Читать книгу Food - Jennifer Clapp - Страница 20

The dominant actors within the current world food economy are aware of some of its shortcomings. Their approach has been to move it forward on more or less the same trajectory that guided it in the past, but with better management to avoid its most obvious pitfalls. But others are less convinced about the merits of the current organization of the world food economy, and are seeking more radical systemic change. Growing awareness of the multiple crises associated with the global food system has fostered a number of movements that seek to resist or fundamentally transform it by reclaiming or reforming governance activity in the “middle spaces” of the world food economy.

In the 1980s–1990s, a number of organizations began to promote the idea of “fair trade” in food and agriculture. An expanding network of fair trade organizations seeks to establish alternative agrifood supply chains that cut out the large TNCs from the middle arena of the world food economy so that the farmers are paid a fair price for their product. These alternative supply chains link farmer cooperatives in developing countries more directly to consumers in rich industrialized countries, reducing the mental distance between producers and consumers, and increasing compensation to farmers.

At a broader level, the idea of “food sovereignty” emerged in the 1990s. Reacting against the imbalanced deal that resulted from the inclusion of agriculture in the WTO, peasant groups in the developing world sought to resist, rather than work within, the current world food economy. Groups such as La Via Campesina, a transnational peasant movement, first articulated food sovereignty as the right of peasant and indigenous communities to determine their own agricultural and food path separately from the global food trading system. This global South movement has dovetailed with movements in the global North that have sought to promote local and indigenous food systems. These relocalization efforts in both the North and South aim to build social and ecological resilience into food systems by stressing the need to develop more sustainable and self-reliant food systems as an alternative to a singular, international trade-reliant global system.

Others have sought to transform the world food economy by forcing improvements to the rules and institutions that govern the food system at the global level. These global food justice advocates have actively campaigned at the international level to bring in strong and legally enforceable global rules to control financialization, to rebalance international trade rules, and to put more stringent global regulations on agrifood TNCs. Whether or not these various initiatives will be successful – some working more squarely within the current system and some working explicitly against the current system – remains to be seen.