Abstract
J. Clapp, Food Cambridge: Polity Press, 2012. 200 pp. £38.00. ISBN 9780745649351 (hbk); £11.19. ISBN 9780745649368 (pbk)
Food is part of a series published by Polity Press that focuses on the contemporary economy of single key resources, (the other commodities covered by the series are timber, fish, and coltan, water and oil). In Food, author Jennifer Clapp focuses on the effects of the greater marketization of this most essential of resources, in the post-war era. With the farmer and the consumer standing at either end of Clapp’s spatialization of the process of food production the focus of the book is squarely on the intermediaries or middle agents such as states, world trade bodies, trans-national bio-technology corporations, financial investors, private foundations and petro-chemical firms who are now significant and powerful actors in how we experience food, and the lack of it. Through a multitude of activities that seek to maximize either agricultural production or profit, these intermediaries are creating and occupying ‘middle spaces’ in the world food economy. This, she argues, has resulted in a power shift away from the grower and eater, and into spaces ruled by mercantilist logic. In the current deregulating financial market, food is now traded as another commodity. Stripped of its particularity as a resource essential to human survival, Clapp argues that ‘food itself … becomes detached from the societal goals food has traditionally served, such as providing nourishment for people and serving as a cultural medium’ (p. 167).
Clapp’s account takes a global perspective and, as the author suggests, local detail is not included. The story begins with the Marshall Plan, with a description of how food economies evolved into global processes in the post-war years. America and Canada were exporters of crop surplus in the 1950s; Europe would follow by the 1960s. Food export policy in America was guided to a large extent by the Cold War and that the belief that well-fed countries would be less likely to erupt into communist revolutions. This belief kept America exporting to countries such as Egypt and South Korea. America’s dominance continued with the so called Green Revolution: the export of the industrial agricultural model to the global south in the 1960s. The desire for efficiency and profit in agriculture led to the expansion of industrial agriculture to become a global project that Clapp discusses in Chapter 2, ‘The Rise of a Global Industrial Food Market’. Clapp describes the spiralling effects felt from the OPEC oil price rises in the 1970s, which together with the ideological shift by US President Nixon’s administration towards smaller government, and particularly, an end to state stewardship of grain surpluses, resulted in a larger role for multilateral development agencies and the trans-national corporation in setting the agenda for the direction and scale of industrial agricultural. Expanding this model has resulted in effects such as lack of genetic and habitat diversity, the pesticide treadmill and the institution of uneven trade rules, and Clapp focuses on the imposition of debt on developing countries, and subsequent programmes to qualify for emergency loans, which forced countries in Latin America, Sub-Saharan Africa and some countries in south-east Asia to adopt neoliberal policies such as privatizing state trading enterprises, removing barriers to foreign investment, reducing government spending, and liberalizing their trade and investment policies in the late 1970s and early 1980s. In addition, these countries were forced to reduce agricultural tariffs and allow a greater level of food imports, fundamentally redirecting revenue from coming into the state to the trans national corporations.
Clapp also examines the role of the financial markets in food production, particularly the effect of a deregulated trading environment. Food is treated as another commodity, abstracted from its use value, and the future life of crops are packaged into financial products such as derivatives. Crops are thus subject of the excessive speculation of the kind that pre-neoliberal legislation was designed to curb. The result of closely linking food prices to financial market activity has resulted most recently in global food price volatility seen in 2007 and 2008. In a subsection on financialization, land grabs and biofuels, Clapp illustrates how the volatile food price situation that was created by the deregulated financialization of food is now giving rise to further speculation by both state and private speculators into agricultural commodity markets, large-scale land investments and biofuel operations in order to hedge risks taken on the more unstable crop commodity markets.
The book’s conclusion presents two-broad based ideological positions, as perhaps directions for the future of global agricultural production and consumption patterns. On the one hand are those that are creating and occupying the intermediate places where agriculture is used to consolidate the interests of private capital and, on the other, are the varied groups of interest who are lobbying for expansion of fair trade, food sovereignty and food justice. Whilst the book presents viewpoints taken from within these two very broad-based coalitions of interests, the narrative of the book takes us through the middle spaces of trade rules, corporate power and the effects of the financialization of food with the aim of allowing the reader to examine where power lies in the food chain, and how that power creates new spaces to consolidate and expand.