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Traditional beneficiaries: trade bans, exemptions, and morality embodied in diets

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Abstract

Research on the nutrition transition often treats dietary changes as an outcome of increased trade and urban living. The Northern Food Crisis presents a puzzle since it involves hunger and changing diets, but coincides with a European ban on trade in seal products. I look to insights from economic sociology and decolonizing scholarship to make sense of the ban on seal products and its impacts. I examine how trade arrangements enact power imbalances in ways that are not always obvious. I explain how the ban’s exemption for Inuit-produced seal goods explicitly aims to protect Inuit from the harshness of capitalism and preserve their traditions. In this respect, the Northern Food Crisis is an embodiment of European visions of who Inuit are expected to be and how they are supposed to act in the global economy.

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Notes

  1. Gombay (2010, p. 11) describes how words like “subsistence” are “linked to the idea that people are eking out a bare existence, [and] carries negative connotations that do not reflect reality.”

  2. The point of the emphasis is not to separate the past from the present, but to affirm that the past is practiced in the present, and informed by “ideas, processes, social relations, values, and institutions” (Gombay 2010, p. 11).

  3. After emphasizing that the European Parliament needed support from the European Commission so that “the trade will stop,” an MEP continues with “Finally, Mr. President, I should like to say this: over 5 million people have submitted signatures on this problem. I think that we have to reflect, as a Parliament and indeed as citizens of Western Europe, that that 5 million is very nearly half the number of people who are unemployed in the European Community just now. We have to recognize that when the North-South dialogue was debated in this Parliament, we did not get 5 million letters. I do not think we got any letters—or very few anyway. When we debated poverty, when we debated hunger, when we debated torture and the misery of many people across the world, the letters did not appear. That, I am afraid, is a reflection on the values that our society sometimes has” (Collins in European Parliament 1983, p. 186).

  4. When quoting a member of parliament (MEP), the citation will state the speaker’s last name and page number in the reference European Parliament (1983).

  5. In the European Parliament debate on sealing, the rapporteur explains the “fact that it is difficult to distinguish between the skins of those species which are most under threat and those which are in rather less danger” (Maij-Weggen in European Parliament 1983, p. 185).

  6. For instance, in the following quote the second statement containing the word “hunting” references methods but the statement itself does not qualify if the methods in question are good, bad, neutral, or something else entirely. By reading the previous statement, it becomes clear that the methods of “hunting” are considered to be cruel: “Mr. President, I am sure that 20 years is enough time to have protested against an inhumane form of hunting which is degrading to both human being and animal alike. The European Community is partly responsible for these hunting methods since 75% of the products of these seals are sold on the Community market” (Maij-Weggen in European Parliament 1983, p. 185).

  7. Some have explained that it is difficult to advance changes in the humane treatment of animals because mutually shared concerns about ecology, human, and animal quality of life are ignored in favour of focusing on polarized positions between hunters and animal activists. Please see Arnaquq-Baril (2016); Audia (2014); and Knezevic (2009).

Abbreviations

EU:

European Union

MEPs:

Members of European Parliament

WTO:

World Trade Organization

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Acknowledgements

I am grateful to James Braun, Dr. Josée Johnston, Dr. Mustafa Koç, Dr. Harvey James and three anonymous reviewers for their constructive feedback. I am also grateful to supportive audiences at the 2015 CAFS annual conference, the 2015 AFHVS/ASFS annual conference, and the Animals and Society section at the 2016 ASA conference.

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  1. Department of Sociology, University of Toronto, 1265 Military Trail, Toronto, ON, M1C 1A4, Canada

    Kristie O’Neill

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  1. Kristie O’Neill
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Correspondence to Kristie O’Neill.

Appendix

Appendix

See Tables 2 and 3.

Table 2 Top 50 words stated in the 1982 European Parliament debate on sealing
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Table 3 Thematic context of each word in the 1982 European Parliament debate on banning seal products
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O’Neill, K. Traditional beneficiaries: trade bans, exemptions, and morality embodied in diets. Agric Hum Values 35, 515–527 (2018). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10460-017-9846-0

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