Table Of ContentY
E
Z
L
TI
K
R
A
M
Y, S,
G E
O M
L I
G
O
E
C R
Y
E T
D
N
L O G
A O I
E
C F R
I
T E
I V
L
O
O
S
P
D
O
e
O c
n
F e
li
D i
s
N e
R
A d
n
a
,
e
c
n
a
t
s
i
s
e
R
,
s
i
s
i
r
C
Political Ecology, Food Regimes, and Food
Sovereignty
Mark Tilzey
Political Ecology,
Food Regimes, and
Food Sovereignty
Crisis, Resistance, and Resilience
Mark Tilzey
Coventry University
Coventry, UK
ISBN 978-3-319-64555-1 ISBN 978-3-319-64556-8 (eBook)
https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-64556-8
Library of Congress Control Number: 2017952327
© The Editor(s) (if applicable) and The Author(s) 2018
This work is subject to copyright. All rights are solely and exclusively licensed by the Publisher, whether
the whole or part of the material is concerned, specifically the rights of translation, reprinting, reuse of
illustrations, recitation, broadcasting, reproduction on microfilms or in any other physical way, and trans-
mission or information storage and retrieval, electronic adaptation, computer software, or by similar or
dissimilar methodology now known or hereafter developed.
The use of general descriptive names, registered names, trademarks, service marks, etc. in this publication
does not imply, even in the absence of a specific statement, that such names are exempt from the relevant
protective laws and regulations and therefore free for general use.
The publisher, the authors and the editors are safe to assume that the advice and information in this book
are believed to be true and accurate at the date of publication. Neither the publisher nor the authors or
the editors give a warranty, express or implied, with respect to the material contained herein or for any
errors or omissions that may have been made. The publisher remains neutral with regard to jurisdictional
claims in published maps and institutional affiliations.
Cover illustration: Samantha Johnson
Printed on acid-free paper
This Palgrave Macmillan imprint is published by Springer Nature
The registered company is Springer International Publishing AG
The registered company address is: Gewerbestrasse 11, 6330 Cham, Switzerland
To Phoebe, Xanthe, and Minty
Contents
1 Introduction 1
Part 1 Political Ecology, Food Regimes, and Food Sovereignty 15
2 Political Ecology and Social Systems: An Integrated, but
Differentiated, Theory of Socio-natural Dynamics 17
3 Political Ecology, Capitalism, and Food Regimes 45
4 The ‘First’ or British ‘Liberal’ Food Regime 1840–1870:
The ‘Second’ or ‘Imperial’ Food Regime 1870–1930 87
5 The Rise and Demise of the ‘Third’ or ‘Political
Productivist’ Food Regime (1930s–1980s) 127
6 The Neoliberal Food Regime, the New Imperialism,
and the Emergence of Food Sovereignty 145
vii
viii Contents
Part 2 Crisis and Resistance 195
7 Th e Neoliberal Food Regime in Crisis? 197
8 C risis and Resistance: Reform or Revolution? 225
Part 3 Country Case Studies 249
9 P relude to the Case Studies: The Agrarian Question
and Food Sovereignty Movements 251
10 B olivia 263
11 Ecuador 275
12 Nepal 289
13 C hina 301
Part 4 Resilience as Counter-Hegemony 313
14 ‘ Understanding the World in Order to Change It’:
What Might Food Sovereignty Look Like? Or, a
Normative Political Ecology as Livelihood Sovereignty 315
References 351
Index 373
1
Introduction
Over the last decade, capitalism has transmuted from its apparent
embodiment of ‘Prometheus unbound’ to a veritable Pandora’s box of
contradictions as it has encountered a series of mounting crises mani-
fested variously as financial, austerity, unemployment, poverty, food,
environment, energy, and climate. These manifold and increasingly all-
pervasive crises potentially threaten, whether severally or collectively, the
future of both humanity and non-human nature. As the twenty-first-
century unfolds, we pass therefore into an increasingly uncertain future
both economically and ecologically. Are these crises inter-linked, how-
ever, and, if so, how are we to understand the linkages? And do these
crises presage the demise of capitalism, or can capitalism overcome them?
