The Fight Over Food: Producers, Consumers, and Activists Challenge the Global Food System

10. Consumers and Citizens in the Global Agrifood System: The Cases of New Zealand and South Africa in the Global Red Meat Chain

With the rapid growth in studies of globalization and mass culture (e.g., Ritzer ), social studies of agriculture and food, or agrifood studies, have begun to examine social relations and practices surrounding agricultural production and food consumption in the context of rapid capital concentration in the global agrifood industry (e.g., Bonanno et al. ; Goodman and Watts ; McMichael ).Within the global agrifood system, however ,there are tremendous variations in the ways in which actors,from farm to dinner table, are linked together. This is because biochemical and ecological characteristics of food items often, though not always, define where, when, and how these items can be grown, processed, and distributed (for example, wheat versus tomatoes). Therefore, many agrifood scholars (e.g., Bonanno and Constance ;Busch et al.;Dixon ;Friedland , ; Heffernan ) use commodity chain analysis as a means of conducting research on different agrifood products. By following a given food item from farm to dinner table, these scholars examine how the organizations that produce, circulate, and regulate a given commodity are arranged in society. With few exceptions (e.g., Dixon ; Long and Villarreal ), however ,many commodity chain studies tend to privilege economic relationships more than any other type of social relationship, and therefore producers and consumers are conceptualized as merely economic categories (Krippner ). Very little effort has been made in the literature to question the 10 consumers and citizens in the global agrifood system: the cases of new zealand and south africa in the global red meat chain Keiko Tanaka and Elizabeth Ransom The case study of New Zealand was funded by a Faculty Research Grant from the University of Canterbury; the case study of South Africa was funded by a Doctoral Dissertation Improvement Grant from the National Science Foundation. The authors thank Wynne Wright, Gerad Middendorf , Carmen Bain, and anonymous reviewers for valuable comments on previous drafts. conceptualization of the categories producers and consumers, what classifies them into these categories, and who constructs these categories. We argue that in the highly globalized agrifood system, the categories of producers and consumers are elusive because very few countries in the world are fully self-sufficient in food production.Even if self-sufficient,most countries ,including the United States,rely on imports to ensure the availability of a wide range of food products year round (e.g., coffee and bananas for U.S. consumers). Moreover, farmers and food companies in some countries may rely on consumers overseas more than on consumers in their own countries for their livelihood.To understand how the global agrifood system operates, it is therefore important for us to ask, who produces our food? Who are the consumers of the foods that “our” farmers and food companies produce? This chapter aims to show that the process of changing rules within the capitalist market system, specifically meat safety governance reform in New Zealand and South Africa, raises profound obstacles for human agency, yet opens new spaces for conceptualizing who participates in promoting change. Agency and structure are complex concepts with dueling tensions that alter the form and substance (as Wright and Middendorf argue in their Introduction to this volume) of individual and collective action in the red meat commodity chains of these two countries. We show that, far from being monolithic, the ways in which capitalism and a changing agrifood structure affect actors in a commodity chain, and the ways in which these actors respond , vary across time and space.We hope to make clear the ways in which structures affect agency,but we also aim to show how structural changes open new opportunities for agency. The definition of agency presented in other chapters in this volume— the active reflexive choice of individuals or collectivities—requires researchers to differentiate between intended and unintended,conscious and unconscious actions. We conceptualize agency slightly differently, so as to allow a focus on actions and the consequences of acts. We argue that the emphasis of empirical investigation needs to be shifted from intentions and motivations to tools and mechanisms that facilitate actors’ ability to act. In other words,such individual capacities need to be situated in a web of relationships that constrain or enable action. This kind of analysis exposes how various types of food networks (e.g.,export-dependent versus domestic commercial networks) in a given commodity chain collide and converge—creating new allies and conflicts and simultaneously redefining the role of each actor in both local and global agrifood markets. In this chapter, there are three interrelated but distinct types of food 248...