Sustainable Food Systems by Robert Biel

Author:Robert Biel
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: National Book Network International
Published: 2016-04-13T04:00:00+00:00

Once agricultural trade was globalised, this took to a whole new level the possibilities for controlling systems by homogenising them.

The effect was notably to promote an absurd expectation that there should be no seasonality in what we consume and that every crop must be available throughout the year. To take the case of asparagus, this can be grown perfectly well in England (as the author does), but only for six weeks per year, which is fine because that makes it special and there is a sense of expectation. Under globalisation, it is imported from Peru. Asparagus makes significant demands on water so, if there was any genuine comparative advantage, it would be from a country with plentiful water, but Peru is actually water-poor compared to the UK (Castanas, 2014). The legitimate aspiration is for people to have plenty of good-quality food every day; the insane aspiration is to have strawberries or asparagus 365 days a year. Yet the latter is what forms the basis of the flagship advertising campaign of the Tesco supermarket chain in Britain, with the slogan ‘freshly clicked’ (illustrated with graphics of asparagus and strawberries): you need only click your touchpad and they source the goods globally. The consumer has no connection with, or responsibility for, how this happens.

Homogenised systems are good for exploitation but bad for sustainability. Even now, neo-liberal economists shamelessly promote ‘free trade’ in food as a security against climate-induced scarcity (for example, Purdue University, 2016). The reality, however, is the opposite: any setup which is homogenised, de-localised and non-modular is vulnerable to shocks and system collapse; there is no security for any country, community, or city which depends on such a setup. Such a critique helps take our grasp of dependency beyond the point reached by the Dependency school: we now see it in terms of systemic vulnerabilities.

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