Class notes BA Geography (L700) Paper 5: Political Appetites: Geographies of Food and Power
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Course
BA Geography (L700)
Institution
Cambridge University (CAM)
This paper provides a critical account of how different actors (farmers, animals, plants, pathogens, etc.) and social forces (state and corporate power, colonial violence, developmental strategies, technology and infrastructure, etc.) come together to produce - or rather co-produce - changes in the...
Paper 5: Political Appetites: Geographies of Food and Power
Overview
This paper provides a critical account of how different actors, both human and the more-
than-human objects and organisms, and social forces (state and corporate power, colonial
violence, developmental strategies, technology and infrastructure, etc.) unite to produce, or
rather co-produce, changes in the global food system.
● documenting these 'revolutions' to the production, distribution and consumption of
food,
● interrogates the meaning of such changes for the different worlds we have
constructed in the past, the kind of worlds we inhabit today, and the likely worlds we
will inherit tomorrow.
● To explain how hunger emerges within modernity and how it continues to be part of
‘our’ economic systems of production, modalities of representation and regimes of
power
● Role of social framing in leading political responses
Michaelmas Term
Lecture 1: Political appetites: an overview
Focusing on the issue at hand and how it is framed to guide certain responses.
a) Hunger
• In 2021, 702 - 828 million faced hunger (or undernourished).
o Definition of hunger; uncomfortable or painful physical sensation caused by
insufficient consumption of dietary energy (FAO, 2022)
▪ Lack of dietary energy or,
▪ Sufficient food access to meet energy requirements, yet are uncertain
how long it will last or if they will be forced to reduce the quality or
quantity available to eat as to get by (FAO, 2022)
• Some 2.31 billion people face ‘moderate’ or ‘severe’ food insecurity.
o Definition of food insecurity; lack regular access to enough safe and
nutritious food for normal growth and development and an active and
healthy life.
▪ Unavailability of food or resource such as money to obtain food
resulting in reduced quantities, skipping or reduced quality of food.
, • Everyday, 24-thousand people die of hunger or associated diseases - a death every
3.6 seconds – even though we have the potential to feed everyone on the planet
(Vernon, 2009)
“Despite increased food production per capita of 20% in developing countries between
1980–90, roughly 800 million people suffer from hunger— of whom 500 million are
chronically malnourished—and more than one-third of children are malnourished (UNDP
1996)”
The Geography of Hunger
• Asia has >50% of hungry worldwide, >1/3rd in Africa, and 12% in Latin America and
Caribbean.
• Africa has the highest overall hunger prevalence – 57% moderate or severe food
insecurity
o For example, Somalia is considered the most hunger-prone country because
of ongoing political instability and civilian insecurity. The latest World Food
Program data (2022) showed that 7.1 million are unable to achieve their daily
food requirements, 5.6million are food-insecure, and 12.3 require
humanitarian assistance to supply basic needs.
• New data shows sharp gender differences in ‘food insecurity’ – every region
worldwide, women face greater food insecurity
● For example, shift from subsistence agriculture to wage labour in large-scale
commercial agriculture may affect hunger by altering control over domestic
resources (see Africa or Indonesia) – as women lose customary land access rights
with divisions in accessibility to wage opportunities and tenancy on rural
development and irrigation projects (Millman, 1990)
“hunger and its distribution - who goes hungry, where and why - is an effect of the extreme
inequality of the contemporary capitalist food system (Bernstein, 2015) which has
materialised as an outcome of the differential relations of power and dependency still
affected by past histories of exploitation and domination”
‘To Starve’
● Maps, figures and statistics tend to present static and de-contextualised view of
hunger.
● Alex de Waal (2017) believes language really matters, with the verb ‘to starve’
embodying both intransitive (suffering) and transitive (acting force) meaning.
o Transitive meaning, ‘to subdue or force into starvation’, starvation is
something one community does onto another.
▪ Departs from theories treating hunger as a ‘breakdown’ or ‘failure’ of
current social configurations (Edkins, 2000)
, ● Famines have functions as well as causes (Nally, 2008)
b) Obesity
From ‘too little’ to ‘too much’
● Worldwide obesity has more than doubled since 1980.
● In 2016, over 1.9 billion people are overweight with 650 million registered as
‘clinically obese’
● Traditionally considered a ‘disease of affluence’, obesity is now a significant problem
in MICs and LICS, who also face the double-burden of ‘malnutrition’
o Almost half of the children under 5 who were overweight or obese in 2019
lived in Asia (WHO, 2022)
o Globally there are more people who are obese than underweight – this
occurs in every region except parts of sub-Saharan Africa and Asia (WHO,
2022)
● Obesity is preventable, with its fundamental cause being an energy imbalance
between caloric energy consumed and that expended.
‘The coexistence of food abundance and deprivation, even in the same countries or
communities, has been a reality for decades and, unless conditions conducive to chronic
hunger are eliminated, the two extremes will continue to coexist in the future.’ According
to the FAO director Jacques Diouf in 2006.
The Geography of Obesity
● Adult obesity is rising everywhere at an accelerated pace
● ‘Food deserts’: many people have to travel significant distances and pay more for
healthy diets (esp those at disadvantage in the neo-capitalist system)
● Time/work pressures mean eating more, dining out more, and consuming
‘convenience food’ – all of which are modes of consumption linked with obesity.
o Diet trends follows social change
● Food industry shapes our consumption choices and food habits – and the industry
has been largely successful in resisting regulation (contends with the notion of
‘choice’)
o The obese body, every bit as much as the hungry body, exists as a potent
critique of the society in which it exists.
, ● A social malady… new ‘global syndemics’ (Lancet report) (focus on interaction of
systems such as climate change)
“Scarcity – as land and resources are diverted to meet the demands of more affluent
consumers – and abundance, as obesogenic diets transform the human body into an
accumulation strategy (Guthman and Du Puis 2006)”
c) Waste
• 1/3 or 1.3 billion tonnes of all edible food for human consumption is lost or wasted
worldwide.
o or enough calories to feed 2- 3bn people (Lipinski et al., 2013)
• If food waste were a country, it would the 3rd largest GHG emitter (FAO, 2015)
• Many reasons for loss/waste: all the supply-chain, aesthetics (‘ugly food’), marketing
(buy more), cultural values (seeing food as ‘cheap’)…
• Benton: ‘the food system from farm to flush’, eating becomes an agricultural act.
Problematising Waste: ‘Systemic Wastefulness’
‘Nutrients accumulate at the animal production facilities concomitantly as they are
depleted on croplands located far from where the manure is produced.’ (Pimmental, 2010)
Current industrial methods in agriculture transform the nature of farming and exact a
mounting burden of pollution an waste framed in current epochal contexts of climate
change and biodiversity loss – best understood relative to political and economic inertia of
the limitations emerging from the environment (Roberts, 2008)
Problematising Waste: ‘Metabolic Rift’
● modern agricultural industry concentrates people in urban, therefore products of
country soil (food and fibre) transported into cities, then lost as waste (wasteful
urban metabolism)
● ‘All progress in capitalist agriculture is a progress in the art, not only of robbing the
worker, but of robbing the soil.’ (Marx, 1867)
● Marx’s formulation of a ‘metabolic rift’ is important because it positions waste as
systemic – an outcome of capitalist principles applied to nature/life.
d) Standardisation, Homogeneity, and Concentration
● Large fields all growing the same crop (monocropping)
● synthetic chemicals and mechanisation to boost productivity
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