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Explanation & Answer
Attached.
Agric Hum Values (2016) 33:215–223
DOI 10.1007/s10460-015-9639-2
In the long run, will we be fed?
Hugh Campbell1
Accepted: 18 July 2015 / Published online: 31 July 2015
Springer Science+Business Media Dordrecht 2015
Abstract This Symposium provides an important
opportunity to reflect on the current state of scholarship
positioning alternative foods against mainstream agri-food
systems. Symposia of this kind have a long tradition as
marking particular turning points in agrifood debates. This
collection provides an opportunity to examine the current
positioning of scholarship around the theoretical and
methodological fracture line between successor theories to
classical political economy and more post-structuralist
approaches to alternative economic activities around food
and agriculture. In the current collection, despite clear
evidence of theoretical positioning around the structural:
post-structural divide, I argue that both aspects of agri-food
theorizing share similar political intent and are positioned
within the same wider political project of agrifood critique.
Therefore, despite theoretical fracture, there is a unity of
political intention that continues to bind together this particular field of research and practice.
Keywords Agri-food scholarship Agri-food politics
Food security
Abbreviations
AFRN Agri-Food Research Network
ANT
Actor Network Theory
CSA
Commodity Systems Approach
FRT
Food Regime Theory
GMOs Genetically Modified Organisms
WTO
World trade Organization
& Hugh Campbell
hugh.campbell@otago.ac.nz
Introduction: agri-food scholarship and agri-food
politics
At certain times in the ongoing evolution of agri-food
scholarship, an appropriate moment arrives to pause and
reflect on the current state of the field. These reflections
often provide some of the most important and productive
moments in our scholarly dialogue, helping us to consider
what are the key framing questions and wider goals of our
field of study. These are also the moments when we might
also usefully reflect on the moralities of scholarship itself.
While this might not be something we often discuss openly,
it is nevertheless true that all scholarship (even the most
sterile empiricism) operates under normative expectations
and valuations. This is especially true of scholarship in the
critical social sciences. Here, we are usually critiquing
existing social structures in a manner that more or less
implicitly implies a rejection of certain political or values
positioning—while others are embraced.1 Agri-food
scholarship is no exception. In this article, therefore, I will
argue that when we characterize ourselves as agri-food
scholars, we also need to understand ourselves as participating in both a scholarly and a political project.
Sometimes these moments of reflection take the form of
edited book collections, symposia, and special issues of
journals. Collectively, these bodies of work often tell us
much more about the state of the field than the serial
consumption of individual articles and books. A collection
performs a particular kind of academic work—something
that can be obscured in the wider avalanche of individual
scholarship. I suggest that this current collection on food
1
1
Sociology, Gender and Social Work, University of Otago,
280 Leith Walk, Dunedin 9016, New Zealand
In contrast, the recent collection by Stock et al. (2015) on Food
Utopias is a refreshingly open engagement with our need to be more
explicit about our political and values projects as scholars.
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216
security and alternative food networks provides one of
these apt moments for reflection on both our theories and
on our research politics. Coming out of one annual meeting
of Australasia’s Agri-Food Research Network, it operates
on four levels. Firstly, it represents a collection of critically
relevant contemporary insights into aspects of the theorization and empirical elaboration of food security issues as
they operate in particular network contexts. Secondly, it
provides a ‘snapshot’ of the wider tensions and dilemmas
facing agri-food politics as a whole. Thirdly, this collection
offers an insight into a particular scholarly community in
Australasia and the way that community has shaped and
responded to the global elaboration of the idea of ‘agrifood’ scholarship. Fourthly and finally, this collection
introduces a number of new scholars in the agri-food
field—something that contrasts with the cluster of established scholars who populated previous agri-food collections in Agriculture and Human Values, such as the Special
Issue on Food Regimes in 2009 (Campbell and Dixon
2009). The following article therefore reflects on the
peculiar and effective power not only of scholarly collections, but also of scholarly networks, and the resonant links
between them.
In the following narrative, I primarily use this collection
to point to these two kinds of collective powers. In doing
so, I reveal a particularly strong kind of political unity
within the wide-ranging theoretical diversity that has
characterized agri-food discussions over the last two
decades.
