POLITICAL ECONOMY OF FOOD

POLITICAL ECONOMY OF FOOD. In the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries the term "political economy" referred to concerns classified under the discipline of economics. In the twentieth century Marxist and Social Democratic critics of the emergent discipline, who believed it was blind to systematic social inequalities, primarily used the term. In the twenty-first century inequality, both national and international, continued as the hallmark of any work identified with the tradition of political economy.

Three kinds of work typically are classified under the rubric of political economy of food. The most widely recognized is political economy of hunger, especially the work of the Nobel laureate Amartya Sen. A second group concentrates on food fights between great powers, such as the conflicts between Japan and the United States over rice imports into Japan. The third group focuses on the development of underdevelopment, that is, processes by which poor nations are kept poor.

Political Economy of Famines

Sen and his associates developed a richly empirical research agenda showing that famines occur not because of too many mouths to feed but because the poor cannot access food. Famines in the late twentieth century occurred in sparsely populated regions, such as sub-Saharan Africa, not in densely populated China, India, or Bangladesh. Although populations continued to grow dramatically in India and Bangladesh, those nations last experienced famines in 1947 and 1974 respectively, the dates they became independent. This implies that where political will exists famines can be averted by following "famine codes." Developed in British India in the 1880s, famine codes are both early warning systems and suggested countermeasures, such as wage employment in public works. Famine codes are only effective in the presence of a relatively coherent public administration and transportation and communication infrastructures. Ethiopia, Somalia, and Afghanistan lacked these elements. The last catastrophic famine in China, which probably killed about 20 million people between 1959 and 1961, occurred in the context of a disintegrating communication system within the Chinese Communist Party.

Why repeated famines in sub-Saharan Africa? The immediate problems of eastern sub-Saharan Africa are civil war and the dispersal of the rural population, which is 18 persons per square kilometer (8 for Somalia), compared to 228 for India, 681 for Bangladesh, and 104 for Nigeria. In a dispersed population the transportation system is underdeveloped and cannot support relief efforts. Dispersed settlements also provide little scope for building efficiencies in terms of the social division of labor and market development. Furthermore in much of this part of Africa the primary form of agriculture is slash-and-burn cultivation, which is a fragile system of sustenance in the first place. Yet such an extensive approach is essential to survival on land of some of the poorest quality anywhere in the world. On the African continent 60 percent of the area has a high expectation of drought, and only 30 percent of the land is suited to rain-fed production of millet, sorghum, and maize (Drèze et al., 1995). Much of the potentially good land is exposed to endemic sleeping sickness that affects both livestock and humans.

Most people starve because they are either unemployed or the price of the agricultural commodity they sell is so low they cannot afford enough food in exchange. If the latter is the cause, as in most of sub-Saharan Africa, producing more cheap food in the first world for export to the poor nations drives down prices further and creates more misery.

Food Fights

Geopolitics have been central to the highly visible food fights between the affluent nations of the European Union, the United States, and Japan. In the 1940s the United States and the European nations assumed that agriculture would be relatively protected for reasons of reconstruction following World War II. But once Western European farmers revived, the U.S. government defended its share of the domestic agricultural market with the 1952 Defense Production Act, which banned the importation of anything from Danish cheese to Turkish sultana raisins (Friedmann, 1993). By 1975, when the European community had become a net exporter of wheat, the transatlantic trade conflict had become significantly hotter. In 1992 the Common Agricultural Policy of the European Union introduced support for domestic oilseed production and brought the transatlantic cousins to the brink of a trade war. Subsequently the most visible fights centered on hormone-injected beef and bananas.

Similarly during the military occupation of Japan, the United States sought to create a social base for the democratic system it was seeking to impose. The United States allowed Japanese protection of farm incomes both for the sake of recovery and in the interest of strengthening Japanese democracy. However, once the Japanese economy was independent it inevitably generated a conflict with the United States over markets and farm subsidies. This time instead of centering on wheat, maize, dairy products, and soybeans as with Europe, the conflict concerned rice, citrus, beef, and soybeans. Eventually the parties compromised on Japanese national sufficiency in rice and dependence on the United States for soybeans, nonrice grains, and beef. Protected rice remained an irritant in U.S.–Japanese relations in the twenty-first century.

Development of Underdevelopment

Political economists of underdevelopment concentrate on a segment of the international trade in food products that is distorted to benefit first world nations. Their basic argument is that free trade in food products never has existed. The U.S. government, among the most ideologically committed proponents of free trade, paid American farmers $71.5 billion in agricultural subsidies between 1996 and 2000. While pressuring third world nations to remove subsidies to their farmers, the first world nations heavily subsidize their capital-intensive agricultural systems. International trade in agricultural produce is shaped not by comparative advantage but by comparative access to subsidies (Watkins, 1996). Highly subsidized first world agricultural surpluses have created a serious disincentive for poor farmers in the developing world.

Furthermore it is argued that these unfair trade practices serve the interests of large corporations in the first world, such as General Foods, as illustrated by the case of instant coffee, the penultimate product of a commodity chain that begins with green coffee beans. Coffee is grown mostly in third world countries and is consumed in the first world. Most value-added parts of roasting, grinding, and packaging are done in first world countries. At the end of World War II the market was dominated by first world corporations, but major producers of green coffee, such as Brazil, sought "forward integration," from coffee to instant coffee, to appropriate more value-added parts of the chain. Brazilian prices were about 20 percent lower, and the quality of the powder was higher (Talbot, 1997, p. 124). General Foods opposed Brazilian imports that cut into the company's profits. The corporation lobbied hard for Article 44 of the Coffee Agreement, which compelled Brazil to impose an export tax on instant coffee and to sell 560,000 bags of green coffee beans per year to its competitors in the United States without the export tax. Receiving almost one-half of this coffee, which it converted to instant coffee, General Foods developed a further advantage over its Brazilian competitors by way of marketing and distribution networks.

In the larger pattern Mike Davis (2001) showed how colonial governments created the third world at the end of the nineteenth century through agricultural policies in the course of subsistence crises in 1876–1879, 1889–1891, and 1896–1902. These three crises were triggered by El Niño events, but capitalism had destroyed traditional networks of support, such as patron-client relations and their associated notions of customary charity, which resulted in the deaths of about 30 million people in the third world and generated conditions of chronic poverty. For example, Europe and India had relatively equal standards of living in 1800, but by 1900, Europe's standard of living was about twenty-one times higher than that of India, by economist Romesh Chunder Dutt's estimation based on the quality of housing, clothing, and diets (Davis, 2001, p. 292). By the end of the nineteenth century the processes of underdevelopment were firmly in place.

See also Food as a Weapon of War ; Food Security ; Food Supply, Food Shortages .

BIBLIOGRAPHY

Davis, Mike. Late Victorian Holocausts: El Niño Famines and the Making of the Third World. London: Verso, 2001.

Drèze, Jean, Amartya Sen, and Athar Hussain, eds. The Political Economy of Hunger: Selected Essays. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1995.

Friedmann, Harriet. "The Political Economy of Food: A Global Crisis." New Left Review 197 (January 1993): 29–57.

Talbot, John M. "The Struggle for Control of a Commodity Chain: Instant Coffee from Latin America." Latin America Research Review 32, no. 2 (Spring 1997): 117–136.

Watkins, Kevin. "Free Trade and Farm Fallacies: From the Uruguay Round to the World Food Summit." Ecologist 26, no. 6 (November–December 1996): 244–256.

Krishnendu Ray