13.

​Situating the ‘Retailing Revolution’

Philip McMichael and Harriet Friedmann

INTRODUCTION

The ‘important issue at stake’ in the new power of retail corporations, write
editors David Burch and Geoffrey Lawrence, is ‘the nature of agri-food
transformation’. Yet, although the fact of greater power is evident – with the
retail sector having ‘moved beyond its traditional responsibility for food
distribution, and…now strongly influencing patterns of production and
consumption’ (see Chapter 1) – its implications are not. What happens if we
widen our perspectives to inquire into the broader patterns of production and
consumption, and more deeply of class restructuring, changes in land use, and the
shifting of cultures on a global scale? Would supermarkets hold their fascinating
place at the centre of a possible new food regime, serving ready meals (and fresh
produce) to captivated customers? How would conflicts between supermarkets
and relatively privileged consumers appear on a wider canvas of global
transformations in ‘supply chains’ and associated changes in work, labour
markets, land use, technologies, and inter-firm relations (complicated by the rise
of private equity firms)? Would power dynamics within the retailing sector
among supermarkets, food brand manufacturers, suppliers of prepared foods to
supermarkets, and food service providers, remain at the centre? What might this
mean in world-historical terms?
This volume identifies an institution operating on an unprecedented scale, and
its chapters examine that institution from many angles, but mostly from the
perspective of consumers in the global North. Our task in this concluding chapter
is to widen the perspective: revisiting old questions about production, specifically
land and labour (now globally integrated in new ways and for virtually every
place), and including new questions about ecology and health, which were hardly
noticed in relation to agriculture and food until the last twenty years. In short,
while supermarkets may be in the driver’s seat, there is reason to doubt they can,
alone, be the vehicle of something as comprehensive and enduring as a new food
regime.
We relate the ‘supermarket revolution’ to food regimes not because we wish to
identify a new food regime, but to emphasise that retailers depend on
(transforming) a broader set of geo-political, economic and ecological relations.
Given the unpredictability of rapid change in the world, and its food system, our
goal here is to refocus food regime analysis itself – away from distinguishing one
regime from another, and towards a methodology for interpreting transitions.
These have so far been as enduring as regimes themselves, and far more
confusing, but we hope to clarify distinct possibilities latent in periods of
transition. A number of chapters (those of Lyons, Lang and Barling, Campbell
and Le Heron, and Hughes) attest to conflicts over ‘dominant’ and ‘alternative’
food systems, including both values and practices. These focus on struggles over
appropriation of social movement initiatives by supermarkets, as they acquire
power and re-constitute value. To interpret transition, we distinguish between
food systems, including both values and practices. These focus on struggles over
appropriation of social movement initiatives by supermarkets, as they acquire
power and re-constitute value. To interpret transition, we distinguish between
changes that destroy old patterns and those that experiment with new patterns in
the interstices of existing institutions and relationships. Without assuming that
these can be clearly demarcated (Morgan, Marsden and Murdoch 2006), the
distinction between destruction of the old, and emergence of elements of
something new, helps to interpret supermarket practices in relation to larger
changes in inter-state power and the international division of labour.
Transnational reorganisation of commodity chains involves complex changes
in class relations and land use throughout the food system – what Burch and
Lawrence associate with ‘the overall governance of the agri-food supply chain’ –
and new forms of conflict. Underway is what Araghi (2000) calls the ‘great
global enclosure,’ as millions of smallholders are displaced by an intensifying
circulation of food, whether dumped in Southern markets or produced for affluent
consumers at home or abroad. Conflicts over reorganisation of land and labour
for export monocultures in the global South now play out in many geographical
and cultural settings, and are increasingly linked across national borders.
Complementing the priority given to the relations and technologies of
consumption in the volume as a whole, we broaden the focus to shifts in
production relations and technologies throughout the new retailer-driven
commodity chains, traced back to the agricultural sources of food plants and
animals. We also situate supermarketisation in changing patterns of international
trade and transnational corporate contracts, which draw specific lands and
peoples into, and exclude others from, shifting supply networks.
The global enclosure produces what Davis (2006) terms the ‘planet of slums,’
a powerful counterpoint to the supermarket culture. The post-Second World War
food regime was egalitarian in intent, incorporating labour into a food
consumption culture in the First World and Third World urban centres in the
name of the social wage and development. It provided meat at lower prices to
more eaters than ever before imagined, along with the new durable foods stocked
by supermarkets – from orange juice concentrate to breakfast cereals and frozen
dinners. The current food system divides and differentiates. It divides through
exclusionary processes associated with global enclosure, and it differentiates by
creating distinctly different types of food for rich and poor customers, including
distinction by price (Whole Foods versus Wal-Mart), and nothing for those
without money. The dispossessed and the very poor must buy, if they can, edible
commodities very different both from what used to be available in local or
national food systems, and from the ‘quality’ meals offered to elites in all
countries. ‘Food deserts’ (Marsden et al. 2000, p. 35), in which retail stores offer
mainly highly processed foods in low-income neighbourhoods in the UK and US,
present another future than ‘quality’ to the growing slums of the global South. It
may be much worse for some, who can no longer grow or buy local crops, as
selected growers and foods are channelled into tightly controlled commodity
chains from which they are excluded (Barndt 2002; Cavalcanti 2004).
The historic shift from state to market as the political-economic organising
principle has nurtured the deepening of the supermarket model, raising longer-
term questions about governance and social equity. Currently, states operate in a
dual arena of shifting power. On the one hand, new forms of government
regulation – ‘private regulation’ (Marsden et al. 2000) – give authority to
supermarkets to establish rules and practices for food safety and quality. This
authority is ultimately delegated, although it may not be easy or even possible to
take it back; it co-exists uneasily with public demands for governments to ensure
food safety, and in many countries, food access. On the other hand, states
negotiate an increasingly chaotic inter-state system, attempting to manage
national accounts within a fluid international division of labour, as corporations
develop new global supply chains and governments seek comparative advantage
to stabilise national currencies and/or service debt. This general dynamic operates
unequally across a hierarchical state system, under the aegis of a state-authored
World Trade Organisation (WTO), often disregarded by strong states, and unable
to obtain equal/equivalent concessions on the part of its members. Institutional
fragility is evident in the failure of successive WTO ministerials to agree on trade
rules for agricultural commodities, in particular. While governance has evolved
with an increasingly private face, experiments in corporate regulation and ad hoc
bilateral trade agreements have thus far been unable to establish uniform rules
with universal applicability. While contention over trade and standards
symbolises the breakdown of the inter-state system arising out of the UN
development era, it is likely that reformulation of rules governing food relations,
like inter-state relations, will be increasingly shaped by protocols for arresting
symbolises the breakdown of the inter-state system arising out of the UN
development era, it is likely that reformulation of rules governing food relations,
like inter-state relations, will be increasingly shaped by protocols for arresting
climate change. If and when that moment comes, we may have a new food
regime. In the meantime, it is important to address the historical context shaping,
and shaped by, the supermarket revolution.

