Understanding and Governing the Global Food System

"When it comes to food," suggests Robert Paarlberg in the preface to his book Food Politics, "everybody is interested" (p. xv). This interest makes sense as a brute function of biology. At the same time food is a basic feature of cultural, economic, and political life. Yet despite food's obvious importance, it has for long stretches been an object of only marginal interest to the social sciences. Food is mundane and of the body—hardly the stuff to excite disciplines concerned principally with things exotic and of the mind. In the last few years, however, as the four excellent and distinctive books examined here attest, food studies, and the politics of food in particular, have become increasingly fashionable areas for scholarly investigation. This development is welcome, even though many of the factors driving this growing interest, from soaring rates of chronic hunger to environmental harm associated with dominant modes of agricultural production, are not themselves any cause for celebration.

Each of the books discussed in this essay sheds important light on crucial food-related concerns, and, more importantly, has things to say about what might be done to address them. They do so through engagement with quite different subject matters. There are nevertheless some major themes that connect these books. The first has to do with governance, in its broadest sense. In a range of ways and with differing conclusions, each of these books asks, why does the global food system look the way that it does? Which actors have power within this system, and what forms does this power take? How is this power wielded, and to what ends? The second theme has to do with the likely shape of the food system(s) of the future. This concern has both empirical and normative dimensions, and is apparent in these books through their engagement with high-profile and hotly contested public debates about such issues as food safety, global trade, corporate power, and genetic modification. What will it take, in the days ahead, to provide plentiful quantities of healthful food for all people, in ways both sustainable and just?

In discussing governance, it makes sense to begin with Paarlberg's book, since as a matter of form and content it is quite distinct from the other three books examined here. Paarlberg's volume is a broad introduction to key concepts and debates within global food politics, written principally for an undergraduate audience. The book opens with a couple of definitional chapters, and then offers short meditations on a series of contemporary food concerns: high food prices, hunger and famine, food aid, and obesity, among others. Each of these thematic chapters is itself approached by way of a series of leading questions. In the chapter on "The Politics of Farm Subsidies and Trade," for instance, Paarlberg offers crisp answers to such questions as, "Do farmers in rich countries need subsidies to survive?" (p. 97) and "Did NAFTA hurt poor corn farmers in Mexico?" (p. 108). (He answers "no," by the way, on both counts).

The book's final chapter, on governance of the world food system, devotes a few pages each to describing key international political and scientific organizations, international NGOs, and private foundations. The bulk of the chapter, though, is given over to an analysis of the role of states. Paarlberg's basic message here is that most of the action within the international food system happens not between but within nations. Most countries, he points out, import and export a relatively small proportion of their food, and agricultural production relies on land, water, and other assets that themselves tend to be under the ultimate control of...