By Jennifer Clapp
Belgians are being told that they need to increase their consumption of frites. Across Britain, farmers have dumped millions of pints of milk down the drain instead of churning it into butter.
In Iran, millions of baby chickens — which may have one day been bound for barbecues — have been buried alive. In India, farmers are feeding strawberries to cattle rather than sending them to markets.
Is this what an “efficient” global food system looks like?
According to the economists, politicians and corporations that have pushed for increasingly interconnected food supply chains over the past 50 years, efficient is what it’s supposed to be: Each country specialises in what it’s best at — potatoes in Belgium, beef in Canada, cocoa in Ghana — and puts it on the global market.
Producers and processors within countries specialise, too, as a way to minimise costs. As a result, at least in theory, prices stay low, the world gets fed and everyone wins.
The coronavirus has revealed that there are serious weaknesses with relying too much on this approach. Improving efficiency can certainly be a good thing, especially if consumers benefit from cost savings and access to more diverse foods.
But the changes in recent years have undermined other important goals, like the ability to adapt during a crisis. When new barriers prevent food from reaching its markets, or demand suddenly drops — both of which are happening now — the system falls apart.
Any one of these would have caused problems in the world’s complex and specialised food supply chains. All of them happening at the same time is wreaking havoc.
International trade in food dates back centuries — ancient Romans traded wine across the Mediterranean; spices travelled the medieval Silk Road — but since the 1970s, when agricultural industrialisation began to really speed up, more and more people have relied on another country for providing at least part of their dinner.
International food trade has increased nearly fivefold since the 1990s, when governments agreed to new rules to open up food trade. Today, nearly a quarter of all food produced crosses a border.
Large transnational corporations saw an opportunity to profit from these changes and are now pivotal players in the trade, processing and packaging of food.
As we have seen with the emergence of megasized companies that dominate entire sectors in the rest of the economy, the largest of the food and agriculture businesses have been steadily buying up their rivals in recent years and command enormous power.
These changes fundamentally transformed food systems that once were more localised and diverse to be more specialised, distant and corporate controlled. Farmers increasingly contract to produce single commodities — crops, meat, dairy — for just a handful of large transnational corporate buyers that process and market it.
A food system organised in this way may be “efficient” in terms of delivering lower prices, but it also has costs: to the environment, to social inequality and, as the pandemic has revealed, to flexibility in the face of disruption. –GN
