The Global Governance of Food

Sara R. Curran, April Linton, Abigail Cooke, Andrew Schrank

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2013
• ISBN:
  9781317991526
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Histoire
• Subtopic: Géographie historique

Food provides a particularly exciting and grounded research site for understanding the mechanisms governing global transactions in the 21st century. While food is intimately and fundamentally related to ecological and human well-being, food products now travel far flung trade routes to reach us. International trade in food has tripled in value and quadrupled in volume since 1960 and tracing the production, movement, transformation, and consumption of food necessitates research that situates localities within global networks and facilitates our capacity to "see the trees and the forest" by zooming from the global to the local and back to the global.

Our need for food is a constant; how we acquire food is a variable; and the production, commercialization, and consumption of food therefore offer an invaluable window onto the globalization of the world we inhabit. Food provides an ideal site for answering the fundamental questions of governance of central concern to globalization debates. This book presents recent and interdisciplinary scholarship about the variety of mechanisms governing global food systems and their impacts on human and environmental well-being

This book was previously published as a special issue of Globalizations

The Global Complexity Framework

SARA R. CURRAN

Until recently, attempts to understand and then manage or influence global complexity and local dynamics have bumped up against a limited set of paradigms that can account for both. In turn, these paradigms have sometimes hindered our empirical observation by limiting our focus to one global system at a time or honing in on the dynamics of particular localities without comprehensively accounting for a variety of global systems. Nevertheless, a few paradigms provide generalized views on global complexity and local dynamics. This essay provides a brief overview of sociological approaches towards understanding global complexity. It is meant to provide a generalized background to the references or implied theoretical approaches found in many of the papers in this collection.

World systems theory provides an account of the global structure of interstate political economy relationships, by deductively predicting not only the web but the directionality of flows that define differential positions of power (e.g., Chase-Dunn, 1989; Wallerstein, 1974). Coupled with dependency theory (e.g., Cardoso & Faletto, 1979; Evans, 1979), a world systems theory approach offers explanations for cross- national differences in political and economic capacities and the persistence of internal, regional inequalities. Still useful today, these theoretical perspectives are limited in their capacity to describe the emergence of important nonstate actors transitional networks, and the dynamics of global structural change.

Based on world systems theory, a more recent approach to understanding globalization focuses on the commodity chain, especially industrial manufacturing (Gereffi, 1993). The approach describes how commodity chains extend and contract around the world and how chains can be more or less vertically integrated in response to global economic cycles. Much attention in this literature has focused on governance of the chain, key agents that control information and technology, the relationships between agents along the chain, and not only trade, but finance and investment relations. The illustrations resulting from global commodity chain approach have been powerful for describing the emergence and continued trend toward outsourcing and its implications for development outcomes, especially regarding textiles, some agricultural commodities, and automobile manufacturing. For our purposes, although many of the papers in this collection are loosely oriented toward a global commodity chain approach, their difference lies in focusing on the local disruptions and dramatic shifts in the shape of global commodity chains and the intersections of one commodity chain with another or the multiple chains and pathways of one commodity. For these reasons, we find the global complexity framework more useful for illuminating global structures and local dynamics (Urry, 2003).

The global complexity approach builds on social network theory (e.g., Castells, 1996, or Held et al., 1999) by focusing on both nodes and the structure of relationships between nodes. A complexity theory approach draws attention to how agents or actors at any nodal point interacting with limited information can intentionally or unintentionally ignore the network's structural imperatives. This ignorance, compounded through iterative engagements, means that the system or social structure is always at risk of perturbations that may have very large reverberations for the web, even dismantling it. This yields the classic complexity metaphor used by ecologists to describe how a butterfly flapping its wings in one part of the world can result in a hurricane in another. Such an approach is counterintuitive to the structural imperatives assumed by global governance regimes, such as the WTO, or the social science paradigms of world systems theory or global commodity chains. Nevertheless, in this collection we find several examples of this complexity, especially as they relate to agricultural commodities and key agents' other forms of access to the global economy.

