Globalising Food: Agrarian Questions and Global Restructuring

297 Pages·1997·2.36 MB·English

by  David Goodman

GLOBALISING FOOD
We have long understood the ways in which manufacturing has become global in scope. The mobility of
transnational capital, the integration of financial markets, the rise of the newly industrialised countries all
pay testimony to the rise of a global manufacturing system. But what of agriculture? The history of
agricultural commodities—sugar, coffee, grains—is both long and international in character. But how are
globalisation and the ascendancy of neo-liberal ideas transforming the organisation of agro-food systems in
different regions around the world?
Globalising Food uses a series of wide-ranging case studies from Britain, the United States, India, South
Africa, New Zealand, and Latin America to investigate the globalisation of agro-food systems and their
distinctiveness from manufacturing. This book reveals the importance of new forces that are reshaping how
agriculture is being integrated into the world economy, and consequences and limits of these processes.
Contributors analyse the responses of local actors and institutions to these globalising forces, as well as
changing regulatory norms and new notions of quality that reflect contemporary concerns with personal
health and environmental sustainability. The case studies also examine agro-industrial change in advanced
and Third World countries, the emergence of new global food chains and the strategies of major actors—
multinational food processors, fast food companies and retailers—to dominate global agro-food systems.
Combining new perspectives from industrial geography, economic sociology, economics, post-
structuralism, and the sociology of scientific knowledge, Globalising Food is a fascinating investigation of
the globalisation and restructuring of localised agricultural sectors and food systems, and provides an
innovative contribution to the political economy of agriculture, of food and consumption.
David Goodman is Professor and Chair of Environmental Studies at the University of California, Santa
Cruz. Michael J.Watts is Professor and Director of the Institute of International Studies at the University
of California, Berkeley.
GLOBALISING FOOD
Agrarian Questions and Global Restructuring
Edited by David Goodman and Michael Watts
London and New York
First published 1997
by Routledge
11 New Fetter Lane, London EC4P 4EE
This edition published in the Taylor & Francis e-Library, 2005.
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Simultaneously published in the USA and Canada
by Routledge
29 West 35th Street, New York, NY 10001
© 1997 David Goodman and Michael Watts, selection and editorial
matter; individual chapters, the contributors.
The right of David Goodman and Michael Watts to be identified as the
authors of this work has been asserted by them in accordance with the
Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988
All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reprinted or
reproduced or utilised in any form or by any electronic,
mechanical, or other means, now known or hereafter invented,
including photocopying and recording, or in any
information storage or retrieval system, without permission in
writing from the publishers.
British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data
A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library
Library of Congress Cataloguing in Publication Data
Globalising food: agrarian questions and global restructuring/
[edited by] David Goodman and Michael J.Watts
Includes bibliographical references and index.
1. Food industry and trade. 2. Agricultural industries.
I. Goodman, David. II. Watts, Michael.
HD9000.5.G589 1997
97–9254
338.1–dc21
CIP
ISBN 0-203-44489-2 Master e-book ISBN
ISBN 0-203-75313-5 (Adobe eReader Format)
ISBN 0-415-16252-1 (hbk)
ISBN 0-415-16253-X (pbk)
What [agriculture] is spared from overseas competition [it] is threatened by industrial development at home.
The transformation of agricultural production into industrial production is still in its infancy. [But] bold
prophets, namely those chemists gifted with an imagination, already are dreaming of the day when bread
will be made from stones and when all the requirements of the human diet will be assembled in chemical
factories…. But one thing is certain. Agricultural production has already been transformed into industrial
production in a large number of fields…. This does not mean that the time has arrived when one can
reasonably speak of the imminent demise of agriculture…. [But] economic life even in the open
countryside, once trapped in such eternally rigid routines, is now caught up in the constant revolution which
is the hallmark of the capitalist mode of production…. The revolutionizing of agriculture is setting in train a
remorseless chase. Its participants are whipped on and on until they collapse exhausted—aside from a small
number of aggressive and thrusting types who manage to clamber over the bodies of the fallen and join the
ranks of the chief whippers, the big capitalists.
