Keywords

Global food supply chains, we have been told often in recent years, are in crisis. Beginning in March 2020, the COVID-19 pandemic’s myriad impacts on human life included dramatic and far-reaching disruptions to global food systems. Border closures triggered critical labour shortages for crop harvesting; outbreaks of infection spread through abattoirs and processing facilities; panic buying cleared supermarket shelves; the precariousness of hospitality and gig-economy work was amplified. Now, as this book goes to press, Russia’s invasion of Ukraine is prompting new warnings of crisis, with delays, price-hikes and shortages in the global food supply chain forecast as oil and gas prices rice and as access to the Russian raw material exports needed for the production of fertilizers plummets. Speaking to the BBC, head of global fertilizer corporation Yara International has declared, “For me, it’s not whether we are moving into a global food crisis—it’s how large the crisis will be” (Simpson, 2022). How much, though, does this language of crisis—as particular, contextual, temporally bound—suffice to describe the conditions of the present? In the case of the COVID-19 pandemic, it has also been clear that the virus’ spread exposed fault lines that run farther and deeper than the circumstances of the pandemic itself, highlighting the nature of a global food system that both relies upon and reproduces acute inequalities of risk, vulnerability, hunger, wealth and power. To this end, the pandemic revealed the global food system as not simply in a state of particular and acute disruption but rather as itself inherently disruptive—of human lives and flourishing, of relationships between people, places and ecologies.

This collection of essays takes the upheaval of the pandemic as a springboard from which to interrogate a larger set of structural, environmental and political fault lines running through the global food system. In a context in which disruptions to the production, distribution and consumption of food are figured as exceptions to the smooth, just-in-time efficiencies of global supply chains, the chapters that follow examine the pandemic not simply as a particular and acute moment of disruption but rather as a lens on a deeper, longer set of structural processes within which disruption is endemic. Here, as Alex Blanchette describes in the Afterword to this collection, drawing on Victoria Stead and Kirstie Petrou’s chapter, the global food system is one constantly scrambling to patch the very cracks and weaknesses it reproduces. Similarly, while we do attend here to the various expressions and temporalities of crisis in this system, we heed those who have cautioned of the immobilizing and obfuscatory framings of “crisis” as exception (Roitman, 2014). The vulnerabilities and inequalities produced as part of business-as-usual in the global food system have been intensified and rendered newly visible by COVID-19, but this intensification has also shone new light on transformational possibilities.

Extending beyond the bounded linearities of supply-chain models, there is a complex constellation of forces that traverse and govern food systems, from the transnational workings of UN, World Trade Organization and European Union committees to the accelerating influence of transnational agri-investors; to the industrialization of production and pressures to intensify and expand the scale of farming; to the fragility of migrant labour markets exposed by prolonged international border closures; and the determined push-back of small-scale regenerative farming, food sovereignty and cooperative movements. Threading through all of these intersecting issues is a set of intensifying pressures associated with environmental destruction, loss of biodiversity and the complex of impacts associated with climate change, rising temperatures and unreliable water supply—all of which are forcing growers and policymakers alike to confront the need for change.

To grasp the food system in its complexity forces us to confront fundamental questions, including, for example, whether the farm is the logical place to start any enquiry in relation to food. Or, in other words, where do supply chains begin? And (where) do they end? In asking such questions, this collection seeks to speak with, and build upon, the critical scholarship of Anna Tsing on “supply chain capitalism” and others who have similarly drawn attention to the cultural and political logics within which supply chains and capitalist value are necessarily embedded (Bear et al., 2015; Tsing, 2009, 2016). However, we also seek to extend beyond the supply chain frame—in its critical as well as traditional modes—to the sprawling constellations of power, materiality and entangled life that necessarily exceed it. At a time when food is more likely to be grasped in terms of speculative investment than as a common good, this book proposes it as a vital prism for grappling with the logics by which power circulates in the world. Attention to food—along the supply chain, and beyond its edges—sheds light on the complex workings and failures of colonial capitalism, on escalating climate change, on the reproduction of hunger and structural exclusion, and on alternative regimes of value that would anchor food and feeding firmly back on the ground.

