Sustainable Food Systems

Building a New Paradigm

Terry Marsden, Adrian Morley, Terry Marsden, Adrian Morley

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2014
• ISBN:
  9781136185410
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Economics
• Subtopic: Sustainable Development
• Index: Economics

In response to the challenges of a growing population and food security, there is an urgent need to construct a new agri-food sustainability paradigm. This book brings together an integrated range of key social science insights exploring the contributions and interventions necessary to build this framework. Building on over ten years of ESRC funded theoretical and empirical research centered at BRASS, it focuses upon the key social, economic and political drivers for creating a more sustainable food system.

Themes include:

• regulation and governance
• sustainable supply chains
• public procurement
• sustainable spatial strategies associated with rural restructuring and re-calibrated urbanised food systems
• minimising bio-security risk and animal welfare burdens.

The book critically explores the linkages between social science research and the evolving food security problems facing the world at a critical juncture in the debates associated with not only food quality, but also its provenance, vulnerability and the inherent unsustainability of current systems of production and consumption. Each chapter examines how the links between research, practice and policy can begin to contribute to more sustainable, resilient and justly distributive food systems which would be better equipped to 'feed the world' by 2050.

1 Current food questions and their scholarly challenges

Creating and framing a sustainable food paradigm

Terry Marsden and Adrian Morley

Introduction: the food question in a new era

The question of food now represents one of the world's ‘grand challenges’. After a prolonged period of plenty, and indeed surplus in the advanced world over the past sixty years, the food price hikes of 2008, followed by financial, fiscal and fuel crises have changed the location and significance of food policy concerns both in advanced economies and elsewhere. We have seemingly entered a new period of destabilisation that has prompted the realisation of the growing interdependence of pressures relating to the operation and governance of food ‘systems’ and shifting boundaries of responsibility between the state, private and civic sectors. There is a growing recognition, among scholars at least, of the need to re-examine the interconnections and linkages between food security, sustainability, sovereignty and justice in the provision, supply, allocation and consumption of food. At the same time the need to address the consequences of climate change, emerging limits to agricultural productivity, and combinative resource depletion (soils, water, phosphates, for example) in a context of growing demand and population growth, makes the environmental sustainability challenge of food all the more urgent.

This book attempts to begin to formulate a scholarly approach to the question of food by assembling contributions from leading scholars and researchers who have been studying these problems over the past two decades. Having debated the issues over a long-standing period they come together here to create a critical and open sustainability perspective on the long-standing conundrum of how to integrate food security concerns (having enough of the right food in the right place for the right people), with those of sustainability (how to create synergies of production, supply and consumption that are socially, economically and ecologically long-lasting and resilient).

This current historical conjuncture presents an important scholarly challenge for agri-food researchers. Clearly, the vibrant interdisciplinary field has expanded and diversified over the past two decades to significantly incorporate not only the critical political economy of the increasingly concentrated and global agri-food system, but also the growing ‘alternative’ politics and social practices of food provisioning and global fair trade (represented by the notion of Alternative Food Networks). Now, it can be argued, is the time to transcend many of these traditional binaries associated with much of that literature and create a wider and more flexible intellectual space within which to re-link the question of food to broader societal, economic, technological and political processes.

Two urgent dimensions of creative agri-food scholarship seem to be emerging through the unfolding global food crisis. First, reactions to the crisis — by governments, corporate businesses, civic and NGO groups, scientists, producers and consumers — are transcending many of the established categories of thought and action we have traditionally adhered to. These include the binaries of nature—society, urban—rural, conventional—alternative, production—consumption, and private—public interest. Second, as we will return to in the conclusion to the volume, given the centrality of food concerns in broader socially and economically sustainable development, it is increasingly necessary to examine the question of food in parallel with its wider political—economic and social conditions. In this sense the food question is a central social science question about the nature and potentiality of broader societal possibilities and contingencies relating to governance, market development, sustainable supply chains, welfare and care, and the relationships between state actions, corporate, producer and consumer actions. Food then, is not just a commodity, nor a product of ‘social nature’. To address the contemporary food question we have to recognise that we are delving into wider social and multi-scalar complexities regarding the question of how different places, regions and nations can construct more sustainable futures. The food question is then an essential and significant ingredient in the creation and building of an ensemble of progressive multiple modernities that will be necessary to sustain the planet over coming decades. The contributions to this volume attempt to create a social ‘lens’ around which some of the key aspects of food sustainability can be viewed.