(Karl Kautsky, The Agrarian Question [1899] 1988:297)
CONTENTS
List of Illustrations v iii
Notes on Contributors ix
Acknowledgements xi
1 AGRARIAN QUESTIONS: GLOBAL APPETITE, LOCAL METABOLISM: NATURE, 1
CULTURE, AND INDUSTRY IN FIN-DE-SIÈCLE AGRO-FOOD SYSTEMS
Michael Watts and David Goodman
Part I Institutions, embeddedness and agrarian trajectories
2 REGIONAL INTEGRATION AND THE FAMILY FARM IN THE MERCOSUL 25
COUNTRIES: NEW THEORETICAL APPROACHES AS SUPPORTS FOR
ALTERNATIVE STRATEGIES
John Wilkinson
3 MULTIPLE TRAJECTORIES OF RURAL INDUSTRIALISATION: AN AGRARIAN 41
CRITIQUE OF INDUSTRIAL RESTRUCTURING AND THE NEW
INSTITUTIONALISM
Gillian Hart
4 AGRARIAN QUESTIONS IN THE MAKING OF THE KNITWEAR INDUSTRY IN 58
TIRUPUR, INDIA: A HISTORICAL GEOGRAPHY OF THE INDUSTRIAL PRESENT
Sharad Chari
COMMENTARY ON PART I: THEORETICAL REFLECTIONS 78
Norman Long
Part II Restructuring, industry and regional dynamics
5 RESTRUCTURING NATIONAL AGRICULTURE, AGRO-FOOD TRADE, AND 86
AGRARIAN LIVELIHOODS IN THE CARIBBEAN
Laura Raynolds
6 RESTRUCTURING PORK PRODUCTION, REMAKING RURAL IOWA 97
Brian Page
COMMENTARY ON PART II: REGIONS IN GLOBAL CONTEXT? 1 15
RESTRUCTURING, INDUSTRY, AND REGIONAL DYNAMICS
Margaret FitzSimmons
vi
Part III Globalisation, value and regulation in the commodity system
7 CREATING SPACE FOR FOOD: THE DISTINCTIVENESS OF RECENT AGRARIAN 1 22
DEVELOPMENT
Terry Marsden
8 AGRO-INDUSTRIAL JUST-IN-TIME: THE CHICKEN INDUSTRY AND POSTWAR 1 39
AMERICAN CAPITALISM
William Boyd and Michael Watts
COMMENTARY ON PART III: ‘CREATING SPACE FOR FOOD’ AND ‘AGRO- 1 66
INDUSTRIAL JUST-IN-TIME’
William H.Friedland
Part IV Discourse and class, networks and accumulation
9 LEGAL DISCOURSE AND THE RESTRUCTURING OF CALIFORNIAN 1 73
AGRICULTURE: CLASS RELATIONS AT THE LOCAL LEVEL
Miriam J.Wells
10 FIELD-LEVEL BUREAUCRATS AND THE MAKING OF NEW MORAL 1 88
DISCOURSES IN AGRI-ENVIRONMENTAL CONTROVERSIES
Philip Lowe and Neil Ward
COMMENTARY ON PART IV: FIELDS OF DREAMS, OR THE BEST GAME IN 2 01
TOWN
Richard A.Walker
Part V Transnational capital and local responses
11 NOURISHING NETWORKS: ALTERNATIVE GEOGRAPHIES OF FOOD 2 11
Sarah Whatmore and Lorraine Thorne
12 REOPENING TOTALITIES: VENEZUELA’S RESTRUCTURING AND THE 2 25
GLOBALISATION DEBATE
Lourdes Gouveia
COMMENTARY ON PART V: THEORETICAL REFLECTIONS: TRANSNATIONAL 2 39
CAPITAL AND ITS ALTERNATIVES
Anthony Winson
Part VI Nature, sustainability and the agrarian question
13 SUSTAINABILITY AND THEORY: AN AGENDA FOR ACTION 2 45
Michael Redclift
14 SOME OBSERVATIONS ON AGRO-FOOD CHANGE AND THE FUTURE OF 2 53
AGRICULTURAL SUSTAINABILITY MOVEMENTS
Frederick H.Buttel
vii
COMMENTARY ON PART VI: SUSTAINABILITY AND INSTITUTION BUILDING: 2 69
ISSUES AND PROSPECTS AS SEEN FROM NEW ZEALAND
Richard Le Heron and Michael Roche
Index 2 76
ILLUSTRATIONS
FIGURES
3.1 Area of study in South Africa 49
8.1 Chickens sold, alive or dressed in 1929: number (excluding baby chicks) 142
8.2 US chicken meat filière c. 1929 144
8.3 Broilers and other meat-type chickens sold, 1992 147
8.4 The broiler filière c. 1993 150
11.1 Network ‘lengthening’: coincident spaces of a fair trade and commercial coffee network 219
