Food regimes and their transformation
Harriet Friedmann
In her first half-hour talk, Harriet Friedmann looks at food system transformation from the perspective of food regimes. She developed this perspective with Philip McMichael at Cornell University. They drew on French historiography, which looks at long time lines (long duree), and on US work on World System Theory, especially as exemplified in the work of Giovanni Arrighi, author of The Long Twentieth Century: Money, Power, and the Origins of Our Times, in looking at how the state system and world economy developed through long cycles since its origin 500 years ago, through colonial empires and international trade.
Relations among states in each cycle form a unique state system which organises that global market. This system of states goes through important transitions, in which the dominant states in power change and power alignments shift. The other important influence on this work on regimes is the French idea of filieres – long chains – from farm to table and the systems of transformation – processing, distribution, storage.
Food regime analysis follows these material chains to track state power, capital investment, class formation, and regional specialization constituting historical agro-economic systems. In this talk, Harriet first defines food regimes and their transitions, then discusses them since since the mid 19th century, and the current contradictions that may lead to a new regime. Below she adds an update since she made the talk.*
Please respond to a 60 sec survey after listening
The running order for the podcast is as follows:
Introduction: 0 to 47 seconds
Definitions: 47 sec to 2 min 19 sec
Settler colonial food regime develops: 2' 19" - 8' 27"
Interrupted by war, ended by economic collapse: 8' 27" - 13' 25"
The mercantile-industrial food regime, 1947-73: 13' 25" - 22' 16"
Into crisis in 1973, and still there?: 22' 16" - 26' 09"
Discovery: Production is not enough for health or sustainability: 26' 09" - 30' 00"
Reorganising the world, diets and supply chains: 30' 00" - end (33' 43")
(Published 2014, Bio, further reading etc updated June 2022)
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*I would now add plantations and extractive political-economic systems, which deepen the history of food regimes to the origins of the capitalist world-economy/world-ecology since 1500, and foreground captive labour systems prior to and continuous with settler farms; both displaced and simplified peoples and the landscapes they co-created with other animals and plants and the soils, waters and climates, and continue to do so.
Food regimes emphasises cycles, but these cycles move within a larger continuity since colonial integration of all earthly places began around 1500. One important contribution has been to understand the plantation as a key institution of the past 500 years, one based on simplification of longstanding biocultural landscapes by colonial transplantation of plants, animals, and differentially cultured people to labour in large estates producing single commodities for distant eaters.
Friedmann, Harriet, Distance and Durability: Shaky Foundations of the World Food Economy, Third World Quarterly, Vol. 13, No. 2, 1992 pp. 37-83.
Friedmann, Harriet, “What on Earth is the Modern World-System? Foodgetting and Territory in the Modern Era and Beyond,” Journal of World-Systems Research (online). Vol. VI. Summer/Fall 2000. Special double issue edited by Giovanni Arrighi and Walter L. Goldfrank, in honour of Immanuel Wallerstein.
Friedmann, Harriet, “International Political Economy of Food: A Global Crisis,” New Left Review no. 197, Jan./Feb. 1993, pp. 29-57.
Bayliss-Smith, Tim, The Ecology of Agricultural Systems. Cambridge University Press, 1982.
Cronon, William, Nature’s Metropolis: Chicago and the Great West. NY: W.W.Norton, 1991.
Hawkes, Corinna, et.al. Globalization, Food, and Nutrition Transitions, 2007. http://www.who.int/social_determinants/resources/gkn_hawkes.pdf
Hans Herren, Benedikt Haerlin, and IAASTD+10 Advisory Group, Transformation of Our Food Systems: The Making of a Paradigm Shift. Available online https://www.globalagriculture.org/transformation-of-our-food-systems.html
Fred Magdoff, Twenty-First-Century Land Grabs: Accumulation by Agricultural Dispossession, Monthly Review, 65:6, 2013.
McMichael, Philip. Development and Social Change: A Global Perspective (7th ed.). Sage, 2021.
Jason Moore, Capitalism in the Web of Life, 2015, Verso
Tony Weis, The Ecological Hoofprint: The Global Burden of Industrial Livestock, Zed Books, 2013.
Winders, Bill, The Politics of Food Supply: U.S. Agricultural Policy in the World Economy. New Haven CT: Yale University Press, 2009.
Worster, Donald. Dust Bowl : the southern plains in the 1930s, New York : Oxford University Press, 2004 [1979].