The origins of the agri-food approach (in
Australasia)
Agri-food scholarship is very much a creature of its theoretical and political origins: namely, in the political economy revolution in rural sociology and rural geography in
the 1980s and 90s. Every PhD student entering the field in
the early 80s would have been able to cite key Marxist
scholars like Kautsky and Chayanov, while general laws of
capitalism were used to re-animate the previously rather
unambitious fields of rural studies not only within sociology, but also through the disciplinary discourse of geography, social anthropology and rural policy.
By 1980, one collection stood out as the key collaboration that signified not simply a pungent critique of prior
approaches to understanding agriculture, but also both a
new, cohesive approach to rural social research, and a new
global network of scholars. Buttel and Newby (1980) acted
as a theoretical manifesto for a new critical political
economy of agriculture; one that placed capitalism as the
central theoretical object at the heart of studies of agriculture and farming in the Developed World. Following the
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H. Campbell
typical characterization of the 1970s as a decade of farm
crisis in the US, Europe and Australia, Buttel and Newby
(1980) assembled a set of analyses that provided new
insights into this discourse. They described farmers as a
particular form of commodity producer; off-farm businesses as agents of capital participating in the subsumption
of family farms; and both farmers (under contract) and
farm labour as exploited. They also described the inevitable concentration and centralization of capital; the falling
rate of profit; and the need to identify exactly where in the
production process particular sites created exploitation
value for capital. In this dramatic new narrative, Buttel and
Newby (1980) argued that while capitalism was restructuring rural regions at a national level, the globalization of
capital did the same work on a broader scale. This new
approach proved peculiarly powerful and quickly attracted
a number of scholars in the US, Europe and farther afield.
Countries like Australia and New Zealand themselves
moved into a period of farm crisis in the 1980s. Influenced
by Buttel and Newby (1980), a group of left-leaning
geographers and sociologists in Australia and New Zealand—including Geoff Lawrence, Bob Fagan, David Burch,
Richard Le Heron, Ann Pomeroy and Philip McMichael
(e.g. see McMichael 1979; Pomeroy 1986; Lawrence 1987;
Fagan and Webber 1994; Fagan and Le Heron 1994)—
brought the insights of this new approach to the problems
of family farm survival, declining rural communities, and
the dramatically changed economic coupling of agriculture
to global circuits of capital in these ex-settler states. A
decade later, the work of this group and their colleagues
(and students) formed the basis of a research network—the
Agri-Food Research Network (AFRN)—which organized
the conference that enabled this special issue of Agriculture
and Human Values to take shape. Given the coherence of
theoretical purpose and political vigour that created the
AFRN in the early 1990s, this special issue forces us to
question whether, in the subsequent 20 years, the field of
agri-food scholarship could have completely outgrown its
original political economy-inspired manifesto. Clearly, this
questioning has implications for how we understand our
collective activities as agri-food scholars.
From the outset, the 1990s agri-food approach emerged
from a desire to create a set of successor theories that
would help flesh out and embed some of the more abstract
and general claims—exemplified in Buttel and Newby
(1980) and elaborated in the 1980s—articulating the nature
of agriculture and food under capitalism. Scholars who
entered the kinds of discussion that animated agri-food
scholarship in the early 1990s shared the same understanding: namely, that agriculture and food systems were in
crisis due to some of the structural tendencies that typified
capitalist economies. Strikingly, however, the sites of
interest and styles of theoretical focus were shifting
In the long run, will we be fed?
somewhat from those articulated in Buttel and Newby
(1980). New theories like the Commodity Systems
Approach (CSA), for example, suggested that a key limitation to theorizing about agriculture and food was the
problematic separation of the realms of production and
consumption (Friedland 1984). For Australian and New
Zealand scholars (as well as many in the US), the key links
between fields of study lay in the big commodity export
platforms of wheat, beef and dairy (Le Heron 1988, 1989).
Methodologically ‘following’ these actual commodities,
moreover, took us to new geographic spaces that linked
tomato growers in Australia with consumers in South East
Asia (Pritchard and Burch 2003); industrial prawn production in SE Asia to consumers in Sydney (Goss et al.
2000); or industrial chicken factories with dinner tables in
Melbourne (Dixon 2002). The agri-food approach began to
become increasingly additive: that is, it studied the capitalist condition of agriculture together with the commodities that stretched from production to consumption,
together with the way these commodities moved across
geographic spaces.