11.2 Network ‘strengthening’: fair trade and commercial coffee networks exhibit distinctive ‘modes of 221
ordering’
TABLES
8.1 US broiler production and consumption, 1934–94 140
8.2 Concentration in the broiler, breeding and egg industries: per cent accounted for by the top four 148
firms
8.3 Leading broiler producing states (by farm value), 1993 148
8.4 Top five destinations for US broiler meat, 1988–95 (1000 metric tonnes) 158
9.1 Criteria of independent contractor and employee 182
14.1 A typology of environmental ideologies, motivations and discourses, with agricultural examples 260
CONTRIBUTORS
David Goodman is Chair of the Environmental Studies Board at the University of California, Santa Cruz,
and has published widely on biotechnology, food systems, and the agrarian question in Latin America.
Michael Watts is Director of the Institute of International Studies at the University of California,
Berkeley, and has worked extensively on agrarian change in Africa and South Asia and the global food
system.
William Boyd is a doctoral candidate in the Energy and Resources Group at the University of California,
Berkeley, and is currently completing a dissertation on the poultry and timber industries in the US South.
Fred Buttel is Professor of Rural Sociology at the University of Wisconsin, Madison. He is currently
concerned with questions of sustainability and agrarian change in the US.
Sharad Chari is a doctoral candidate in the Department of Geography at the University of California,
Berkeley, and is currently completing a dissertation on the relations between agriculture and regional
industrialisation in southern India.
Margaret FitzSimmons is a Professor of Environmental Studies at the University of California, Santa
Cruz, and has a forthcoming book on US agriculture and its restructuring.
William Friedland is Professor Emeritus of Community Studies at the University of California, Santa
Cruz, and is a leading figure in the study of Californian agriculture.
Lourdes Gouveia teaches Anthropology and Sociology at the University of Nebraska and currently is
working on agrarian restructuring in Venezuela and the American Midwest.
Gillian Hart is a Professor of Geography at the University of California, Berkeley, who has written on
state and agrarian labor in Southeast Asia and is currently completing a book on South Africa.
Richard Le Heron teaches in the Geography Department at the University of Auckland and has
published extensively on the transformation of New Zealand and Australian agriculture in the 1980s.
Professor Norman Long holds an appointment in Sociology at Wageningen Agricultural University in
the Netherlands, writing and researching broadly on questions of rural development, commodification,
and human agency in agrarian systems.
Philip Lowe holds a Professorship in the Center for Rural Economy at the University of Newcastle and
has published on a wide range of issues pertaining to environment, discourse, state, and agrarian change
in the UK.
Professor Terry Marsden holds an appointment in City and Regional Planning at the University of Cardiff
and is currently completing a research project on agrarian change in Brazil and the Caribbean.