With a global complexity perspective, it is not enough to look at the macro governance structures, such as GATT, WTO, or other trade agreements. The institutions behind these governance mechanisms often presume control over the entire system. Nor is it enough to look at one commodity chain because it also relates to other commodities in terms of substitutability, additives or because the very nature of its travel creates connections to other systems of economic and political relations altering those systems or benefiting from them. Finally, a global complexity approach requires a simultaneous focus on localities. Institutions, conditions, and actors in localities are expected to introduce perturbations into global webs of exchange precisely because their actions are necessarily a result of limited, relatively localized information. These actors can never have full information and as such their interaction within a global structure is incomplete, resulting in nonlinear outcomes for both localities and global structures.

Our starting point for considering global governance and the interaction between food trade, development, and the environment begins, therefore, from a global complexity standpoint. The very nature of our research question for the special issue speaks to the heart of the global complexity approach, which declares that understanding globalization via complexity requires attention to both social and natural systems and the interactions between the two. Each of the cases that follow in Part 1 reveal the kinds of complex interactions between social and natural systems, indicating how challenging is the task of global governance regimes, especially when trying to do so to benefit social and environmental well being in particular localities. As such, a global complexity approach necessarily sets forth more equivocal conclusions about the good or bad of globalization.

References

Cardoso, F. H. & Faletto, E. (1979) Dependency and Development in Latin America (Berkeley, CA: University of California Press).

Castells, M. (1996) The Information Age: The Rise of the Network Society (Oxford, UK: Blackwell).

Chase-Dunn, C. (1989) Global Formations: Structures of the World Economy (Cambridge, MA: Blackwell Press).

Evans, P. (1979) Dependent Development: The Alliance of Multinational, State, and Local Capital in Brazil (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press).

Gereffi, G. (ed.) (1993) Commodity Chains and Global Capitalism (Westport, CT: Praeger).

Held, D., McGrew, A., Goldblatt, D. & Perraton, J. (1999) Global Transformations (Cambridge, UK: Polity Press).

Urry, J. (2003) Global Complexity (Cambridge, UK: Polity Press).

Wallerstein, I. (1974) The Modern World-System, Vol. 1: Capitalist Agriculture and the Origins of the European World-Economy in the Sixteenth Century (New York: Academic Press).

Unexpected Outcomes of Thai Cassava Trade: A Case of Global Complexity and Local Unsustainability

SARA R. CURRAN & ABIGAIL M. COOKE

Introduction: Complexity and Cassava

In 1967, the multilateral General Agreement on Tariffs and Trade (GATT) established low import tariffs to Europe on cassava (Manihot esculenta), and named Brazil and Indonesia, then the largest producers of cassava, as the principal exporters. Instead of Indonesia and Brazil emerging as the top exporters to Europe, by 1975, Thailand emerged as the dominant world exporter of cassava chips, pellets, and starches. In 1985 Thailand garnered 95% of the European cassava imports. The unexpected and dramatic emergence of Thailand as a cassava exporter took the European Economic Community (EEC) by surprise and quickly led to attempts to manage the .ood of cassava products to protect competing European grain producers. By the mid-1990s, managed quota access to the European market was dramatically closed to Thai exporters. As the warning signals grew through the late 1980s and early 1990s, leading economic development agencies and pundits heralded dire consequences for Thai cassava growers. Instead, Thai cassava production suffered only a minor setback and Thai exports continue to dominant the world market. How did these two outcomes come about? And, why were they not anticipated by leading policymakers and social scientists?

The Thai cassava case offers an opportunity to understand the dynamics of globalization and contributes empirical evidence for the emerging paradigm of global complexities (Urry, 2003). Social science scholars of globalization are currently caught in debates about the importance of global institutions versus the role of the local and localities in shaping globalization. As Urry (2003) points out, globalization has become both cause and effect, but social science has not fully elaborated the internal structure and dynamics of the global and how global systems might interact with other social systems. To do so requires a new paradigmatic perspective to explain how globalization is ‘neither omnipotent nor subject to control by society’ (p. x).