Other central concepts, such as Food Regime Theory
(Friedmann and McMichael 1989), geographically and historically embedded these new additions. Food Regime
Theory suggested that, under capitalism, both agriculture
and food were configured in particular geographic and historical formations that—following the pattern of French
Regulation Theory—experienced cyclic periods of stability
and instability (Le Heron 1993). Global-scale regimes linked
many regions; regional scale regimes brought together the
kinds of commodity systems being discussed elsewhere;
while these systems in turn linked to the problems faced both
by family farmers in exporting regions, and by new urban
consumers at the other end of commodity chains. Book
collections (Burch et al. 1996, 1999a; Le Heron and Pawson
1996; Lockie and Bourke 2001) and journal symposia
(Burch et al. 1999b) marked the key moments of elaboration
of this approach in Australasia; identified key commodities;
observed particular historical regimes, crises and phases;
and referred many of these back to central dynamics within
the restructuring of capitalist economies.
This narrative may appear to suggest that the 1990s were
characterized by a slight fracturing of the original coherent
core of political economy-inspired insights in agriculture
and capitalism that arose in the 1980s. In my opinion,
however, the rise of agri-food scholarship was both
dynamic and galvanizing, primarily because it was premised on a powerfully shared political as well as theoretical project. It involved a rejection of mainstream
agricultural economics, farm management, rural extension
and orthodox agribusiness studies. It made a clear and
concerted argument that the crisis of agriculture and rural
regions could not be understood using explanations framed
217
by orthodox economics. It also challenged the implicit
expectations of technological optimism in agricultural
science—the idea that there was no such thing as an agricultural problem that couldn’t be solved by a new technological intervention. At the same time, the political and
moral values of mainstream, industrial agriculture and food
also formed the ‘other’ to agri-food assertions. Scholars in
the agri-food approach constantly opposed the values of
cheapness, abundance, predictability and choice that
operate as the chief cultural justifications of contemporary
food systems, and reframed these values as fraudulent,
deceptive, ideological or unsustainable. While Michael
Pollan, for example, may be a populist, his denunciation of
these ‘values’ of food was nevertheless premised on
scholarship that was comfortably situated within the critical agri-food approach (Pollan 2006, 2008). I suggest that
agri-food scholars were bound together not only by a
shared set of theoretical debates, but also by a strongly
shared set of political positions that rejected the majority of
mainstream thinking about agriculture and food systems.
This set of shared political and theoretical arguments has
remained a more or less stable feature of the politics of the
agri-food approach in the subsequent 20 years of meetings,
collaborations and publications. This explicit political
project has also allowed agri-food scholarship to branch
out sideways to engage with other critiques of late
modernity: environmental and sustainability concerns like
GMOs; food and health concerns around fast food and
obesity; more general anti-capitalist, anti-free trade and
anti-globalisation movements; and global concerns about
structural inequality, development and poverty (interestingly, however, not yet—or not comprehensively—with
the politics of gender). These alliances were elaborated
around a central moral cause: locating the problems of
contemporary life within the dynamics of socio-economic
worlds that are unequal, unsustainable and unhealthy.
From structural political economy to the poststructural in agri-food scholarship
So, the political heart of agri-food studies has remained a
stable element of collaborations and collections in this
area. A second element, however—namely, the theoretical
framework of orthodox, neo-Marxist political economy
that launched this critique of agri-food relations under
capitalism—has undergone a more serious set of revisions
and challenges. While the politics have remained constant,
the object of the critique—the socio-economic configuration of capitalist economies—has shifted and has thus been
subject to dramatic theoretical revision.
If we were to identify one collection as the manifesto
for critique of the orthodox agri-food approach, it would
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218
be Goodman and Watts (1997). Drawing on new theoretical approaches and methods guided both by Actor
Network Theory (ANT) and also by post-structural concepts like discourse, many of the contributors to Goodman and Watts (1997) took a dramatic turn away from the
structural political economy orthodoxy in agri-food studies. As a critique, this collection had a long latency phase
in agri-food scholarship. Increasingly, however, more
agri-food work began deploying ANT or rediscovering
the ‘material’ in agri-food (Goodman 2001); citing Bruno
Latour as an influence (e.g. Busch and Juska 1997; Busch
2000); using ‘softer’ alternative political economic theory
such as the French Convention approach of Boltanski and
Thevenot (Wilkinson 1997; Rosin 2008); or taking into
account the ‘Post-Structural Political Economy’
approach—itself inspired by Gibson-Graham’s (1996,
2006) critique of orthodox, structural political economy
(Larner and Le Heron 2002; Le Heron 2003; Le Heron
and Lewis 2009).