This book asks questions that lie at the heart of these crises: how we are
to understand the relationship between capitalism and the environment,
capitalism and food, and capitalism and social resistance? These questions
coalesce particularly in the study of food regimes, the means by which
capitalism organizes the environment and people, primarily through
agriculture, to provision with food (and increasingly biofuels) its distinc-
tive system of ever-expanding production and consumption. In address-
ing the recent, ongoing, and inter-linked crises of food, fossil fuel, and
© The Author(s) 2018 1
M. Tilzey, Political Ecology, Food Regimes, and Food Sovereignty,
https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-64556-8_1
2 1 Introduction
finance this book asks not only whether there are environmental limits to
capitalism and economic growth, but also whether there are political lim-
its, as peasants, indigenous people, and the globally burgeoning ‘precar-
iat’ resist the further commodification of their livelihoods and the poverty
which arise from capital’s necessarily uneven development. The book
does this by means of Political Ecology, an approach that offers not just a
new way of analysing capitalism, the environment, and resistance, but
also new, normative responses to current agro-ecological-economic crisis
(see Perreault et al. 2015 for discussion).
Political ecology, as developed and deployed in this book, attempts a
synthesis of the social and natural sciences by retaining the social specific-
ity of politico-economic systems whilst recognizing their inescapable bio-
physical constitution and dependencies. This book is distinctive,
therefore, in its emphasis upon the need for an integrated, but differenti-
ated, ontology of socio-natural relations, distinctive because it is an
approach that, in a recent, and comprehensive assessment of the field,
was not highlighted as one of the commonly defining commitments of
political ecology (see Bridge et al. 2015). Stated succinctly, political ecol-
ogy, as elaborated here, recognizes that social systems are, to a significant
degree, constituted by, and dependent on, biophysical affordances and
constraints, whilst insisting also that these affordances and constraints are
always mediated, and in fact partly constructed, by human social rela-
tions and power structures that are specific in time and space. This means
both that ‘nature’ is always mediated for humanity by social relations of
production and meaning, and that significant elements of ‘nature’,
although by no means all, are materially re-configured by those social
relations. Significant elements of ‘nature’ and of ‘society’ may be described
therefore as socio-natural hybrids. And here farming and food are per-
haps classic examples of hybrid ensembles of the natural and the social.
But significant elements of ‘nature’ continue to exist and function
‘beyond’ the influence of the social—thus basic physical and chemical
processes, for example, continue to operate irrespective of human influ-
ence. And some elements of human society possess ‘emergent properties’,
most particularly ‘meaning-making’ and the symbolic dimension under-
lying power dynamics, that are inexplicable in biophysical terms. This
means that approaches which employ ‘flat ontologies’ of the natural and
1 Introduction 3
social, in other words where the natural and the social are taken to be
‘hybrid’ throughout, lose explanatory specificity and power. Approaches
such as these, lacking ‘ontological stratification’, include Actor-Network
Theory (see Lave 2015) and the ‘world ecology’ theory of Moore (2015).
The book therefore develops a distinctive approach to political ecology,
based in critical realism, dialectics, and related strands of Marxian the-
ory,1 that helps us to understand the fundamental ecological underpin-
nings of society, but in a way that does not lose sight of the social agency,
political reflexivity, and meaning that underpin the temporal and spatial
specifics of power. The book therefore links the ‘ecological’ and the ‘polit-
ical’, or the ‘material’ and the ‘discursive’, dimensions of capitalism and
its food regimes. This helps us to appreciate that a key element of capital-
ism’s dynamic is the relationship between power, both material and dis-
cursive, and resistance. This means that capitalism is not the agent-less
juggernaut that is sometimes portrayed in food regime theory, but rather
an ‘agent- full’ series of political projects that advances or retreats accord-
ing to the relationship between material/discursive power of the hege-
monic class fraction and resistances to it, both from other capitalist class
fractions (sub-hegemonic fractions) and from non-capitalist fractions
(potentially counter-hegemonic fractions). This relationship of intra-class
and inter- class struggle takes the form variously of compromise and co-
optation (hegemony) and of opposition and suppression (domination).
And this relationship is seen to take place most importantly in and around
the state as perhaps the crucial nexus for struggle. In this way, resistance
does not just happen at the grassroots ‘without taking power’, as is often
asserted in the food regime literature (and often counter-posed to a ‘state-
less’ and ‘monolithic’ capitalism), but, more typically, takes place in and
through the state in ways that deny common assertions regarding the
latter’s demise and supersession during the course of the neoliberal era.
But it is important to emphasize here that, in this book, the state is not
considered to be the ‘impartial’ and wholly rational arbiter of competing
interests beloved of orthodox liberal theory, or a ‘thing’ that exists in
opposition to the ‘market’ as in neoclassical and Keynesian/Polanyian
theory, but is rather, as in Neo-Gramscian and Regulation Theory, seen
to be a capitalist state that is itself a social relation, the ‘condensation of
the balance of class forces in society’ (Jessop 2016). The book is also
