the food system in crisis - social movements, food insecurity and bio-politics
DESCRIPTION
- The political ecology of understanding the creation of the international order! - Social movements and the challenge to existing orders! - Linking the body and spaces of resistanceTRANSCRIPT
International Security, Crime, Terrorism & Conflict
The Food System in Crisis - social movements, food in-security and bio-politics
Dr Matt Reed
– David Kilcullen !
- “Out of the Mountains: The coming age of the urban guerilla” 2013
“Just as living things require inputs..so do cities. That is cities cannot exist without those inputs - urbanites require clean air, water, food, fuel and
construction goods to subsist …” pg.41
Outline- The political ecology of understanding the creation of the international order!- Social movements and the challenge to existing orders!- Linking the body and spaces of resistance
Key terms - political ecology, climate, food security, food system, social movement theory, ordering, bio-politics!Key thinkers - Davis, Castells, Foucault
Food Security - Increasing public policy concern
❖ Projections of shortage - climate change, limits of physical inputs (peak oil, water etc)!
❖ Global demographic changes (young, southern)!
❖ Urban-rural transition (urban, littoral, unplanned)!
❖ Dietary transition (plants to meat)!
❖ Changes to international order (rise of China, US hegemony)
ENSO
- ENSO - El Nino - Southern Oscillation!
- Global climatic change, irregular!
- shown as nations but regions effected!
- changes to heat/rain fall patterns
flows across pacific!
reversed
Shifts in weather patterns
impacts on monsoon
ENSO impacts
❖ Droughts in Australia, China, India and Southern Africa !
❖ Profound impact on agricultural production, particularly cereals (wheat, corn, rice) but also pastoral production systems!
❖ These are traded as commodities globally
Making of the 3rd world❖ Davis argues that severe ENSO cycles in late 19th C allowed
imperial expansion, intersection of imperialist militarism, global market and climate!
❖ India, China - people often had higher standards of living and were centres of industrial production - “Even outcaste agricultural labourers in Madras earned more in real terms than English farm labourers” p.55!
❖ Whole of free trade system held up funds from Asian trade ‘the starving Indian and Chinese peasantries were wheeled in as unlikely saviours’ p58
Mike Davis, - Late Victorian Holocausts/The Origin of the Third World
“Nineteenth-century peasant producers in India and China - and, to a lesser extent, in Brazil and southern Africa - existed increasingly in the late
Victorian world market but not of it.” p54
“Between 1875-1900 - a period that included the worst famines in Indian history - annual grain
exports increased from 3 to 10 million tons; as Dutt pointed out, this quantity equaled the annual
nutrition of 25 million people.” p59
19th Century China
- Massive ethnic violence and revolts!- Imperial government forced to abandon mechanisms protecting against ENSO induced famines!- ‘Britain’s dominant role in Chinese foreign trade, built by Victorian nacrotrafficantes with gunboats, thus leveraged the whole free trade imperium’ Davis p.60
HEILONGJIANG
HARBIN
CHANGCHUNJILIN
SHENYANGLIAONING
SHANDONGJINAN
JIANGSU
SHANGHAISHANGHAI
HANGZHOU
ZHEJIANG
SHIJIAZHUANG
TIANJINTIANJIN
ÜRÜMQI
XINJIANG
TIBET (XIZANG)
LHASA
QINGHAI
XINING
GANSU
INNER MONGOLIA
HOHHOT
NINGXIASHANXI
HEBEI
BEIJINGBEIJING
GUANGZHOUHONG KONGHONG KONG
MACAU
SICHUAN
CHENGDU
YUNNAN
KUNMING
HAINAN
GUANGXI
NANNING
LANZHOU
NANJING
CHONGQING HUBEIANHUI
HEFEIZHENGZHOU
HENAN
YINCHUAN
XI’AN
SHAANXI
TAIYUAN
FUJIAN
FUZHOU
GUANGDONG
HAIKOU
HUNAN
CHANGSHANANCHANGJIANGXIGUIZHOU
GUIYANG
CHONGQING WUHAN
Contemporary China, and place names
The British Raj 19th Century
“If the history of British rule in were to be condensed in a single fact, it is this; there was no increase in India’s per capita income from 1757 to 1947. There was no economic development in the usual sense of the term.” Davis p.63!!- Commercialisation of agriculture - wheat, cotton, opium, indigo led to impoverishment and starvation.!!- Raj choked off the development of peasant agriculture into capitalist agriculture.
