By Tony Weis. London & New York: Zed Books 2007; ISBN: 9781842777954. £16.99. Reviewed by Glenn Brigaldino. ©Glenn Brigaldino, 2008.
The food we buy and eat can tell powerful stories. It may seem better to simply enjoy its many culinary varieties than to think much about where it comes from, its ingredients or who produces it and how. However both our taste buds and our brain cells need a strong stimulus in order to recognize the complexities of food's political economy. Tony Weis, professor at the University of Western Ontario in Canada, presents a highly informative narrative on these complexities in layman's terms. Published just months prior to the eruption of this year's global food crisis, his pocket-size book provides abundant fact-based arguments to confidently engage in political dialogue on the driving forces of a food system seemingly in perpetual crisis.
From preface to concluding chapter five, Weis disputes claims of inevitability of today's dominant food economy. His purpose is to unsettle illusions that it is impossible to fundamentally overhaul existing conditions of agricultural production, consumption and trade. To-day's modes of high-input farming, based on a system of industrialized grain-livestock production result in a tremendously deep environmental footprint. Yet Weis demonstrates that regardless of its costs, the current food system is incapable of attaining food security on a global scale. His well-narrated assessment unveils not only the output-level dilemmas and contradictions of a system in deep crisis; it also focuses on the institutional arrangements and power-relations, predominantly of the World Trade Organization (WTO), responsible for a status quo that translates into poor nutrition, poverty and hunger for millions around the globe. WTO efforts to reinforce abstract competitive advantages of nation states by regulating trade regimes for agricultural products are seen as completely divorced from food security concerns of the global poor.
Claims made by proponents of the status quo that markets can succeed at ensuring reliable and affordable supply of nutritious food if only allowed to operate freely and with minimal state intervention, are forcefully dismissed by Weis as being ideological and catering to profit interests of transnational companies and parasitic political elites.
For Weis, the obscenity of simultaneous poles of obesity and hunger in a market-driven food economy cannot be ignored, nor is it ethically acceptable: in terms of quantity more than enough food for all is produced globally. However the purchasing power to access that food is unevenly distributed within and between countries to the extreme. As an example, the farm subsidy regimes in OECD countries cost six times as much as all OECD development aid in any given year. Indeed, it is more than shameful that ‘the average EU subsidy per cow was roughly the same (US$2) as the poverty level on which billions barely exist’. Transnational agro-conglomerates, unconcerned about notions of social and cultural significance of food and associated traditions, continuously promote a global convergence of food consumption and diet patters (such as meat-rich diets) without much concern for long-term health consequences for consumers.
Small farmers and food-security minded decision-makers in developing countries frequently find themselves short-changed with regard to viable production or policy options. As the process of global integration of national and regional food economies has intensified so has its dependence on the ‘chemical and fossil energy treadmill’. Unable to keep up, especially rural populations whose livelihoods heavily rely upon low-input, small-scale agriculture have been squeezed out of markets and fallen below narrow poverty lines. Ultimately there seems to be little doubt, at least in the author's mind, that the food system as we know it, is heading for a fall. Weis’ analysis allows the reader to see this year's food crisis as an acceleration of a combination of worrisome trends underlying the global food economy. We have witnessed sharp price hikes in supermarkets in affluent societies as well as in village markets in low-income developing countries. Unsurprisingly, the poor have been affected most, many millions of whom are slipping back into food insecurity from which they only recently had seemingly freed themselves. Food riots have erupted in various places and high-level political activism, from the 2008 Food Summit in Rome, the G8 meeting in Japan to the recent Forum on Aid Effectiveness in Ghana have all sought to present meaningful responses to the crisis at hand.
Most certainly none of these events have attempted to explore the sub-title of Weis’ book, namely, ‘The battle for the future of farming’. If they had referred to this guide to understanding and re-imagining the global food economy, they may have found that solutions to the endemic crisis of agricultural production in the global economy lie with those who are waging the battle for sustainable alternatives: the farmers, consumers and activists of civil society in North and South. Secondary responses to the recurring failures of the global food system, even commendable relief and project-level responses to the immediate hardships faced by food-insecure populations, perhaps allow for some temporary reprieve from an ongoing, livelihoods debilitating crisis. Yet root causes of the crisis are hardly touched in the process. There is little to be gained by trying to dissect such causes into their multiple, interwoven constituent factors, even though factors such as bio-fuel production, increased global demand for meat products (especially in newly affluent parts of Asia), climate change or rising fuel costs all play a role. Debate on tomorrow's food system that is organized as a fundamental departure from the uncertainties inherent in the food economy of today, is best to be based on a firm critical analysis and factual footing. With his important book on this vital topic, Tony Weis has provided nothing less than a solid departure point for such debate.
Editor's Note: ROAPE would like to take up the challenge in this review, that is ‘the battle for farming in Africa’. If you are interested in working with us, please get in touch with me, Jan Burgess – editor@123456roape.org