Introduction to the special issue on the radical political economy of food

Winter 2008, Volume 40, No. 1

BRUCE PIETRYKOWSKI

University of Michigan, Dearborn

This special section of the RRPE is devoted to the radical political economy of food. The scope of inquiry involving the political economic dimensions of food production, distribution, and consumption is vast. Food is a source of nutrition and sustenance as well as a symbol of cultural conformity, political identity, solidarity, and resistance. Food is embedded in systems of commodity production as well as in relations of non-commodified collective or household production and consumption. Foodstuffs can be natural, processed, synthetic, and genetically modified. In addition to its other roles, food is a resource deployed in the maintenance of power and subordination in local, regional, and transnational sites. Few, if any, other material goods embody this multiplicity of strategic roles and symbolic uses.

As Fine, Heasman, and Wright (1996) note, the study of food has long been the purview of scholars toiling within disciplinary fields. As such, a kind of monoculture grew up around the anthropological understanding of foodways and rituals; psychological descriptions of food choices; health science analyses of nutritional content; and agricultural economic models of food production and distribution. More recently, though hardly new, sociologists and geographers have sought to diversify and hybridize their research focus to better understand the socio-political role of food and the interaction between local and global food systems (Marsden, et al. 1996; Lockie 2002; Goodman and Dupuis 2002; Morgan, Marsden, and Murdoch 2006). The papers in this issue can be seen as part of this broader interdisciplinary research project concerning the political economy of food.

In the first article, Fridell, Hudson, and Hudson draw our attention to the evolution of the production and consumption of fair trade coffee. The fair trade movement is characterized by the forging of direct connections between producers and consumers where production is undertaken by democratically controlled worker cooperatives. In addition, and unlike the mono-crop strategies employed by capitalist producers, fair trade coffee production is integrated into subsistence agriculture, thereby resulting in far more sustainable agriculture. Yet the very success of fair trade coffee in improving the living conditions of producers motivated participants in the movement to expand its market while simultaneously preserving its brand image. This placed social movement activists in the risky business of trying to productively engage with corporate coffee producers, who control the bulk of the world supply of coffee. From the “big four” producers’ perspective, the dilemma involves accommodating the ethical stance of fair trade consumers while negotiating with fair trade producers, whose goals are often antithetical to those of corporate capital. The article dissects the range of corporate responses and the challenges they pose for successful anti-capitalist social movements seeking to undermine the separation between consumers’ marketplace choices and the conditions of production under which commodities are produced.

The consumer as political agent is also at the heart of the second article by Salevurakis and Abdel-Haleim. Here the role of bread subsidies in Egypt is explored. The authors provide a brief review of the mainstream economic literature on bread subsidies and find that subsidies are routinely regarded as inefficient even by economists who acknowledge the human benefit they provide, demonstrating the remarkable durability of the neoliberal orthodoxy. They construct a counter-narrative by exploring the potential destabilizing political effects of dismantling the system of bread subsidies. By highlighting the political demands resulting from a change in the price of bread, they point out the limitations inherent in the microeconomic concept of the price elasticity of market demand. The authors note that as the subsidy itself is being whittled away, the potential for bread to be used as a political rallying cry by fundamentalist forces increases. Through this case study of the bread subsidy in Egypt, we are able to gain insight into the way in which food is simultaneously a source of nutrition and a carrier of political meanings associated with citizenship and human rights.*

In the final article, Clare Herrick examines the complex and competing discourses surrounding the manufacture and export of genetically modified organism (GMO) foods. As with the previous article, Herrick analyzes the way in which the necessity of food for human sustenance and development can be used by corporate capital and State actors to exploit and maintain dependency. In this case, the conflict between the United States and the European Union over GM food was exported to southern Africa in the form of GM famine relief food. Interestingly, the contours of the GM debate map quite differently onto the southern African context. This, in turn, highlights the tension between those who argue for a technological fix to famine and those who favor restructuring the system that perpetuates resource inequality. But, Herrick goes even further to illustrate how this discourse is received by nation-states in southern Africa and how the science of food production is tactically inserted into discussions of food aid and famine relief.

Viewed collectively, the three articles in this section illustrate the importance of food as a focus for research in radical political economics. A key insight shared by all three contributions is the attention paid to the antinomies of resistance politics. Resistance is depicted as but one move in a dialectical relationship that calls forth counter-resistance, produces further conflict, and often ruptures the stable terrain upon which oppositional discourse is staked. This perspective can help to inform strategies and struggles over the control and future development of food systems.

I would like to thank the authors for their thought-provoking contributions. I also want to thank my colleagues on the editorial collective and our managing editor for their work in preparing the articles for publication. It is our hope that this special section on food will stimulate further research destined for publication in the pages of the RRPE.

Bruce Pietrykowski, for the special issue collective:
David Barkin
Melanie DuPuis
Christopher Gunn
Julie Guthman
Paul Hancock
Phil McMichael
Bruce Pietrykowski

References
Fine, B., M. Heasman, and J. Wright. 1996. Consumption in an age of affluence. London: Routledge.

Goodman, D., and E. M. Dupuis. 2002. Knowing food and growing food: Beyond the production-consumption debate in the sociology of agriculture. Sociologia Ruralis 42 (1):143–50.

Krist, J. 2007. Full tanks, empty bellies. Knight Ridder Tribune Business News, May 25.

Lockie, S. 2002. “The invisible mouth”: Mobilizing “the consumer” in food production-consumption networks. Sociologia Ruralis 42 (4):278–94.

Marsden,T., R. Munton, N. Ward, and S. Whatmore. 1996. Agricultural geography and the political economy approach: A review. Economic Geography 72 (4):361–75.

Morgan, K., T. Marsden, and J. Murdoch. 2006. Worlds of food: Place, power and provenance in the food chain. Oxford, UK: Oxford University Press.

*A similar situation is developing with tortillas in Mexico. In the wake of the rapid rise in demand for corn to produce ethanol, speculators are tightening their control of global supplies, occasioning basic food prices for the staple to skyrocket, with devastating consequences (Krist 2007). Thanks to David Barkin for bringing this example to my attention.

More information about this special issue is available from the Sage Publications website