This document outlines an upcoming lecture on the food system crisis from various perspectives including bio-politics, political ecology, and global changes. It will discuss peaks and troughs in the food system, the normalcy of crisis, and how power has shifted from agriculture to controlling access to urban markets. The lecture will also cover topics like climate change, water, biodiversity, energy, population growth, waste, land, soil, and dietary changes in the context of the new fundamentals of the food system.

1. The Food System in Crisis?
Bio-politics, political ecology & global change
Dr Matt Reed
06/02/2014
copyright Matt Reed 2014

2. Outline
✤
Crisis - what crisis?
✤
Peaks & troughs
✤
Bio-politics
✤
Political ecology
✤
Global changes
✤
Flows, networks & gels
copyright Matt Reed 2014
01

3. copyright Matt Reed 2014

4. The normal crisis of the food
system
✤
Range of meanings of crisis, and its uses
✤
“Twenty-first century policy needs to focus on food supply
chains, beyond as well as including agriculture, because power
and capital have moved off the land, controlling access to
mostly urban markets.”
✤
“Biology has become the pre-eminent science, replacing the
chemical revolution of agrichemicals and fertilisers before it.”
✤
Tim Lang 2010

5. Power in the food system
✤
Retailers and financialization
✤
Retailer driven supply chains, moulding of consumer’s
choices
✤
A political formula: Capital + Science + Waste reduction ,
Raises food output = Progress.
✤
Lang - ecological public health

6. New Fundamentals (pace
Lang)
✤
Climate Change
✤
Water
✤
Biodiversity and Ecosystems Support
✤
Energy & non-renewable fossil fuels - peak oil,
✤
Population growth - urban
✤
Waste
✤
Land
✤
Soil
✤
Labour
✤
Dietary change & public health

7. Bio-politics
✤
Guthman & DuPuis and the politics of fat
✤
Foucault’s History of Sexuality, desire and the
emergence of new points of power.
✤
“For millennia, man remained what he was for
Aristotle: a living animal with the additional capacity
for a political existence; modern man is an animal
whose politics places his existence as a living being in
question”.p265

8. Rural Development paradigms
✤
Marsden and Horlings
✤
Eco-economic strategies of food and rural
development
✤
Replacing the neo-liberal policies, on economic,social
and environmental grounds
✤
Looking for a place to stand

9. 01

10. http://www.hbo.com/documentaries/in-tahrir-square-18-days-of-egypts-unfinished-revolution

11. Protest movements 2008 - 2014
- Arab spring (Tunisia, Egypt, Syria, Morocco, Turkey, Yemen,
Bahrain) + protest in Iran
- Occupy movement (US, UK …..)
- Indignadas (Spain) + Greek & Italian protests
- Brazilian protests
- Brazilian protests
- Brazilian protests
- Brazilian protests
copyright Matt Reed 2014
- Riots in the UK, Sweden and
China
- On-going protests in Thailand
- Suppressed peaceful Sunni
protests in Iraq

12. Flows, networks & gels
✤
After Mol, Castells and ANT
✤
After the nation state
✤
Centrality of networks as a paradigm and organising
metaphor
✤
Gels - movements, migrations

13. Castells
✤
Globalised informational capitalism
✤
“the core processes of informational generation,
economic productivity, political/military power and
media communication are already deeply transformed
by the informational paradigm, and are connected to
global networks of wealth, power, and symbols
working under such a logic” (Castells 1997:21)

14. The network paradigm
✤
“I propose the hypothesis that space organizes time in
the network society” (Castells p376)
✤
The importance of flows (not forces)
✤
“Flows are not just one element of the social
organisation: they are the expression of processes
dominating our economic, political, and symbolic life”
p412

15. Global Fluids
“Global Fluids are spatial patterns structured neither by
boundaries nor by more or less stable relations, but by
large flexibility, liquidity, gel-like movement and
permeable boundaries. Fluids demonstrate no clear point
of departure or arrival and no clear sequential dependency,
just de-territorialised movement with no necessary end
state or goal. Migrating people, financial capital, the
Internet and social movements are typical examples”
✤(Mol
2013: 7)

16. Global Integrated Networks
“GINs consist of more or less stable, enduring and predictable relations
between nodes or hubs stretching across different regions with relatively
walled routes for flows. GINs cross regional boundaries and thus become
deterritorialised, although place-based moorings ensure that they do not
become footloose. They deliver the same kind of outcome at all nodes, with
limited adaptation to local circumstances and their ‘products are
predictable, calculable, routinised and standardized’ (Urry 2003, pp. 56–
57). Large multinational corporations like Coca Cola, agro-food networks
and civil society network organisations such as Friends of the Earth are
typical examples.” Mol 2013

17. Social theory and food system
✤
Socio-spatial
✤
Importance of nature - political ecology
✤
Food as a route to questions about wider flows and
networks
✤
Challenge of critical social science to inform and abet
social change.