In this introductory chapter we begin to outline this framework by focusing first upon the historical development of food security and sustainability dynamics. This creates some space to explore some of the inherent problems and the associated regulation of food security and sustainability over the last two centuries. In the second part of the chapter we attempt to map out some of the contemporary key cardinal elements for a more critical, flexible, engaging and intellectually inclusive sustainability paradigm. Here, as with the succeeding contributions, we do not seek to be all encompassing or exclusive in our approach. Rather, we wish to begin to open a wider and more urgent scholarly vector within which we can more centrally locate and expose agri-food studies to major societal questions such as: how can we re-create the means and capacities to adapt and transform society beyond its carbon-based modernisation project? And, how can food actors and institutions build the means by which to create sustainable modernities?

Food security and sustainability as distinctive ecologies

Food production and consumption embodies and is affected by essential natural and metabolic processes that have historically been difficult for industry and wider forms of market and state development to control. Indeed, a continuing theme in agrarian and agri-food studies has been this long-standing ‘awkwardness’ of agri-food development (see Mann and Dickenson, 1978; Morgan et al., 2006; Kitchen and Marsden, 2011). Unlike many other forms of economic and industrial development, food systems are distinctively embedded in physical, human, animal and plant ecologies, such that they abide by and become affected by a range of different temporal and spatial conditions, not least the long-standing disjuncture between production cycles and labour time. In framing a new sustainability paradigm for food it is necessary to recognise the continuity of this distinction, as well as the historical and long-term tendency, despite these conditions, to attempt to control and manipulate these processes by industrial and specific technological means. Agri-industrialisation in much of the twentieth century, through the applications of capital and technologies, attempted to ‘smooth out’ these disparities. This, however, never completely succeeded. Partly for this reason, food systems hold particular spatial and regulatory configurative features — or social ecologies — in capitalist economies. And once these configurations take hold they tend to last and influence the pathways of new dynamics. The story of food systems over the past two centuries can thus be seen as part of this paradox. No matter how globalised, technologically sophisticated or inherently footloose they may become, food systems, and their consumption and production dynamics, inherently interact with and shape spaces and places. In turn, these spaces and places — these ecologies — act to reconfigure food systems.

The first part of this chapter begins by charting this historical paradox. The historical context to the development of a sustainable food systems paradigm is important because of the current depth of crisis we now face with regard to both food sustainability and food security. We argue in the second part of the chapter that there is an urgent need to develop a new, more integrated, scientific approach to the sustainability and security of food as both of these facets experience increasingly uncontrollable problems associated with climate change, resource depletion and food insecurity. Such a scientific approach can no longer be associated with the analysis of causes alone; critically, it also has to deal with finding solutions and charting pathways out of the current crisis. We are at a historical juncture where, as we describe below, past systems of regulating the twin problems of food sustainability and food security are no longer ‘fit for purpose’. They are neither ambitious nor all encompassing enough to deal with both the external and internal social and ecological costs and risks now engendered in the modern food system. Moreover, we have to recognise that there are severe ‘lock-in’ and denial processes at work as the crisis unfolds which partially involve the appropriation of various shades of sustainability or ‘weak’ forms of ecological modernisation. Indeed sustainability as a chaotic concept is everywhere; and it has been co-opted and inserted in lock-in and denial processes and discourses. The scientific quest then must now be to critically reconstruct real ecological modernisation through creating the conditions for transformative change in food systems. Central to this, as we argue here, is a re-conceptualisation and integration of the problems of food sustainability and food security.

It is not surprising therefore that, in advanced economies at least, food security and sustainability, both of which are essentially dependent upon combinations of social and natural features, have been key food governance concerns for over the last two centuries. Indeed, as industrial capitalism developed, rapid urbanisation led to more intensive enclosure of agricultural land and an ever-increasing use of fertilisers to enhance production for the growing, and increasingly urban, population. In his letters to Engels, Marx, among others in the nineteenth century, clearly understood the necessity of linking food security and sustainability by showing an appreciation for the then rapidly growing field of soil science (led by Liebig), which seemed to provide the scientific means to sustain larger and more urban settlements through the intensification of agricultural production. At that time, food security and sustainability began to find something of a long-lasting ‘spatial fix’, or what some Marxists called the ‘metabolic rift’ (see Foster, 1999). Along with various public health measures, such as clean drinking water and milk pasteurisation (see Atkins, 2010), this provided a platform to sustain continued urbanisation throughout the twentieth century.

