Beginning with Foucault's writing on food provisioning in the mercantile period, this paper explores how a moral economy of hunger is gradually replaced by a political economy of food security that promotes market mechanisms as a better protection against scarcity. In Western Europe the emergence of political liberalism and laissez-faire economics substantially shaped how hunger and scarcity were conceptualised and socially managed. Beyond Europe these social forces were manifest in the development of colonial plantations. Here the transformation of non-capitalist social formations into market economies -what Harvey (2003) terms 'accumulation by dispossession' -was a foundational moment in the development of a global provisioning system that undermined the anti-scarcity strategies of some populations, while ensuring food security for others. The subsequent discovery of the 'Global South' hunger, together with the desire to encourage better habits and purer morals among 'backward' peoples, created the context in which further curative interventions, designed to consolidate a capitalist food economy, were valorised and maintained. These reflections set up the final part of the paper, where I contextualise recent efforts to present agro-biotechnologies as a prowelfare and anti-scarcity response. Moving beyond the causes of hunger to explore its strategic function, this analysis highlights how corporate agribusiness -in partnership with the life sciences -is attempting to recondition human, animal and bacterial life in order to quicken the reproduction of capital. I term this new moment in the commercialisation of food systems accumulation by molecularisation. The paper concludes by examining how the corporate management of food folds into biopolitical strategies for managing life, including the lives of the hungry poor who are 'let die' as commercial interests supplant human needs. key words biopower colonial agribusiness agro-biotechnology capitalism hunger historical geopolitics
While scholars of contemporary philanthropy have observed a concerted interest in the promotion of 'self-help,' little has been said about the political history of this investment and its significance in determining both domestic and international development priorities. We locate this modern conceptualisation of self-help in early twentieth-century philanthropic practice that sought to 'gift' to individuals and communities the precious habit of self-reliance and social autonomy. The Rockefeller Foundation promoted rural development projects that deliberately sought to 'emancipate' the tradition-bound peasant, transforming him or her into a productive, enterprising subject. We begin by documenting their early agricultural extension work, which attempted to spark agrarian change in the US South through the inculcation of modern habits and aspirations among farmers and their families. These agrarian schemes illustrate the newfound faith that 'rural up-lift' could only be sustained if farming communities were trained to 'help themselves' by investing physically and psychologically in the process of modernisation. We then locate subsequent attempts to incentivise and accelerate international agricultural development within the broader geopolitical imperatives of the Green Revolution and the Cold War. While US technical assistance undoubtedly sought to prevent political upheaval in the Third World, we argue that Rockefeller-led modernisation projects, based on insights gleaned from behavioural economics, championed a model of human capital -and the idea of 'revolution within' -in order to contain the threat of 'revolution without'. Approaching agricultural development through this problematisation of the farmer reveals the 'long history' of the Green Revolution -unfolding from the domestic to the international and from the late nineteenth century to the present -as well as the continuing role of philanthropy in forging a new global order. Dear PhilipPlease find our freshly revised paper! It may help to briefly outline the main changes we have made to the MS:1. We have removed the concluding paragraph that summarised the paper's findings and which you felt (and we agree) was largely superfluous. 2. We have added a small amount of text to the abstract, the 'cultivating global citizens' section and the conclusion -basically the sections where you felt additions might be happily made -to ensure that the theme of internationalism is explicit. 3. We have removed several citations from the bibliography -sources that were not directly cited in the text -in an effort to reduce the word count further (against that we now include a reference to Mono Domosh's paper). 4. As requested we now indicate roughly where the images should be placed and provide appropriate captions for each one.We hope you approve the revisions we've made, but do please get in touch if you have any further concerns.
This paper has a two-part structure. The first part of the paper explores contemporary land grabs and shows how they both reflect and constitute a new neoliberal governance structure over land and land-based resources. In this sense, what is noteworthy about land grabs is their world-making capacity: the deals structure and make possible new relations of power in the global food economy. For this very reason, it is crucial to understand how land grabs affect both the pace and direction of agrarian change. The second part of the paper examines the discursive strategies that align 'food security' concerns with land-grabbing practices. Here I suggest that 'food security' supplies a moral sanction for land grabs. By mustering public empathy around a desire to 'feed the future', food security discourse -to borrow an idea from Fassin (2012) -converts a relationship of dominance (the governance of precarious lives) into a relationship of assistance (the provision of a remedy).
This third and final ‘Geographies of food’ review is based on an online blog conversation provoked by the first and second reviews in the series (Cook et al., 2006; 2008a). Authors of the work featured in these reviews — plus others whose work was not but should have been featured — were invited to respond to them, to talk about their own and other people’s work, and to enter into conversations about — and in the process review — other/new work within and beyond what could be called ‘food geographies’. These conversations were coded, edited, arranged, discussed and rearranged to produce a fragmentary, multi-authored text aiming to convey the rich and multi-stranded content, breadth and character of ongoing food studies research within and beyond geography.
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