The outcome of this synthesis was a diminution of
analyses of ideology in favour of discourse; a reduction in
the focus on a single capitalist economy in favour of
diverse economies; and a reduction of focus on institutional/social power. Instead, focus shifted in favour of
more dispersed powers; the power of materials; and new
ways of understanding social dynamics and processes that
might act as alternatives to the kinds of mainstream food
systems (and scholarship) that agri-food scholars still united to critique. As Michael Carolan (2013a) succinctly
describes it, even with the rise of post-structural approaches, agri-food scholarship is still interested in power. The
critical difference is that agri-food research has become
interested in both ‘dominance power’ and ‘difference
power’. The power of ‘difference’, in particular, has
opened up theoretical consideration of terrains of contest
that can be mapped on a much wider scale than the central
economic structures of capitalism.
While considerable support exists for these new
approaches, this support is by no means universal. At
present, the current state of agri-food debates consists of a
strong, continuous use of macro-level structural, political
economy-inspired concepts such as food regimes, development, and a hostile stance towards corporate power.
However, these concepts now operate alongside analyses
that draw more from post-structural approaches. Perhaps
the most telling sign of a subtle shift in the structural
corpus of agri-food studies has been the near-ubiquitous
slide from the theoretical use of the term ‘capitalism’ to the
more politically contextual and historically-situated term
‘neoliberalism’ as the moral ‘other’—and thus the target of
our political and theoretical critique (for a review see Wolf
and Bonanno 2014).
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H. Campbell
Agri-food scholarship and alternatives
to capitalism: the organic case
Demonstrating this shift from structural to post-structural
approaches—and the simultaneous shift in political orientation of scholarship—can be usefully illustrated via one
particular kind of alternative food: organics. Agri-food
scholars first considered alternatives to mainstream capitalism when Buck et al. (1997) opened a ‘window’ by
analysing the political economy of organic agriculture.
From this point, and partly prompted by the surge of public
interest in organic food in countries like Australia, New
Zealand, the US and the UK, agri-food scholars began to
discuss the nature and effectiveness of organic agriculture
as a genuine alternative to capitalist agriculture (see particularly Guthman 2000). From 1996 onwards, papers on
organics became standard fare at the Agri-Food Research
Network meetings. From the 1999 conference of the
European Society for Rural Sociology in Lund (collected
as Michelson 2001), and the IRSA meeting in Trondheim
in 2004 (collected as Holt and Reed 2006) papers and
sessions positioned ‘the organic’ in one of three ways: as a
genuine site for an alternative social movement to create
new values and outcomes in mainstream markets; conversely, as a co-opted (conventionalized) alternative that
lost all value once it was incorporated into mainstream
economic structures and institutions; or, intriguingly, as
both (bifurcation) (for a review see Rosin and Campbell
2009).
In the subsequent 10 years, and as a participant in these
debates, my reflection is that the concept of ‘organic’ has
ended up in at least four theoretical/political positions in
agri-food discussions:
1.
2.
3.
4.
as a failed alternative that became subsumed and
‘conventionalized’ into capitalist forms;
as an exemplar of a new style of (neoliberalised)
governance in agri-food systems, with audit systems
evolving to manage risk in particular consumer
markets;
as a form of agriculture that, through the lens of poststructural approaches (such as convention theory),
potentially operates with the kind of challenging
‘difference power’ argued by Carolan; or
as a site where different material outcomes in terms of
environmental sustainability might be enabled.
These four positions certainly demonstrate different
articulations of agri-food theory. More importantly, these
positions also describe different political identifications
around the perceived value and rationale for—to give one
example—even studying organic agriculture in the first
place.
In the long run, will we be fed?
Position (1) describes organics as a ‘sham’ or ‘con’ for
not acting as a genuine alternative to capitalist structures
(put not only more elegantly in Guthman 2004, but also
with more populist appeal by Pollan 2001). While position
(2) is still generally politically negative for organics (given
its association with neoliberalism), it also implies that that
the organic concept is also capable of low-level transformation (for a reflection on 1 and 2 see Constance 2008). In
contrast, position (3) displays ‘difference power’: that is,
organic can either disrupt and undermine existing certainties about agriculture (an argument prefigured in Rosin and
Campbell 2009), or can become enactive and raise other
potentials (Campbell and Rosin 2011). Position (4) takes an
even stronger stance: that organic might be more environmentally sustainable than conventional agriculture. This
stance provides its own political justification (for a fuller
discussion see Campbell et al. 2009).