FOOD REGIME TRANSITIONS

Food regimes are typically organised by implicit political-economic rules that

flow from specific power configurations in the inter-state system. ‘Free trade’ in
the British ‘international’ era, and politically-regulated trade in the US ‘national’
era, framed highly structured and distinct patterns of production, social classes
and state formation (Friedmann and McMichael 1989). Regimes include
internally contradictory elements, leading to prolonged transitions, in which
actors lose the capacity to predict the results of their actions, or those of other
actors. The transition between the British- and US-centred regimes lasted over
two world wars, and in between them, through a collapse of world commerce and
a series of ecological catastrophes in major exporting areas of North America. It
is possible to consider the period from the mid-1970s (when the
Keynesian/Bretton Woods order associated with US hegemony collapsed),
through the so-called ‘neoliberal’ era, as a similar long-term transition. Whether it
has included a proto-type food regime, embedded in corporate/environmental
principles, with contradictory implications for the inter-state system, is beyond
this chapter’s purview. Our point here is to understand what is transitional, and
how such long-term changes express, and result from, contestation and
experimentation to create something new. All this occurs during a time in which
financial flows redirect wealth towards rising powers, such as India, China, and
the expanding European Union (Arrighi 1994). How these new world spaces will
reconfigure geo-political, and food, relations is an open question at this stage. But
the supermarket phenomenon has a key role to play.
So far, in the absence of commitment to inter-state institutions, a multi-polar
world allows for veto power, but not for consensus on new rules. The changes
wrought by supermarkets are larger than the food system. They are vehicles of
social and ecological reorganisation: transforming historical relations embedded
in local food systems, crop varieties and knowledges, rural communities, peasant
producers and small farmers, waste recycling systems, biological processes,
hydrological cycles, and a variety of urban experiences and cultural lifestyles. All
these ‘externalities’ of global supply chains (will eventually) require the kinds of
regulation so far provided by national states, which have mediated the claims of
social movements and private capitals. Simply put, the reproduction of labour
forces in politically and environmentally stable relationships of daily life must
underpin the long-term survival of supermarket supply chains. Their sales can
increase, and they can destroy other means of subsistence to increase their sales
in regions which rely on local markets, but they cannot create the infrastructures
of daily life that underpin reproduction of workers, as well as consumers.
The ability of firms to mobilise labour and get crops from fields depends on
social and natural conditions outside the purview of what can be incorporated
into ‘green’ or ‘ethical’ commodities. Transformation of supply chains entails
reorganisation of land use and labour processes, which, together, alter the social
and natural environments within and against which they are deployed. That is,
they are not processes existing in a social or natural vacuum. The environments
within which globalisation and liberalisation are introduced or imposed, in turn
condition the actual realisation of these ‘macro-processes’. Jeffrey Nielson and
Bill Pritchard in Chapter 10 capture this relationship sharply in observing:

While the cliché of ‘timeless rural India’ no longer describes the political economy of
Indian farming…. the lives of many rural communities continue to be hinged to the
production of food for local self-sufficiency needs, organised within a complex regime
of agricultural regulation orchestrated through national and state bureaucracies. These
contexts will necessarily produce a complex set of outcomes from supermarket-led
restructuring in the Indian countryside, however much politicians and economists in
New Delhi might wish to paint a simpler policy tableau which has supermarkets rolling
out their procurement strategies unproblematically, and with wholly positive effects.