As industrial and urban-based capitalism developed it was necessary to ‘solve’ the twin problems of security and sustainability, first through intensification and artificial fertilisation of land, and second, by unleashing the mechanisation of production. In the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries these forms of agri-industrialism struggled with resolving Kautsky's formulation of the agrarian question: that is, how to continue to intensify production and appropriate some farming functions in processing and agri-industry while at the same time maintain some sort of ecological or natural balance in the agricultural transformation process (Kautsky, 1988; Goodman and Watts, 1997). Unlike other forms of industrialisation, food systems would not abide by the same principles of concentration and centralisation, partly due to the reliance upon the soil and topography, along with the dispersed nature of family farms and peasantry. However much industrial, corporate and then finance capital attempted to appropriate these ‘awkward’ agrarian processes — as witnessed throughout the twentieth century with the arrival of the intensive food regime (see Friedmann and McMichael, 1989) — a dominant feature of capitalist penetration in the food system has been the maintenance of family-based production units and the resilience of dispersed, land-based farming systems. The way around these ‘obstacles’ was to create an ever concentrated agri-industrial complex around the family farming sector, on the one hand, and subject producers to arms-length control through the operation of a continuous ‘cost—price’ squeeze and the dynamics of the ‘technological treadmill’ (Cochrane, 1968) on the other. It is perhaps remarkable how these attempted processes of subsumption of agrarian nature have been so long-lasting, despite different cycles of technological and regulatory change over the past two centuries. From early industrialisation until the present day, these ‘awkward’ conditions have presented many problems for the state as it has attempted to assert variable forms of public interest through its custody of food systems and compromises made with agri-industrial sectors. As we shall see, these are processes that encompass both capital and the state; for it is in both of their interests to continually attempt to arrest the problems of food security and sustainability in a global context of rapid urbanisation and population growth.

Productivism, the intensive regime and the spatial partitioning of city and countryside

Following the imperial food regime, which had gained ground in the UK and a host of settler countries during the nineteenth century based on imperial ‘free trade’ and settler extensive agriculture (see Marsden et al., 1993), the more ‘intensive food regime’ that dominated the twentieth century (see Friedmann and McMichael, 1989) provided not just a major Fordist solution for the growth of cities and towns but also a clear allocation of functions for the countryside and the city (see Cronin, 1991). For instance, by the 1930s, and especially after the Second World War, the UK countryside was strictly demarcated to guarantee the stimulation of food production; at the same time, rigid restrictions were placed upon unplanned ‘ribbon’ development around expanding cities. In 1947, at the nadir of the British post-war financial debt crisis, and with severe food and energy shortages amidst one of the worst winters of the century, this process culminated with the passing of both the Agriculture and the Town and Country Planning Acts. The former introduced direct state subsidies for intensifying national food production, while the latter defined the rigid functionality of the ‘town’ and ‘country’ as clear regulatory spatial fixes (see Marsden et al., 1993; Murdoch et al., 2003).

This system, which also developed to varying degrees in other advanced countries (e.g. The Netherlands), enabled a continuous compromise to be made between food and nutritional security within a productivist model of agriculture. It also favoured a particular spatial shaping of cities, towns and villages around functional hierarchies and varying types of spatial planning mechanisms — a dynamic that is often bypassed in the literature. The relative success of this spatially regulated system meant that human health concerns regarding food could be relatively marginalised into concerns about food adulteration and minimum safety and nutritional standards (see Lang et al., 2009).

As the twentieth century un...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Table of Contents
• List of illustrations
• Notes on contributors
• Acknowledgements
• List of abbreviations
• 1 Current food questions and their scholarly challenges: creating and framing a sustainable food paradigm
• 2 Food futures: framing the crisis
• 3 European food governance: the contrary influences of market liberalization and agricultural exceptionalism
• 4 The public plate: harnessing the power of purchase
• 5 Sustainable food supply chains: the dynamics for change
• 6 Biosecurity and the bioeconomy: the case of disease regulation in the UK and New Zealand
• 7 Improving animal welfare in Europe: cases of comparative bio-sustainabilities
• 8 Exploring the new rural-urban interface: community food practice, land access and farmer entrepreneurialism
• 9 The ‘new frontier’? Urban strategies for food security and sustainability
• 10 Conclusions: building the food sustainability paradigm: research needs, complexities, opportunities
• Index