Viewing organic agriculture as a site of alternative
politics in agri-food theory creates a useful lens to see the
dual quality of agri-food scholarship as both a theoretical
and a political project. One political framing of ‘organic’
sits comfortably within the political binary that defines all
environmental politics as being subsidiary to anti-capitalist
politics. In clear contrast, however, other political frameworks articulate a strong desire to attain environmental
sustainability as our most compelling priority. Arguably,
the most dramatic transition in political justifications of
agri-food scholarship in the last 20 years lies between these
two poles—the anti-capitalist and the pro-environmental.
As other scholars have suggested, as a field of study, agrifood is no longer characterized as solely an anti-capitalist
project, and is now adjusting to the politics of the
Anthropocene (Larner 2011; Hill 2014). Now, we have
entered a time where the political valuations that guide
what we critique, research, and/or seek to avoid are not just
economic inequalities (no matter how dire). Now, we come
face-to-face with the wider threat of ecocide and planetary
death (Crutzen 2002; Steffen et al. 2007). To paraphrase
Keynes, now, we face a future in which, in the long run, we
all may not be fed.
Food security and alternative food networks
Arguably, the rise of Anthropocene politics in agri-food
scholarship is only partly the outcome of transitions in our
theoretical frameworks and explanations. Partly—also—it
emerges from the outcome of wider disruptions in political
certainties around global food security and food supply. As
food and oil prices tracked upwards in lock-step, the World
Food Crises of 2008 and of 2011–2013 not only reinforced
some of the material bases of human survival, but also
issued a profound challenge to the neoliberal certainty that
219
market liberalization—and the political aspirations of the
WTO and other agencies supporting free trade—would
provide a lasting solution to world hunger (Rosin et al.
2013; Wald and Hill 2016; Clendenning et al. 2016). We
are currently inhabiting a political moment when the
question of whether we can feed the world is more pressing
and immediate than it has been for many decades.
In this unsettling wider geo-political context, the world
of agri-food scholarship has increasingly found common
cause under the political banner of ‘food security’. Food
security links key concerns over development, globalization, and neoliberalisation with grounded concerns about
local food systems; environmental sustainability; alternative sources of food supply; governance; democracy; and
resilience (see Wald and Hill 2016; Clendenning et al.
2016).
Configurations of the Anthropocene present new political dynamics. For example, one challenge for rights-based
approaches is that they imply global governance arrangements—which seem increasingly unlikely in a world where
food crises and the collapse of global trade negotiations
make global-scale solutions less plausible. On the other
hand, global trade negotiations have unwittingly both fostered and given a forum for new political alliances from
‘below’: the BRICs countries, for instance, were initially a
collaboration of resistance to the Doha Round of trade
negotiations. Similarly, La Via Campesina emerged into
prominence around the World Food Summit of 1996 and
then protested at WTO meetings in 1999 and 2003. La Via
Campesina now operates as the largest voice in a wider
patchwork of food sovereignty movements (McMichael
2009; Wald and Hill 2016; Clendenning et al. 2016).
This, then, comprises the complex coupling of political
and theoretical work being attempted by this symposium.
Each article is more or less explicitly positioned on the
theoretical spectrum between orthodox and post-structural
political economy. Here, however, I also look to overview
each article in terms of its significant political and values
framing.
Three articles in this symposium openly position capitalism as a key matter of concern. Firstly, Dixon and
Richards (2016) reveal not so much the ‘local trap’ as the
‘urban trap’. Dixon and Reynolds (2016) use Food Regime
Theory (FRT) to structure their argument around influential
political economy-inspired ideas and to illuminate the
wider and more resonant configurations of country and city
in Australia (the utility of FRT also appears in Wald and
Hill (2016) and Clendenning et al. (2016)). This approach
incorporates echoes of Raymond Williams’ classic Marxist
voice in his influential book The Country and the City
(1975). Dixon and Richards (2016) seek to challenge the
implicit binary between rural (implying commodity-production, corporate agriculture, and the ‘politically bad’)
123
220
and urban (suggesting alternative consumers and networks,
sustainability concerns, and the ‘politically good’) that
hampers elaboration of food security policy in Australia.
Here, Dixon and Richards argue that—in contrast to the
ass...