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The Global Food Economy: The Battle for the Future of Farming
The Global Food Economy examines the human and ecological cost of what we eat.
The current food economy is characterized by immense contradictions. Surplus 'food mountains', bountiful supermarkets, and rising levels of obesity stand in stark contrast to widespread hunger and malnutrition. Transnational companies dominate the market in food and benefit from subsidies, whilst farmers in developing countries remain impoverished. Food miles, mounting toxicity and the 'ecological hoofprint' of livestock mean that the global food economy rests on increasingly shaky environmental foundations.
This book looks at how such a system came about, and how it is being enforced by the WTO. Ultimately, Weis considers how we can find a way of building socially just, ecologically rational and humane food economies.
The current food economy is characterized by immense contradictions. Surplus 'food mountains', bountiful supermarkets, and rising levels of obesity stand in stark contrast to widespread hunger and malnutrition. Transnational companies dominate the market in food and benefit from subsidies, whilst farmers in developing countries remain impoverished. Food miles, mounting toxicity and the 'ecological hoofprint' of livestock mean that the global food economy rests on increasingly shaky environmental foundations.
This book looks at how such a system came about, and how it is being enforced by the WTO. Ultimately, Weis considers how we can find a way of building socially just, ecologically rational and humane food economies.
217 pages, Paperback
First published June 16, 2007
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Displaying 1 - 6 of 6 reviews
June 25, 2011
I got wind of this book through a previous reading (http://www.goodreads.com/review/show/...). Tony Weis has very much placed himself in a school of thought next to Harriet Friedmann and Philip McMichael - all broadly on the left in one way or another...
The book is a cracker of an introduction to the international political economy of food, and then some. Its great strength lies in the attempt to weave both a very large body of (leftist) academic literature together with an accessible perspective for social activists (there is so much readable detail packed into this that I may eventually have to make a new set of notes out of the first set of notes I took). However, the skeleton of the argument seems fairly straightforward. So here is my half-baked caricature of some of his main arguments:
The current world food system structure first took shape about 150 years ago, thanks to industrialisation, colonialism and capital expansion. It has evolved to the point where it is driven less by states (assuming it ever really was in the first place) than by a now-infamous minority of gargantuan food companies feeding on monopoly rents and support from rich-country governments. While the biggest food mercantilists, the USA and the EU/EC, have long nurtured a bilateral trading relationship both conflictual and cooperative in nature, the food interests of the developing world have diverged in a number of ways that has made it extremely difficult for them to present a united front to push back against the market imbalances held in place by the western capitals. Some states, like Brazil, Thailand, Malaysia and Argentina (part of the so-called Cairns grouping), have become highly competitive agricultural goods exporters in their own right (often building on the old, monocropped colonial patterns of production they were saddled with in the first place). The majority of other states have not; some like India and China have, for their own political reasons, prioritized domestic food self-sufficiency over any attempt to export food for foreign exchange. Meanwhile, most others struggle to even feed themselves, relying on subsidised food imports (and other agricultural inputs) from the overflowing granaries of the West. This makes a common policy position for the 'South' rather tricky, to say the least.
By and large, the entire dominant 'grain-livestock complex', as Weis calls it, is argued to be completely unsustainable in many aspects; be it from an environmental point of view, in terms of social justice for most farmers, or in terms of food access for the heaving masses pushed off the land, jobless, semi-starving and banging on the doors of the rich states. There are good reasons why these issues have reached their apex at the WTO; and again why pursuing them at the level of the WTO is unlikely to bring about any real benefits for either producers or the vast majority of food consumers, with little cash to spare to begin with. Weis' recommendations are to pursue relocalization of food systems; networked social movements are already pointing the way forward, and peak oil will help take care of the rest.
---
Some of all this will probably seem fairly obvious for who follow the news closely (but maybe not so much here, in Singapore). But to have all this set down in one place is indeed very useful. Chapter 4 on food negotiations at the WTO was particularly gratifying to read, despite the relative lack of references cited.
Some fact-checking of the references cited might be needed to assess the validity of some key claims, particularly the generally positive assertions of the agro-ecology literature (ie. multicropping, pro-small farmer, local foods can feed enough mouths sustainably in today's world)...but these probably reflect more on my own dubious second-hand knowledge about the basics of farming, more than anything else...
If there are criticisms, they would include the concern that a book with such a broad and accessible scope does not pay enough attention to local nuances and often overlooks more complex narratives in favour of a strong dependency perspective...sometimes a bit too strong, I think. The Philippine land reform narrative does not really do justice to what happened during Marcos' time, as far as I know (pp. 94). Similarly, not all inequitable land reforms can be blamed on neoliberal agendas by the World Bank (pp. 122, 183); to use the Filipino example again, the state itself often seems to do the deed quite well enough on its own, eg. CARP under Aquino.
While Weis' argument that profiteering food companies manipulate diets and our demand for meat, processed products through marketing, lobbying etc is well taken (eg. China now, pp. 105-106), I do wonder whether it is all that simple...the upwardly mobile are not simply dupes, and often need to find outlets to express their desire to level out genuine material and social inequalities, particularly in the developing world. If it means eating more red meat, and smoking more expensive Malboros, just like the Europeans and Americans, then yes, why not? Why are Chinese architects copying UNESCO-certified Austrian villages ad verbatim for popular consumption back home? Perhaps at the end of the day it is often not the thing itself, but what it represents in different minds, societies...Veblen...