This collection of essays has its origins in a workshop sponsored by the Academy of the Social Sciences in Australia and co-hosted by the Alfred Deakin Institute for Citizenship and Globalisation, Deakin University and the Institute of Postcolonial Studies, Melbourne, in June 2021, in the midst of an extended COVID-19 lockdown. The pandemic has been, then, both an empirical touchstone for the collection and the context within which the chapters were produced. Most contributions engage the pandemic directly; some take other of the food system’s disruptions as their focus. They are grouped under four themes.

“Foundations” includes this introductory overview, which is followed by Lauren Rickards and Melinda Hinkson’s exploration of global supply chains as artefacts of distinctive social formations and conduits of colonial capital power. Supply chains are, they argue, ultimately disruptive mechanisms that separate people from places, from each other and from the very idea of the production of food for nourishment. Sarah Ruth Sippel’s reading of the recent boom in agri-investment then offers another perspective on the underpinnings of contemporary, global food relations. Tracking patterns of investment with origins in the 2007/08 financial crisis, Sippel shows how the “winners” from that crisis are now consolidating their power, and profits, through the pandemic.

“Production” opens with Victoria Stead and Kirstie Petrou’s examination of the pandemic’s disruptive impact on labour in the Australian horticultural industry. They show that attempts to deal with a shortage of seasonal workers resulted in a paradoxical entrenchment of uneven distributions of precarity, risk and vulnerability along the fault lines of race and migration status. Kelly Donati, working in the Western Australian wheat belt, and Daren Shi-Chi Leung in southern China provide compelling case studies of transformational farming projects across scale that draw creatively on diverse regenerative and traditional agrarian techniques. Both cases suggest cautious optimism, revealing considerable scope for creative working with, and pushing back against, the organizing logic of global capital.

The chapters gathered under “Distribution” explore instances of the pandemic’s impact on food supply and accessibility. Matthew Henry and Carolyn Morris unpack the “crisis” of essential food shortages. Through case studies of disrupted supplies of pork and flour in Aotearoa New Zealand, they expose the fantasies of logistics through attention to the social, material and affective liveliness of actual substances. Maggie Dickinson analyses the United States’ mass mobilization of food-aid programmes, demonstrating that in the face of escalating unemployment and life-threatening risks for frontline food workers, hunger continues to be used to entrench unsafe working situations that prop up a racist and ecologically destructive food system. David Boarder Giles presents an intimate perspective on the pandemic supermarket through ethnographic attention to the labour undertaken by essential workers in an inner-city independent grocery store. His chapter casts light on the supermarket as at once a definitive node of the global food supply chain and a key site for the expropriation, circulation and accumulation of surplus value.

In the final section, “Food Politics”, Jon Altman and Francis Markham take us to the remote Indigenous communities of northern Australia, where a food security “crisis” is shown to be primarily an artefact of government policies designed to punish the poor and push remote-community residents to urban centres. Government responses to the pandemic paradoxically offered a reprieve for these exceptionally governed citizens and hence shed light on the basic structural reforms that could readily alleviate hunger and misery into the future. Tomaso Ferrando takes us to the UN Food Systems Summit, where transnational corporate actors intervene with state support to distance peasants, Indigenous communities and citizens from vital decisions in relation to global agriculture. Finally, we move from the theatre of the UN to quotidian experiences of consumption, where Christopher Mayes and Angie Sassano critically explore the limitations of consumer-food-ethics campaigns. The collection is rounded out by Alex Blanchette’s Afterword. In reflecting upon the ever-compounding brutalizing history of agricultural capitalism, Blanchette draws on the concept of “temporary measures” as a way of coming at the “non-transformational upheavals” upon which contributors to this collection reflect. Drawing on the work of Silvia Federici, and her rejection of the characterization of capitalism as a historical break with feudalism, Blanchette offers the ultimately hopeful vision of capitalism itself as a temporary measure—one of many patches on the structural weaknesses of the global food system and the relations of power it embodies. So conceived, this temporary measure might yet be overcome by people in the pursuit of fuller visions of nourishment and vitality, through a profoundly different set of attitudes to the production of food and practices of feeding.