In other words, while supermarkets can be instruments of change, path-

dependence is not guaranteed precisely because social reproduction implicates
complex cultural and political relationships.
Corporate restructuring is, itself, not the only dynamic at work. It is important
dependence is not guaranteed precisely because social reproduction implicates
complex cultural and political relationships.
Corporate restructuring is, itself, not the only dynamic at work. It is important
to broaden our view of the agri-food system as governed by more than corporate
mechanisms. As the editors of this book remind us, corporate agriculture
disadvantages and displaces small producers, with the corporate agri-food system
appropriating resources and life-worlds from extant food cultures as part of its
deepening revolution. Just as retailers are expedient in appropriating discourses,
and sometimes practices of alternative food systems (Guthman 2004), so
corporate agriculture is premised on the appropriation of food cultures around the
world. Contests between ‘conventional’ and ‘alternative’ approaches to food
provenance extend beyond the question of ‘quality’ to ways of organising
societies and the agri-ecosystems that support them (Morgan, Marsden and
Murdoch 2006).
When considering such comprehensive transformations, the historical concept
of food regimes points to two useful distinctions: between periods of stability and
transition, and between the destruction of old relations and the emergence of new
ones. While our early accounts of food regimes (Friedmann 1982, Friedmann and
McMichael 1989) focused on periodising world history from the perspective of
relatively stable arrangements of agricultural production, trade, and
transformation into food commodities, our recent efforts turn to periods of
transition (Friedmann 2005; McMichael 2005). To put it simply, a food regime
analysis of contemporary conditions would highlight the profound conditions of
instability of the agri-food system.
‘Crises’ can be understood as turning, or tipping, points of contradictory,
usually implicit, practices. From our perspective, it is clear that the food crisis of
the mid-1970s, both domestically and internationally, ushered in an enduring
period of transition. Such transitions are marked by contestation and
experimentation over the shape of a new food regime. The contestation is easier
to see. Power becomes evident that was formerly hidden in implicitly agreed
rules: for instance, that national governments are responsible for food health and
safety; that industrial agriculture and food manufacturing are unambiguous
improvements on artisanal and local farming practices; and that international
trade and aid shipments of food are universally beneficial.
What was once unquestioned, or even unnoticed, becomes a problem. Notably, in
the ‘world food crisis’ of 1973-74, ‘subsidies’ and ‘food aid’ came to the fore as
contentious issues. These have not declined as other elements of the food regime
of 1947-73 came into question. In the 1980s, food safety shifted from a technical
problem left to experts to a political question of how to assess and respond to
risks. Most important, in our view, was the loss of hegemony – meaning
legitimate leadership as well as economic and political weight – of the US. This
meant that practices of national governments, such as food standards and food aid
shipments, changed from accepted, though implicit norms, into contentious
issues, both among and within states. Food aid became ‘dumping’ (Friedmann
1982), and food scares caused numerous trade barriers and incompatible national
attempts to solve crises of public confidence.
All was negative in a set of multiple and confusing failures of a food regime
once taken for granted or, perhaps, not even noticed. Building something new is a
bigger challenge, as interests diverge, among governments, classes, cultures, and
global regions. Indeed, the interests themselves become confused and confusing,
so that attempts to make explicit international rules falter on cross-cutting
alliances and shifting national and transnational politics. Inter-state rifts and
alliances transect a growing array of ‘venues,’ including the WTO and the United
Nations’ body, Codex Alimentarius. As the issues increasingly intersect,
completely new inter-governmental organisations and issues become relevant to
agri-food restructuring. The Convention on Biological Diversity takes completely
different approaches to trade in plants and animals, and potentially affects the
nature of farming itself. Even the Convention on Climate Change becomes
relevant as distances travelled by foods (so-called ‘food miles’) increase, and as
energy crops become potential ways to reduce dependence on outside sources,
potentially at the expense of food crops. As the issues and organisations multiply,
agreement becomes ever more elusive. The European Union is at loggerheads
with the major agri-exporting countries over ‘quality’ issues, such as hormone
beef and labelling, of crucial import to supermarkets as well as consumers. At the
same time, the EU has joined forces against the global South over trade rules,
potentially undermining attempts by the WTO to dismantle export subsidies,
import restrictions, and domestic farm programs.
The WTO is part of a broad range of efforts, which include debt collection and
structural adjustment, aimed at dismantling national protections by countries of
import restrictions, and domestic farm programs.
The WTO is part of a broad range of efforts, which include debt collection and
structural adjustment, aimed at dismantling national protections by countries of
the global South, and forcing them to export whatever they are able (McMichael
2005). From green beans to fresh flowers to farmed shrimp, their agricultural
sectors during the 1980s and 1990s shifted from nationally-regulated domestic
and export production to privately contracted exports. This at once opened the
door to sourcing of year-round fresh produce by supermarkets, and allowed them
to become a private power in place of government-managed agricultural and food
sectors of the defunct food regime.
Terms like ‘neoliberalism’ clearly name a negative process of breaking up
selected elements of the old food regime by powerful interests both state and
private. Deregulation has succeeded, selectively, opening the way for national
governments to support strategies by private corporations. Domestically, Marsden
et al. (2000) have shown that in the UK this has undermined the national food
regulation that prevailed during the ‘mercantile-industrial’ food regime
(Friedmann 2005). Formerly, the national government made health standards and
local authorities inspected food manufacturing and retailing businesses. In the
1990s, this became the lower of a two-tier system. The new, higher tier deferred
to, and in the new language ‘audited’, the centralised control systems introduced
by supermarkets. Rather than inspect, government officials read corporate reports
showing how they implemented their own (usually higher than minimal) safety
and health procedures.
However, the reach of supermarket chains is beyond the scope of the UK, US
or, indeed, any other government, to control. No national government can
implement its own rules in regulating transnational sources of foods and
ingredients of composite foods, including those entering into ‘ready meals’ so
important to the triumph of supermarkets over formerly-dominant branded
manufacturers. At the same time, supermarkets go much further in reconstituting
previous food regime structures than any government could. Together with
impasse at the WTO and other international organisations, governments took two
steps to consolidate changes in public-private relationships. Domestically, they
allowed the consolidation of corporate power through mergers and acquisitions
that might once have led to anti-trust or anti-combines restrictions, and facilitated
corporate moves to claim authority and trust over food safety (Marsden et al.
2000). Internationally, inter-governmental organisations, notably Codex
Alimentarius, which could not resolve disagreements between the powerful EU
and US and their allies, collaborated ever more closely with the International
Standards Organisation. The ISO is a private standards body becoming ever more
important as trade and corporate production lines cross-national borders, and as
governments are unable to agree on public regulations. Like national procedures,
Codex international standards are increasingly developed in collaboration with
ISO. Similarly, Codex standards are mandatory (in an odd way, enforceable
through challenges at the WTO), while ISO standards can be higher and are
voluntary. They include ‘quality management systems’ and ‘environmental
management systems’ (Friedmann and McNair 2006).
These private, voluntary, international initiatives, necessarily supported by
public institutions, comprise what we separately and together identify as elements
of a corporate/environmental food regime (Friedmann 2005; McMichael 2005).
Whether and to what extent these initiatives can generate a stable set of rules, and
the practices governed by them, to constitute a new hegemonic order, remains to
be seen. This will also depend on resolving the destabilising impact of the
selective dismantling of national regulation of agricultural production and trade
via structural adjustment and the WTO’s Agreement on Agriculture (1995),
converting the global South into a farm to supply the retailing revolution. The
key here is that both standards and trade relations currently express and
reproduce instability on a global scale, and resolution is neither clear nor
imminent.
With respect to trade relations, WTO protocols privilege corporate agriculture
in various ways – from trade rules through investment vehicles (TRIMS) to
intellectual property rights (TRIPs). The Agreement on Agriculture employs
trade restrictions, production controls, and state trading boards to outlaw
‘artificial’ price supports. States in the global South are required to open their
farm sectors, while Northern states have managed to retain huge subsidies,
concealed by the so-called ‘box’ system. By decoupling subsidies from prices the
price floor is removed, essentially establishing an artificial ‘world price’
(considerably below the cost of production), which can be – and is – deployed as
a weapon against farmers everywhere through the dumping of agricultural
surpluses (Peine and McMichael 2005).
(considerably below the cost of production), which can be – and is – deployed as
a weapon against farmers everywhere through the dumping of agricultural
surpluses (Peine and McMichael 2005).
The WTO’s minimum import rule (aimed at national self-sufficiency
strategies) intensifies the impact of this lowered world price, destroying Southern
rural cultures, with small farmers unable to compete in markets where the prices
for farm products continue to fall. This process, perhaps strategy, of
‘accumulation through dispossession’ (Harvey 2003) accounts for the
centralisation of global food stocks (60 percent are in corporate hands, six of
which control 70 percent of the world’s grain trade), and the simultaneous
displacement of millions of small farmers. Liberalised trade relations, under
WTO rules, restructure food circuits in two key, related ways. First, they deepen
food dependency – thus, wheat imports in Africa increased ‘by 35 percent
between 1996 and 2000, while the total value of these ever-cheaper imports
actually fell by 13 percent, on average’ (Rosset 2006, p. 65). Second, they
consolidate a new international division of agricultural labour, dedicated to
growing ‘food from nowhere’ (Bové and Dufour 2001, p. 55). For example,
Mexico – the home of maize – has been transformed by NAFTA-style
liberalisation into a food deficit country, importing US corn at the expense of
almost two million campesinos (Carlsen 2003), and exporting fruits and
vegetables from corporate plantations along the border. Public Citizen’s report,
Down on the Farm (2001), notes that small farmers on both sides of the border
are displaced by this relationship.
As trade rules deepen access to cheaper land and labour, agricultural
outsourcing becomes more attractive – especially when, for example, the
differential between the value (in US dollars) of a square metre of New Jersey
farmland and that of Brazilian virgin timberland is 1.98 to 0.005, respectively
(World Watch 2006, p. 32). European introduction of ‘multifunctionality’, via
CAP reform, rewards agriculture’s non-remunerative services (environment,
space, rural habitation, food safety and animal welfare), encouraging agricultural
out-sourcing from offshore regions with low wages and weak environmental
regulations. Doux – France and Europe’s foremost poultry producer –
accomplished this by acquiring Frangosul, the fourth largest poultry producer in
Brazil, where production costs undercut those in France by two-thirds (Herman
and Kuper 2003, pp. 21-22). Meanwhile, imported Chinese garlic, produced at
almost half the cost, outsold Californian garlic for the first time in 2006, imports
having increased 112 percent since 2000 (Barrionuevo 2006, p. D1). China has
also become increasingly consequential as a global supplier of organic foods.
Access to cheaper land and labour is created through market coercion –
whether displacement of farmers by artificially cheapened imports of food and
agri-technologies from the global North, or enabling policies by governments
under pressure to service debt with agri-exports. As anticipated in the Nielson
and Pritchard chapter on Reliance’s plans to out-compete foreign supermarkets in
India, we will see deepening of experiments already underway in Andhra Pradesh
state, such as Vision 2020, to consolidate agro-industrial estates – ‘farmed on a
contract basis for corporations using genetically-modified seeds to produce agro-
exports of vegetables and flowers, and requiring the displacement of upwards of
20 million small farmers’ (Ainger 2003, pp. 25-26). In fact, Reliance Industries
Limited opened its first wholly-owned supermarket in Hyderabad in late 2006.
This expands its entry into the supermarket business, which it began in Mumbai
earlier that year – assisted by Indian government use of eminent domain
(following the Chinese state’s example) to seize land from local farmers to
establish a Special Economic Zone one-third of the size of nearby metropolitan
Mumbai for export production. Dianne Bunsha (2006, p. 1) reports that:

[a]ccording to informed sources, Reliance plans to convert these fields into expensive
real estate, and the government seems to be acting as its broker, forcibly acquiring land
at a pittance and handing it over to RIL to sell to businesses in the SEZ. It will be a
satellite city in prime location – close to the major highways, ports and the site for the
new international airport. Besides the 45 villages that are to be acquired, Reliance has
been buying up agricultural land at cheap rates anticipating an increase in land value in
the area once the SEZ comes through.

The forcible incorporation of land, with long-standing material significance and

cultural attachments, into agri-export platforms represents a rupturing of social
fabrics that is naturalised in trade rules, rendering the foundations of supermarket
supply chains invisible.
The conversion of the South into a ‘farm’ for the global North reinvents the old
colonial pattern of the Britain-centred food regime, but with a twist. In the
nineteenth century, tropical colonies of Britain, France, and Holland exported
 The conversion of the South into a ‘farm’ for the global North reinvents the old
colonial pattern of the Britain-centred food regime, but with a twist. In the
nineteenth century, tropical colonies of Britain, France, and Holland exported
agricultural raw materials and were expected to feed themselves. In the US-
centred food regime, subsidised exports – largely from the US – made many
countries of the global South, freed from colonial rule and devoted to industrial
and urban growth, dependent on grain imports. With the onset of the debt regime
(from the 1980s), the export imperative, and vulnerability to subsidised imports –
with all they entail in displacing domestic staple food production in the global
South – were originally mandated by structural adjustment ‘conditionalities,’ and
then reinforced and institutionalised by trade agreements in the 1990s. For
example, in the ‘new agricultural country’, Chile – the largest supplier of off-
season fruits and vegetables to Europe and North America – food cropping in
beans, wheat and other staples has declined by more than a third, as agri-export
plantations controlled by five corporations have displaced local farmers. Across
Latin America, whereas 90 percent of agricultural research targeted food crops in
the 1980s, during the 1990s export crops monopolised 80 percent of research
expenditures (Madeley 2000, pp. 54-5). The new dependence on imports, indeed
on ‘food from nowhere,’ is now universalised.

