The biopolitics of food provisioning

Abstract

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

Towards a Synthesized Critique of Neoliberal Biodiversity Conservation

“…We follow Foucault in understanding neoliberal ideology to be accompanied by and made manifest through distinct governmentalities (techniques and technologies for managing people and nature) and embodied practices in social, material, and epistemological realms. Combined, these work as biopower to construct and regulate life and lives in significant ways (Nally 2011). We commence with the assertion that there has been a conflation of what is generally (and simplistically) referred to in conservation discourses as economics with the ideological assumptions of neoliberalism.…”

Food security framings within the UK and the integration of local food systems

“…Earlier definitional work by Maxwell (1996, p. 155) suggested that thinking about food security had shifted from the global and the national to the household and the individual; yet, much of the current emphasis on food security counters this shift and is global in perspective, as noted in commentaries which explain the origins and dynamics of the global food crisis (Jarosz, 2009;Lawrence et al, 2010;McDonald, 2010;McMichael, 2009). In a reading of World Bank and the United Nations Food and Agriculture Organization policy texts on food security, Jarosz (2011 see also Nally, 2011) argues that scaled definitions of food security have been used to serve neoliberal ideology, which more recently includes linking individuals to global modalities of governance that emphasise the instrumentality of agricultural productivity in development strategies.…”

Building anunjust foodscape: shifting governance regimes, urban place making and the making of Chinese food as ordinary in Hong Kong

“…But racialization within cities is more than just containment. Newman (2005) argues that social groups (both dominant and subordinate) are the objects of governance through the institution of boundaries and borders; of categories, rules, and procedures that define and organise populations as racialized, most often to align with creating economic advantage for one group over all others (see also Nally 2011). Consequently racialized (and classed) constructions extend through the city via its systems.…”

“…Distinct populations are made through the ways in which they are made visible in space, given access to space and given the authority to control that space via institutions that serve the interests of capital (Nally 2011). Mori argues (2008Mori argues ( :1467 biopower is also "deeply involved in capitalism, particularly because biopolitics regards the human body as a population, regulating it for capital accumulation and redistributing it into proper spaces."…”