The complexity framework proposes that the global is ‘characterized by emergent and irreversible complexity and by processes that are simultaneously social and natural’ (Urry, 2003, p. 13). Emergent properties are the collective or system properties that come from the compounding of individual and iterative actions and that are more than just a scaling up of microprocesses (pp. 24–25). These emergent properties are self-organizing (pp. 28–29) and as they come from iterative actions by individuals, they do not exhibit proportional, or even predictable, cause and effect (p. 23). Positive feedback loops and increasing returns can mean unexpected and irreversible path dependence (p. 28). Complexity theory draws its lessons from empirical studies of networks and mathematical models of chaos.

A complexity approach also widens the frame of reference until there are no externalities (Urry, 2003, p. 37). Moving in this direction, it is not enough to look at the macro governance structures, such as GATT and other trade agreements, to understand how Thailand came to dominate the global trade in cassava. The institutions behind these governance mechanisms often presume control over the entire system. However, in this case they exerted very little control beyond initially setting the market conditions. Both the surprising amount of cassava flooding European markets and the unsuccessful attempts from subsequent trade agreements to curtail the flow hint that other powerful mechanisms were at work. For example, another global institution that became implicated and then took control was a global migrant network of entrepreneurs. Specifically, the Chinese diaspora, with connections across East and Southeast Asia, worked outside of and was accountable to neither national nor international governance regimes. Importantly for the establishment and spread of cassava production and exports, these entrepreneurs had contact with both local farmers and connections to export markets. And, they also created new institutions to develop new forms of processing and management of production, research product diversification, and actively cultivate new markets for cassava products.

Widening the frame to include all externalities also means examining the local conditions and dynamics that influence the organization of production or consumption. Local conditions, such as geopolitical considerations, ecological considerations (especially when considering natural products—agricultural, forestry-related, or fisheries), and history, all of which set the stage for emerging path dependencies or social change. In this case, Thai national government concerns about insurgency and strategies to develop northeastern Thailand in particular figure in cassava's success. Within this historical framework and important for the complexity framework, was the individual and iterative nature of the spread of cassava cultivation knowledge. Cassava is not grown on huge plantations, rather by smallholders. The decisions of individual farmers were essential, particularly to the growth in production. Later, as agribusiness vertically integrated (and national policy toward agri-business warmed), individual farmers were increasingly tied into contractual arrangements with buyers and processors (Baguma & Kawuki, 2006; CIAT, 2002; Curran (pers. comm. with cassava factory manager, summer 2008; Goss et al., 2000). However, planting cassava yields ecological path dependencies, resulting from the degradation of land quality (deforestation and erosion) that then limit alternative cropping options and only encourage the continued planting of hardy cassava, significant land remediation investments (which few Thai farmers have access to), or abandoning land for lengthy periods of time. The widening of the analytical frame identi.es the social and natural processes working in tandem to produce a complex system of local dynamics in.uencing a global system, which in turn profoundly influences local conditions and dynamics. Identifying the feedback mechanisms that link nodes to a web—speci.cally how they shape the structure of both nodes and webs—is a fundamental exercise for understanding complexity and its outcomes.

In this work we weave together the different aspects of the complex web mentioned above, taking into account international institutions, international migrant networks, geopolitical dynamics, the actions of individual farmers, and the consequences for the natural environment. We do this in four sections. The following section sets up t...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Table of Contents
• Notes on Contributors
• Introduction: Agriculture, Trade, and the Global Governance of Food
• Part 1: Global Complexities and Local Dynamics
• Part 2: Responses to Global Complexity—Branding and Certification
• Part 3: Responses to Global Complexity—Ethical Trade
• Conclusion: Negotiating the Dynamics of Global Complexity
• Index