the United States starting exporting their food surpluses to Europe.
Most of us have enough to eat, and so if asked if we are “food secure” would have an implicit understanding of what the question meant. But the question is not as self-evident as it might appear. Neither is the idea of malnutrition, which afflicts the majority of the world's population. In this Episode we will explore what is meant by malnutrition, food security and food sovereignty, and get a better understanding of why it is important to go behind the numbers and think carefully about what these terms mean.
Food is essential to human life, and yet many of us take it for granted. Yet food embodies a host of cultural, social, political and economic relations that we need to start to think about if we are to start to think about why understanding the food system is important, for us and for our communities.