Tania Li and Pujo Semedi, Plantation Life: Corporate Occupation in Indonesia's Oil Palm Zone. Duke University Press, 2021. (1)
Max Haiven, Palm Oil: The Grease of Empire. Pluto Press, 2022. (2)
Sven Beckert, Empire of cotton : a global history. New York : Vintage Books, 2015. And Sidney Mintz, Sweetness and power : the place of sugar in modern history New York : Viking, 1985 (3)
Wendy Wolford, (2021) The Plantationocene: A Lusotropical Contribution to the Theory, Annals of the American Association of Geographers, 111:6, 1622-1639, DOI: 10.1080/24694452.2020.1850231. (4)
(1) Oil palm is the most recent expansion of plantation forms of production. It in inherits the legacies of racialized systems based on clearing biocultural landscapes of existing people, plants, animals, and all their intricate relationships with simplified introduced labour, plants and animals, which began with colonial genocide of indigenous peoples and simplification of the landscapes they managed, replaced by alien plants, mainly sugar, and labour by captured and transported Africans. Yet it exists very much in the present, and can be studied in the intricate relationships of power that create profit and misery despite false claims of superiority. Based on historical and ethnographic research among oil palm plantation workers in Malaysia, the authors show how the language of productivity, efficiency, and the like continue to justify plantations despite evidence of their destruction of lives, livelihoods, and ecosystems and their reliance on naked power to generate profits.
(2) An historically grounded, artistic and imaginative approach to the way that this newest plantation crop has infiltrated every nook and cranny of production, consumption, and daily life of people who buy and use everything from processed foods and cosmetics to computers. The author tracks colonial transplantation of oil palm from West Africa --- where it was (and is) used for nourishment, ritual, and more in cultures and landscapes --- to Asia and beyond, where it displaces cultures and agronomies of great diversity and complexity. Transplantation and organization into plantations rather than mixed farms profoundly altered use of palm oil. Refined oil palm in global commerce now plays a pervasive, mostly invisible role in many industrial systems.
(3) Mintz is a classic of holistic historical analysis, linking regions, social classes, production systems, and consumption of a plant that changed the world through its organization into plantations, which in turn were the laboratories of industrial labour organization. Beckert does a comparably admirable analysis of cotton. While not a food, it becomes relevant once plantations are understood as central to food regimes. It widens the lens to include industrial products as well, so links beautifully with palm oil organized into massive plantations two centuries later.
(4) The social science debates over the idea of Anthropocene have led to important additions to understanding food at the centre of human history and to the emergence of food regimes with colonial conquest of territories and integration of the world. Jason Moore has suggested “capitalocene” as a name for the specific ways that capitalist world-ecology has simplified the world since 1500. A more direct focus on agricultural systems and land use has been the name “plantationcene.” Wolford did not introduce the term, but develops it within a world-system framework.
Links
UN Special Rapporteur on the Right to Food
International Assessment of Agricultural Knowledge, Science and Technology for Development, report available here
FoodFirst: Institute for Food and Development Policy
Global Alliance for the Future of Food
The Institute for Agriculture and Trade Policy
IPES Food: International Panel of Experts on Food Systems
Regreening the desert, John D Liu
Harriet Friedmann, food systems analyst, author, and speaker, is Professor Emerita of Sociology, Geography and Planning at the University of Toronto, based at the Munk School of Global Affairs and Public Policy. She taught in the Munk School and Departments of Sociology and Geography and Planning.
She participates in international research and policy on food and agriculture, including visiting teaching with Institute of Social Studies (Erasmus University) in The Hague, and research with CIRAD (Centre International en Recherche Agronomique pour le Developpement) in Montpellier, CPDA (Federal University of Brazil) in Rio de Janeiro, Université Aix-Marseille, Institute of Political Economy, Carleton University (Ottawa), Peter Wall Institute of Advanced Study (University of British Columbia). She was Review Editor of the chapter on investment of the UBN-led International Assessment of Agricultural Knowledge, Science, and Technology for Development (IAASTD) and the advisory committee of the 10-year anniversary volume. She serves on several editorial boards of journals related to food and agriculture and to the world system.
As longstanding member and former chair of the Toronto Food Policy Council, and the advisory board of the UNESCO Chair on Food, Biodiversity and Sustainability, she has been connected with many pioneers linking civil society and municipal governments in comprehensive food strategy. She has published on many dimensions of agriculture and food, including family farms, corporate strategies in the food sector, food policies, changing patterns of diet and consumption, and social movements to change the food system, focusing on trans-scalar dynamics. She was awarded the 2011 Lifetime Achievement award by the Canadian Association of Food Studies.
Her work now focuses on political ecology of food, including ways of knowing and relating to Earth.
Follow-up
If you want to arrange for follow-up discussions for a class with Harriet Freidmann via the internet – over Skype or some other service - please contact her.
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