Global Food Systems

1
Global Food Systems

• Intro
• Integration Empire
• Food in the Colonial World Economy
• The Three-World Order, 1940-75
• The Postwar Food System, 1940-75

2
Integration of the World Economy

• After 1850
• Into Europe (US, Japan)
• Raw materials
• Labour
• Out of Europe (US, Japan)
• Manufactured goods
• Chop Suey and Spaghetti Meatballs

3
Food in the Colonial World Economy

• International food order emerged as early as
  1870
• British capital, Chinese labour, German goods

4
Wheat

• Exports
• 6X increase
• 1873-74 to 1924-29 -- 130.5 to 747.9 million
  bushels
• Production
• 1885-89 to 1929-34 2.4 to 4.5 billion bushels
• Wheat the new agrarian class in settler areas

5
Sugar

• Spread of production
• 1830 -- 572,000 tons
• 1890 -- 6 million tons
• Canada Sugar Refining Co., 1854 (Redpath)
• Vancouver-Fiji Sugar Co., 1905-1920

6
Apples

• Living organisms
• Nova Scotia
• 1 million bushels p.a. up to 1890 to UK
• 4.5 million p.a., 1918-23
• Industrializing rationalizing apple production
  and shipping

7
An Imperial Food System

• there has been a revolution in your food
• Empire as a garden, single agro-ecological space

8
Empire as Food System
9
The Three World Order, 1940-1975

• End of the Pre-war (Euro-centric, colonial)
  system
• Great Depression
• World War II
• Decolonization
• Cold War
• The Bretton-Woods order
• 1st, 2nd 3rd Worlds

10
The Postwar Food System

• Grain Surpluses
• Food Aid
• Cheap food in 3rd world
• Substitution
• Integration

11
Substitution

• From food science
• Sugar
• High fructose corn syrup
• Beet sugar
• Oils
• Soya Oil (from soybeans)

12
Integration

• Livestock
• Feed Soybeans maize
• linking field crops with intensive, scientific
  animal production, through giant agri-food
  corporations, across many national boundaries.
• Grain
• Continental Cargill (American)
• Unilever (Anglo-Dutch)
• Bunge and Born (Argentinian)

13
The World System Characterized

• Distance and durability
• Commodification
• Intersecting food chains
• State supports
• Homogenization of agriculture diets
• Increasing disconnection from the land

14
Questions

• What is the fixed stomach?
• What was appealing about processed foods?
• What was appealing about the supermarket?
• Is the development of the organics industry an
  example of the fixed stomach in action?