Abstract
Early food regimes literature tended to concentrate on the global scale analysis of implicitly negative trends in global food relations. In recent years, early food regimes authors like Harriet Friedmann and Philip McMichael have begun to consider the sites of resistance, difference and opportunity that have been emerging around, and into contestation with, new food regime relations. This paper examines the emerging global-scale governance mechanism of environmental food auditing—particularly those being promoted by supermarkets and other large food retailers—as an important new dynamic in our understanding of the politics and potentials of food regimes. Commencing with an examination of Friedmann’s corporate environmental food regime, two key dynamics are identified as being pivotal in the rise and decline of global-scale regimes: securing social legitimacy for food relations and the importance of ecological dynamics in global food relations. By extending McMichael’s notion of ‘Food from Nowhere’ versus ‘Food from Somewhere’, the paper interrogates the emergence of a cluster of relations that comprise ‘Food from Somewhere’ and examines whether this cluster of relations has the potential to change some of the constituent ecological dynamics of food regimes. These ecological dynamics have historically been problematic, amply demonstrating Marx’s metabolic rift as the early food regimes solidified relationships between ‘ecologies at a distance’. By using socio-ecological resilience theory, ‘Food from Somewhere’ is characterized as having denser ecological feedbacks and a more complex information flow in comparison to the invisibility and distanciation characterizing earlier regimes as well as contemporary ‘Food from Nowhere’. The conclusion of this article is that while ‘Food from Somewhere’ does provide one site of opportunity for changing some key food relations and ecologies, the social legitimacy of this new form of food relations does rely on the ongoing existence of the opposite, more regressive, pole of world food relations. The key question for resolving this tension appears to be whether new food relations can open up spaces for future, more ecologically connected, global-scale food relations.
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Notes
A theme she returned to in Friedmann and McNair (2008).
The initial discussion of the WTO governed regime described the emerging ‘corporate food regime’ (McMichael 1993). More recent uses have described this as the ‘Food from Nowhere’ Regime—a term that has received acclaim amongst agri-food scholars as well as signalling something important for the argument in this article (McMichael 2002). Henceforth the corporate industrial pole of the post-WTO order will be described as the ‘Food from Nowhere’ Regime.
While she uses the narrative of the food regime to describe this cluster of relationships, others have approached this emerging set of phenomena via the lens of new forms of global governance, standards and benchmarking which are reconfiguring and reconstituting production–consumption relations (see Larner and Le Heron 2004; Le Heron 2003, 2005). For a review see Campbell and Le Heron (2007).
The name ‘Food from Somewhere’ was first used in McMichael (2002), although, in that usage refers predominantly to the situation of food in localized social and economic settings rather than combining food localism with global food audit relations—as is argued in this article. As a term, ‘Food from Somewhere’ provides both a clear link to its ‘Food from Nowhere’ twin—as this article will go on to argue—as well as superseding the original primary focus on food corporates implied by Friedmann’s terminology of a ‘corporate environmental regime’.
Even now, ‘feed the world’ discourses from the post-WWII regime are circulated by some groups.
See Moore (2000) for a review of use of the idea of metabolic rift by Marx, Braudel, and Bellamy Foster.
What is notable in this list is the absence of much cultural impact of the fraught ecological, economic and cultural consequences being experienced by producers in impoverished food producing regions. While Fair Trade labelling has opened up one such line of consumption politics it could not, in truth, be considered a major driver of elite consumption changes in the same way that embodied health has operated.
This is not the only place in which ecology entered the food regimes narrative. See, for example, an early discussion of ecological dynamics and food regimes by Le Heron and Roche (1996).
Although, in some respects, his discussion of the invention of the Chicago Board of Trade and futures trading implicitly suggested that it had global-scale powers of incorporation and ordering.
It is important to emphasise that these external effects were more than just ecological. Davis’s Late Victorian Holocausts (2001) powerfully links ecological and social catastrophe in the newly subjugated food producing zones of the British Empire in the latter part of the nineteenth century.
There were, of course, exceptions like the emerging organic agriculture movement’s critique of destructive colonial soil exploitation (Stuart and Campbell 2004).
See Walker and Salt (2006), Walker et al. (2004), Folke (2006) for an analysis of a cluster of effects that are described variously as social-ecological resilience or incorporating ‘panarchy’. Agricultural examples can be seen in Allison and Hobbs (2004), Beilin (2007), and Milestad and Darnhofer (2003). An important first attempt at understanding resilience in wider commercial food systems is Anderson (2007).
Which is not to say that ecological critique was completely absent. Stuart and Campbell (2004) identify strongly linked strands of ecological critique and anti-imperialism in parts of the early organic social movement.
I am indebted to Ruth Beilin for her insight that ‘Food from Nowhere’ is ecologically linked to the ‘landscapes of anywhere’—where local ecologies can be replaced by generic (and artificial) food production platforms.
Which does not make the popularizing of ecological politics around agriculture any less influential. The combination of ecological and health politics are potentially strongly mutually reinforcing.
While GlobalGAP is strongly organized around a group of European retailers, other alliances have formed around NGOs and/or other combinations of industry participants. Consequently, GlobalGAP sits alongside other global audit entities like the Marine Stewardship Council, Forest Stewardship Council, Dolphin-Friendly Tuna, Certified Organic, Fair Trade, Slow Food and many others.
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Acknowledgements
This paper emerged and was refined as part of a stimulating dialogue that emerged between a group of scholars over the last 2 years. I would particularly like to acknowledge the detailed commentary and constructive engagement of Jane Dixon, Philip McMichael, Harriet Friedmann, Farshad Araghi, Ruth Beilin, Chris Rosin, Julia Haggerty and three very useful anonymous reviews on an earlier draft of this paper.
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Campbell, H. Breaking new ground in food regime theory: corporate environmentalism, ecological feedbacks and the ‘food from somewhere’ regime?. Agric Hum Values 26, 309–319 (2009). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10460-009-9215-8
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s10460-009-9215-8