Of course, there are hard limits to such sympathies...particularly in the pockets of relative prosperity everywhere, where new ways of consuming have to be invented...rendered obsolete...and reinvented, endlessly.
How we arrive at modern, localized food systems, assuming we even want to get there, no one really knows...such is the great mystery, and tragedy, and hope, of collective political action as we know it...
The book is a cracker of an introduction to the international political economy of food, and then some. Its great strength lies in the attempt to weave both a very large body of (leftist) academic literature together with an accessible perspective for social activists (there is so much readable detail packed into this that I may eventually have to make a new set of notes out of the first set of notes I took). However, the skeleton of the argument seems fairly straightforward. So here is my half-baked caricature of some of his main arguments:
The current world food system structure first took shape about 150 years ago, thanks to industrialisation, colonialism and capital expansion. It has evolved to the point where it is driven less by states (assuming it ever really was in the first place) than by a now-infamous minority of gargantuan food companies feeding on monopoly rents and support from rich-country governments. While the biggest food mercantilists, the USA and the EU/EC, have long nurtured a bilateral trading relationship both conflictual and cooperative in nature, the food interests of the developing world have diverged in a number of ways that has made it extremely difficult for them to present a united front to push back against the market imbalances held in place by the western capitals. Some states, like Brazil, Thailand, Malaysia and Argentina (part of the so-called Cairns grouping), have become highly competitive agricultural goods exporters in their own right (often building on the old, monocropped colonial patterns of production they were saddled with in the first place). The majority of other states have not; some like India and China have, for their own political reasons, prioritized domestic food self-sufficiency over any attempt to export food for foreign exchange. Meanwhile, most others struggle to even feed themselves, relying on subsidised food imports (and other agricultural inputs) from the overflowing granaries of the West. This makes a common policy position for the 'South' rather tricky, to say the least.
By and large, the entire dominant 'grain-livestock complex', as Weis calls it, is argued to be completely unsustainable in many aspects; be it from an environmental point of view, in terms of social justice for most farmers, or in terms of food access for the heaving masses pushed off the land, jobless, semi-starving and banging on the doors of the rich states. There are good reasons why these issues have reached their apex at the WTO; and again why pursuing them at the level of the WTO is unlikely to bring about any real benefits for either producers or the vast majority of food consumers, with little cash to spare to begin with. Weis' recommendations are to pursue relocalization of food systems; networked social movements are already pointing the way forward, and peak oil will help take care of the rest.
---
Some of all this will probably seem fairly obvious for who follow the news closely (but maybe not so much here, in Singapore). But to have all this set down in one place is indeed very useful. Chapter 4 on food negotiations at the WTO was particularly gratifying to read, despite the relative lack of references cited.
Some fact-checking of the references cited might be needed to assess the validity of some key claims, particularly the generally positive assertions of the agro-ecology literature (ie. multicropping, pro-small farmer, local foods can feed enough mouths sustainably in today's world)...but these probably reflect more on my own dubious second-hand knowledge about the basics of farming, more than anything else...
If there are criticisms, they would include the concern that a book with such a broad and accessible scope does not pay enough attention to local nuances and often overlooks more complex narratives in favour of a strong dependency perspective...sometimes a bit too strong, I think. The Philippine land reform narrative does not really do justice to what happened during Marcos' time, as far as I know (pp. 94). Similarly, not all inequitable land reforms can be blamed on neoliberal agendas by the World Bank (pp. 122, 183); to use the Filipino example again, the state itself often seems to do the deed quite well enough on its own, eg. CARP under Aquino.
While Weis' argument that profiteering food companies manipulate diets and our demand for meat, processed products through marketing, lobbying etc is well taken (eg. China now, pp. 105-106), I do wonder whether it is all that simple...the upwardly mobile are not simply dupes, and often need to find outlets to express their desire to level out genuine material and social inequalities, particularly in the developing world. If it means eating more red meat, and smoking more expensive Malboros, just like the Europeans and Americans, then yes, why not? Why are Chinese architects copying UNESCO-certified Austrian villages ad verbatim for popular consumption back home? Perhaps at the end of the day it is often not the thing itself, but what it represents in different minds, societies...Veblen...
Of course, there are hard limits to such sympathies...particularly in the pockets of relative prosperity everywhere, where new ways of consuming have to be invented...rendered obsolete...and reinvented, endlessly.
How we arrive at modern, localized food systems, assuming we even want to get there, no one really knows...such is the great mystery, and tragedy, and hope, of collective political action as we know it...
November 22, 2016
Read it to gain some info for my research paper- it was a pretty decent book that summarized and expanded upon some ideas and historical events that were mentioned in my global studies textbook. It was a fairly easy read, though it might not be for someone who is just being introduced to the topic of globalization and food security/inequalities.
October 11, 2023
Interesting for a book for school.
May 6, 2012
Boring and riddled with typos. You can get the information he is presenting in a myriad of other books. The only reason it doesn't get a 1 star is because the information he is presenting is important.
October 4, 2011
Gonna be dipping into this in the future I reckon, dead good. (Even if my reviews aren't).
Currently reading
February 26, 2013I didn't finish it yet but It is a problem that there is not a theoretical background on this book
Some Marxist ideas but they are not well supported...
Some Marxist ideas but they are not well supported...
Displaying 1 - 6 of 6 reviews