RETAILING SUPPLY CHAINS: OLD PATTERNS, NEW

LIABILITIES
Today, the very definition of corporate organisation includes the ubiquitous
‘supply chain,’ which channels fresh foods and food inputs across national
borders downstream towards manufacturers or processors, and thence to retailers
and the consumer. These supply chains are heterogeneous and network-like
(Pritchard and Burch 2003). Nonetheless, they are increasingly integrated, and
are internal to the retailer’s operations. This is, in fact, one of the principal
features of the so-called ‘retailing revolution’. In addition to consolidating market
power, supermarkets have transformed it by developing ‘own brand’ food
manufacturing – in effect integrating backwards, displacing traditional brand
manufacturers like Nestlé and Heinz. British retailers lead this development, with
‘own brand’ products constituting 95 percent of the market for ‘ready meals,’
relying on new ‘flexible, adaptable and innovative’ suppliers (Burch and
Lawrence 2005, p. 6).
While the increasing subordination of manufacturing by retailing is perhaps
the key indicator of the ‘retailing revolution’ (something complicated by the
proliferation of private equity firms and the reconstitution of the food service
sector) as Burch and Lawrence note in Chapter 5, there is a broader
reconfiguration afoot in the agri-food industry. The new patterns induced by
retail-led supply chains are focused on specific supply chains. First, there is a
deepening of the livestock-maize-soy complex central to the food regime of
1947-73 (Friedmann 1994). While livestock processors have routinely integrated
upstream to produce meats and grains, they now integrate downstream into
retailing, supplying ready meals (Burch and Goss 2003, p. 273). Second,
agribusiness conglomeration involves a deeper reconfiguration, and, interestingly
is most developed regionally in East and Southeast Asia, represented by Charoen
Pokphand (CP) (originating in Thailand) and the Salim Group (originating in
Indonesia). CP commenced its activities in feed, moving on to chicken, shrimp,
and pigs. Regionally, it expanded its agribusiness activities, and moved into
retailing, telecommunications, real estate, and petrochemicals. The Salim Group
followed a similar path, and is currently the dominant regional supplier-retailer of
instant noodles (see Burch and Goss 2003).
This conglomerate model extends to new animal production, notably shrimp
and fish aquaculture (Wilkinson 2005), which use either similar feeds for land-
based livestock or involve industrial fishing to feed domestic animals. It differs
from the manufacturer supply-chain model adopted by Nestlé, Philip Morris and
Unilever, which deploy multi-product horizontal integration via standardised
food products, such as dairy goods, biscuits, baked goods, beer and spirits and
confectionary, for emerging markets (Tonzali 2005, p.16). Finally, the global
retailing model, dominated currently by European transnationals, Tesco (UK),
Ahold (Netherlands), and Carrefour (France), is transforming food processing
and farming via private standards, emphasising quality. Whether manufacturer
supply chains adapt to the just-in-time model led by supermarkets will depend on
the trajectory and environment of competitive relations, including the structuring
of class diets and urban habitats.
New crops shipped long distances to be sold as ‘fresh’ (fruits and vegetables,
the trajectory and environment of competitive relations, including the structuring
of class diets and urban habitats.
New crops shipped long distances to be sold as ‘fresh’ (fruits and vegetables,
as well as fish and seafood) or as ingredients in ready meals, are key to the
supermarket revolution. Anticipated by industrial changes in lettuce and tomato
production to be shipped continentally from California (Friedland 1994;
Friedland, Barton and Thomas 1981; Walker 2004), supermarkets began to
source counter-seasonal fruits and vegetables internationally in the 1980s. They
benefited from the export imperative being imposed on debt-ridden countries of
the global South, which were forced through the incremental constellation of
structural adjustment rules to open their import markets and remove previously
sanctioned protections from domestic farmers and urban consumers.
A model supply-chain study is Tangled Routes, which follows the journey of
the corporate tomato in a long journey across the Americas (Barndt 2002). It
begins in Mexico, the centre of origin of tomatoes and therefore key to its
continuing evolution as a landrace cultivated by farmers in many micro-regions.
There it is transformed into a monocultural cultivar on lands opened to
monocultural farming in northern Mexican states of Sinaloa and Sonora. Migrant
labour comes from peasant regions in the south of the country, whose livelihoods
have been compromised by the dumping of highly subsidised maize from the US,
an opening to imports forced by debt obligations to export, and institutionalised
by the North American Free Trade Agreement. The corporate tomato, planted and
harvested by itinerant indigenous women, packed and/or processed by mestizo
women and men, and transported to Canadian retailer Loblaws, or to fast food
outlets, follows a circuit parallel to that of female migrants who work in the agri-
food industry in Canada for money to remit to their households in rural Mexico.
Securing rural households is universally rooted in gender relations premised on
female participation in migrant labour networks.
Similarly, women sustain horticultural export industries in Kenya, where
roughly 90 percent of horticulture serves the European (notably the UK) market.
In the context of global retailers adopting just-in-time inventories, and an
1
‘economy of quality,’ there has been a palpable shift away from small-holder
contract farming to centralised estates and pack-houses depending on migrant
female labour. As Dolan (2004) notes, retailer food supply chains exploit the
‘comparative advantage of women’s disadvantage,’ resting on a pedestal of
women engaged in tenuous decisions about maintaining households through off-
farm labour on capitalist estates (see also Collins 1995). Accordingly, the politics
of the retailer-consumer nexus, identified in this volume by Konefal and co-
writers, extends to the broader implications of unequal trade, rural displacement,
monocultures, gender relations and expanding circuits of migrant labour.
The global retailing model has deepened its reach and impact into the fields
and villages of the global South via imposition of private standards, emphasising
quality. British retailers ‘cash in on the consciences of customers by expanding
their fair trade and organic ranges’ as the ‘ethical food market has grown by 62
per cent in the past four years’ (Frith 2006, p. 21), and the ‘trend for more
shoppers to put quality ahead of price has led to huge increases in sales of fresh
and organic foods’ (Finch 2006, p. 21). The ‘quality’ market is currently
dominated by European transnationals (Tesco, Ahold, and Carrefour). However,
North American firms are also now sourcing according to their own quality
standards, including the Canadian pioneer in own brands (Loblaws) and, more
dramatically, the US Whole Foods which – like its recent UK acquisition Fresh
and Wild – explicitly serves a customer base willing to pay considerably higher
prices. These higher prices not only relate to ‘healthy’ and ‘local’ foods but also,
more recently, to ‘animal compassionate’ meats from the Whole Foods company
(New York Times 2006, p. 1). Wal-Mart is the largest and most recent retail entry
into global markets in ‘organics,’ which are transformed from social movement
goals into low-input export monocultures, through the political influence of
corporations in the setting of US government standards (Guthman 2004).
Supermarkets drive the boom in organic foods, being responsible in Britain for 76
percent of organic food sales, while British supermarkets overall imported 34
percent of all the organic food they sold in 2005 (Renton 2006, p. 22).
This new ‘economy of quality’ in food depends on the reconstitution of land
and labour relations globally. Whether sourcing from plantations or contract
farmers, supermarkets transform the rural world with the latest information
technologies (including computers and mobile phones) to facilitate commercial
links, and to reposition production in a volatile global market (Long and Roberts
2005). Brazil’s ‘new agrarian districts’ in Sao Francisco Valley export mangoes,
grapes, tomatoes, and acerola (a sweet, cherry-like fruit). Some 50 percent is sent
overseas (25 percent under contract to French retail giant, Carrefour), and 50
2005). Brazil’s ‘new agrarian districts’ in Sao Francisco Valley export mangoes,
grapes, tomatoes, and acerola (a sweet, cherry-like fruit). Some 50 percent is sent
overseas (25 percent under contract to French retail giant, Carrefour), and 50
percent is destined for corporate retailers in Brazilian cities (Marsden 2003, pp.
30, 57). New relations at the agricultural end of supermarket supply chains
transform conditions of labour and labour markets. A producer who shifted from
seller- to buyer-driven chains, commented:

… the market had changed and was demanding quality. We had to change too; more
qualified people, new technologies at harvest and after harvest; packing houses, cooling
chambers, packaging and wrapping papers…. We had to travel, to hire external experts,
and to develop new systems of cutting and irrigation. There were changes in labour
control and in the ways fertilisation, pulverisation and timing were done; the
introduction of computer programming was also new (Marsden 2003, p.56).

Like earlier, green revolution technologies, agri-industrialisation in the service of

the ‘economy of quality’ stratifies producers between those (sometimes virtual)
farmers who can afford the technology, and those who surrender their farms to
commercial neighbours or incoming entrepreneurial farmers, and remain as hired
labour, with a base of ethnic and female minorities (Marsden 2003, p.61). The
social footprint of the quality economy involves the wholesale transformation of
farmers into producers, hired labour, or migrants, creating new generations of
what Bauman (1999, p. 22) has called ‘structurally redundant’ people.
The ‘economy of quality’ enlarges its ecological footprint, generating new
vulnerabilities well outside the purview of any corporation. The prices that
support the constant flow of foods around the globe depend on the price of fuel to
move them. Relocation of agriculture has been enabled by a dramatic fall of 70
percent in the cost of sea freight between 1980 and 2000, and a 3-4 percent
annual fall in air–freight costs (Millstone and Lang 2003, p. 66). Food transport
raises ‘food miles,’ and ‘is one of the fastest growing sources of greenhouse gas
emissions’ (Millstone and Lang 2003, p. 66). National accounting systems do not
include emissions resulting from air and sea freight, so they are not included in
the Kyoto Protocol targets. The ‘food miles’ problem is exacerbated by ‘food
swapping’. Thus, in the milk trade: ‘Until recently most people consumed milk
produced locally, but from 1961 to 1999 there was a five-fold increase in milk
exports, with many countries both importing and exporting large quantities,
resulting in millions of extra food miles’ (Millstone and Lang 2003, p. 66).
Analogous to the extension of the Southern land frontier for offshore food
production, is the rising fossil-fuel consumption involved in the global fishing
industry, exacerbated by deeper-sea fishing as coastal fish stocks deteriorate.
Despite the liabilities, it is important to note that transport technologies
underwriting intensification of the ‘ecological footprint’ are as significant in
enabling the retailing revolution as the techno-science of retailing (that is,
inventory control via information technologies, and bar coding), discussed in
Chapter 12 by Jason Konefal and his co-writers.
Unstable energy markets create even more uncertainty for transnational supply
chains. So, on the other side, they are vulnerable to disruption – especially as
climate change concerns alter the equation. Urban populations have never been
so divorced from the fields that feed them. Under these circumstances, local
sourcing as one method of addressing energy constraints is likely to reinforce the
ethical foods boom, led by British supermarket culture. In this juncture, Tesco
now appropriates Tim Lang’s concept of ‘food miles’ to appeal to its loyal
consumers (The Guardian 2006, p. 30). Aquaculture is another response to
dwindling wild fish stocks, and the consumer turn to fish. Finally, industrial
countries are shifting (for the EU, with government incentives) into agricultural
fuels to augment energy self-sufficiency. This could contribute to the destruction
of the old patterns from a collapsing food regime, in which the North exported
surplus agricultural commodities, as it displaces grains and livestock and other
crops. At the same time it has the potential to deepen the South’s potentially
catastrophic role as world farm, as regions such as Southeast Asia intensify
deforestation to expand palm oil production as biodiesel exports for the EU
(Monbiot 2006, pp. 159-160).
Aside from such significant uncertainties, the impact of these changes wrought
by the corporatisation of agriculture and its retailer-led supply chains is expressed
in oppositional food sovereignty movements – from the landless-workers’
movement in Brazil to the Slow Food Movement in Italy and beyond (Desmarais
2002; Fonte 2007; Wright and Wolford 2003). In other words, in addition to
contributing to ecological disruption, world food system transformation is deeply
fragmenting the social order – as the gap between affluent and dispossessed
populations complicates rifts within nations and between states.
contributing to ecological disruption, world food system transformation is deeply
fragmenting the social order – as the gap between affluent and dispossessed
populations complicates rifts within nations and between states.