SRINAGAR
JAMMU & KASHMIR
JAMMUHIMACHAL PRADESHSHIMLAPUNJAB
CHANDIGARH
DELHI
HARYANA
RAJASTHAN
JAIPUR
GUJARAT
GANDHINAGAR
UTTARAKHANDDEHRADUN
UTTAR PRADESH
LUCKNOW
MADHYA PRADESH
BHOPAL
MAHARASHTRAMUMBAI
SILVASSADAMAN
DADRA & NAGAR HAVELI
ANDHRA PRADESH
HYDERABAD
KARNATAKA
BANGALORE
GOAPANAJI
KERALA
THIRUVANANTHAPURAM
TAMIL NADU
PONDICHERRY
CHENNAI
BHUBANESWAR(ODISHA) ORISSA
CHHATTISGARH
RAIPUR
BIHAR
PATNA
JHARKHANDRANCHI
WEST BENGALKOLKATA
SIKKIM
GANGTOK ASSAM DISPUR
ARUNACHAL PRADESH
ITANAGA
NAGALANDKOHIMAIMPHAL
MANIPURAIZAWLMIZORAMTRIPURA
AGARTALA
SHILLONGMEGHALAYA
British India - Pakistan, India, Bangladesh, Burma
Why all this talk of the 19th C?
❖ Importance of:!
❖ Agricultural commodities - food (wheat, tea, coffee), drugs (opium) & industrial inputs (indigo)!
❖ Global trade and international order!
❖ Consequences of financialization of commodities for poorer people!
❖ Intersection of climatic variation and social systems.
http://www.hbo.com/documentaries/in-tahrir-square-18-days-of-egypts-unfinished-revolution
Global/Arab Spring 2010 -
❖ Food price spikes after ENSO events - draught/floods - increased financialization/speculation of food commodities!
❖ US and Europe bio-fuels - food = fuel!
❖ Urbanised populations very reliant on often subsidised food products.!
❖ Then it all kicked off! [http://youtu.be/bu9YBJ_wp3I]
Social movement definitions❖ Shared Identity!
❖ may transcend class/gender/ethnicity!
❖ Informal networks!
❖ not one single organisation
❖ Solidarity!
❖ support one another!
❖ Unconventional protests
Protest
❖ Transcending ‘normal’ politics!
❖ Bearing witness - sincerity and sacrifice!
❖ Numbers - mass protests!
❖ Symbolic acts - images!
❖ Cultural protest - tailored to the governance system!
❖ Control of (urban) space
Hybrid urban spaces❖ Castells!
❖ "In our society, the public space of the social movement is constructed as a hybrid space between the Internet social networks and the occupied urban space: connecting cyberspace and urban space in relentless interaction, constituting, technologically and culturally, instant communities of transformative practice.' p 11!
❖ Co-ordination across time/space !
❖ Increase speed of communication and experimentation !
❖ Diffusion and availability
Protest movements 2008 - 2014
- Arab spring (Tunisia, Egypt, Syria, Morocco, Turkey, Yemen, Bahrain) + protest in Iran!
- Occupy movement (US, UK …..)!
- Indignadas (Spain) + Greek & Italian protests!
- Brazilian protests
- Riots in the UK, Sweden and China! - On-going protests in Thailand!- Suppressed peaceful Sunni protests in Iraq
Stuffed & Starved❖ A focus of governance on the body !
❖ The starved - those without food or insecure!
❖ threat of insurrection!❖ The stuffed - those who’s bodies
are over fed!❖ threat of illness and drain !
❖ Regulation of the body - medical interventions!
❖ Also national security - competition between nations - eclipse of liberal order?
–Michel Foucault (1998:375)
“The body and everything that touches it: diet, climate, and soil – is the domain of the Herkunft: “The body manifests the stigmata of past experience and also gives rise to desires, failings and errors” (Foucault 1998:375)!
Herkunft - descent - as discussed by Nietzche
Future thoughts❖ The nexus of the global commodity chain written on the
body !
❖ Security in this context multifaceted - national, familial, personal….!
❖ Food system vital in a wider political ecology !
❖ Borders of the licit/illicit commodities - central role of drugs!
❖ Opportunities not just for repression but revolt