SUPPLY CHAIN POLITICS

There is a common theme, both explicit and implicit, in literature on the
supermarket revolution – perhaps best expressed in the final sentence of Chapter
12: ‘… the future political arena of food and agriculture is likely to be the
retailer-consumer nexus’. In our view, this is an important, but only a partial,
piece of the unfolding story. We would complement this scenario with
observations that the current ordering of food relations ‘consists of two
differentiated ways of organising food supply chains, roughly corresponding to
increasingly transnational classes of rich and poor consumers’ (Friedmann 2005,
p. 254), and ‘the standards revolution involves selective appropriation by food
corporations of social movement demands for environmental, food safety, animal
welfare and fair trade relations, with the potential of deepening social inequality
globally (at the expense of peasants and poor consumers) as private regulation
displaces public responsibilities’ (McMichael forthcoming 2007).
Beyond questions of material equality and justice, we expect that the question
of corporate agriculture’s ‘ecological footprint,’ while absent from popular
representations of climate change such as Al Gore’s film, An Inconvenient Truth,
will increasingly shape political discourse and contention regarding methods of
reducing and/or rationing carbon consumption. In other words, the political
landscape, while including the politicisation of retailing, will be confronted with
the consequences of a world-wide social polarisation. It will be fuelled by cycles
of peasant displacement to peri-urban slums and circuits of migrant labour, as
well as the threat of environmental catastrophe stemming from the steady rise of
greenhouse gas emissions. The question of social reproduction will be deeper
than whether ‘ethical foods’ satisfy consumer and producer needs in a new
‘economy of quality’. It will involve finding new social and political
infrastructures to revitalise social reproduction as a public-inclusive, rather than a
private-exclusive, right (McMichael 2003) and reverse the combined trends of
human ‘redundancy’ and global warming. These large-scale social and ecological
rifts in the global/planetary fabric will require paradigmatic shifts in thinking
about the goals and institutions of human development within increasingly
evident natural limits. Reducing the consumption of ‘food miles’, like ‘fair trade’
activism, addresses the tip of an iceberg (a now unfortunate metaphor) that
ultimately extends to the broader, historical question of the socio-ecological
conditions under which food is produced and consumed and how those conditions
express and shape political relations (a veritable food regime question).
The supermarket model cascading across world regions over the past 15 years
expresses the dominant condition, whereby cycles of displacement and
incorporation (see du Toit 2004) are realised through growing inequality and
ecological imbalance. From the early 1990s, the average share of supermarkets in
food retailing in much of South America and East Asia (other than China and
Japan), Northern-Central Europe, and South Africa rose from roughly 10-20
percent (1990) to 50-60 percent by the early 2000s. (By comparison,
supermarkets had a 70-80 percent share in food retail in the US, UK and France
in 2005.) Within those regions, Costa Rica, Chile, South Korea, the Philippines
and Thailand led the way – supermarketisation reached 50 percent of food
retailing by the mid-1990s (Reardon and Timmer 2005, pp. 35-37). A ‘second
wave’ spread to parts of Southeast Asia, Central America and Mexico, and
Southern-Central Europe, where shares of food retailing rose from 5-10 percent
in 1990 to 30-50 percent by the early 2000s. A ‘third wave,’ reaching 10-20
percent of food retailing by 2003, occurred in parts of Africa (especially Kenya),
remaining parts of Central and South America and Southeast Asia, and China,
India and Russia – these last three being the current frontrunner destinations for
retail FDI (Reardon and Trimmer 2005, pp. 35-37).
The retailing revolution is not simply about reconfiguring agri-food industries.
It also transforms domestic food markets (typically the source of about 85 percent
of food consumption). Trade in processed foods such as juice, baked goods,
snacks, meats and beverages rose between 1980 from 18 percent of global food
trade to 34 percent in 2000 (Regmi and Gehlar 2001). However, sales by foreign
subsidiaries of firms in developed countries, to consumers in developing
countries, have increased dramatically. For example, ‘local sales by foreign
subsidiaries of US processed food firms are five times the exports of processed
countries, have increased dramatically. For example, ‘local sales by foreign
subsidiaries of US processed food firms are five times the exports of processed
food from the US to the rest of the world’ (Reardon and Timmer 2005, p. 28).
Institutional changes – the macro-processes identified by Lawrence and Burch
in Chapter 1 – enable this ‘trojan horse’ phenomenon, where agribusiness moves
at will across national borders to dominate domestic markets. Foreign investment
in domestic food chains has increased enormously over the last two decades:

In 1980, total FDI [Foreign Direct Investment] was roughly $1 billion a year into Asia,
and the same in Latin America; agrifood investments followed this general pattern for
total FDI. By 1990, the amount was roughly $10 billion a year into each of these two
regions that were forerunners in globalisation. By 2000, the figure was $80-90 billion
(Reardon and Timmer 2005, p.30).

Corporate globalisation consolidates retailing, as transnational firms acquire local

chains. Thus the Dutch firm, Royal Ahold, now owns 50 percent of La Fragua
supermarkets in Central America (Busch and Bain 2004, p. 328). And, in 2002
five global retailers (British Tesco, French Carrefour and Casino, Dutch Ahold
and Makro, and Belgian Food Lion) invested $US 120 million in Thailand alone,
while Wal-Mart invested $US 600 million in Mexican supermarket development
(Reardon and Timmer 2005, p. 42).
In addition to the reconfiguration of power relations within supply chains (via
‘own brands’), the world is experiencing a deepening of retailing control of
national markets, as retailers ‘mop up’ local chains, wet markets and other forms
of food provisioning in the non-European and Eastern European regions. In the
1990s, supermarket growth in Latin America, followed by Asia, outstripped that
in the US by a factor of five. In Latin America, Ahold, Carrefour, and Wal-Mart
represent 70-80 percent of the top five retailers, centralising procurement from
farmers across the region (and their own global processing operations), for
regional provisioning (Regmi and Gehlhar 2005). As supermarkets consolidate
their power, farmers surrender control. In Guatemala, supermarkets now control
35 percent of food retailing. Dugger (2004, A10) reported that ‘their sudden
appearance has brought unanticipated and daunting challenges to millions of
struggling, small farmers,’ who, lacking binding contracts, must consistently meet
new quality standards, in order to stay in the game – a game of declining prices as
retailers have virtually unlimited suppliers.
Ironically, as the ‘economy of quality’ for wealthy consumers drives a process
of ‘accumulation through dispossession’ across the global farm belt,
supermarketisation transforms diets for mass/poor consumers in the opposite
direction. Worldwide, supermarket diets for the working poor converge on a
narrowing base of staple grains, increasing consumption of animal protein, edible
oils, salt and sugar, and declining dietary fibre, as consumption of brand name
processed and store-bought foods rises, contributing to an increasing prevalence
of non-communicable (dietary) diseases and obesity (Kennedy et al. 2004, p. 14).
This global ‘nutrition transition’ is associated with an explosion of obesity,
described by the WHO as ‘one of the greatest neglected public health problems of
our time’ (quoted in Gardner and Halweil 2000, p. 13). Questions of social
reproduction include the nutritional dimension, where the ‘underfed’ 1.2 billion
people are matched by the ‘overfed’ 1.2 billion consumers malnourished by
industrial food (Gardner and Halweil 2000, p. 7). Arguably, one way to begin to
address this epidemiological crisis is to rebuild political institutions committed to
reversing the move away from local food sourcing, and to constructing a
sustainable and inclusive ‘economy of quality’ – the ‘food sovereignty’
movement represents one model of this new sensibility (see McMichael 2006).

THE POLITICS AND CULTURE OF CONSUMPTION

The chapters in this collection dealing with the issues of politics and the culture
of consumption provide a wealth of information regarding the transformation of
consumption patterns, and related cultural changes that we associate with the
supermarket. As Mark Harvey notes in Chapter 3, there is a general move on the
part of retailers from distributing to constructing and reconstructing taste in the
form of new kinds of ready meals and other products. He links this to the
peculiarity of food as a commodity. Related to this peculiarity is the line of
inquiry instigated by Jane Dixon (Chapter 2), who focuses on new relations of
authority and the significance (and commodification) of trust in the culture of
accumulation for ‘post-modern citizens’. Others note the superstores’ embrace
and representation of lifestyle (Lang and Barling, Chapter 8), and expansion of
authority and the significance (and commodification) of trust in the culture of
accumulation for ‘post-modern citizens’. Others note the superstores’ embrace
and representation of lifestyle (Lang and Barling, Chapter 8), and expansion of
stocks of non-foods (Vorley, Chapter 11), and differentiation of foods along
ethnic lines (Konefal et al. Chapter 12). Finally, there is the micro-politics angle
offered, in Chapter 6, by Hugh Campbell and Richard Le Heron, who complicate
the politicisation of the consumer-retailer complex with a call for researchers to
focus upon particular instances of consumer politicisation and the
institutionalisation of forms of auditing. However, while our attention is on the
evolution of the consumer-retailer relationship, well developed in this volume,
we might investigate the historical function of this attention to consumption in
more detail. ​
A key, perhaps, to these developments is that whereas previous food regimes
were inscriptions of British and US, hegemony, this transitional period is driven
by corporate/market hegemony and its attendant contradictions, as discussed
above. Previous food regimes were rooted in the politics of European citizenship
and Third World independence, respectively, with the politics of the first
translated into the politics of the second. But the point is to distinguish current
food regime intimations, based upon corporate hegemony and the politics of
consumption. Here, former social rights are increasingly privatised, and
development writ large is redefined as the right to consume: whether consuming
material fashions (including designer food) as freedom, or consuming market
goods in the global South as a symbol of the developed lifestyle (such as mass-
produced packaged noodles versus wet market or street-vendored goods). As the
new condition and outcome of development, consumption embodies the social
and ecological contradictions of our age. Under neoliberal capitalism, financial
instruments have institutionalised speculation, with credit card expenditures (and
debt) as a key source of accumulation (Arrighi 1994; Harvey 2005). Where the
social wage has declined or simply disappeared, financial institutions deploy
credit to encourage consumers to commodify their future. In this context,
consumption is elevated to a key social indicator of individual well-being, and is
the object (and outcome) of the new science of retailing, enabled by information
technologies and the psychology of risk avoidance and trust – as discussed by
Konefal et al. in Chapter 12.
If consumers commodify their future – in the form of debt – they also
commodify, indeed consume, their future, in a world with increasingly evident
social and environmental limits. Climate change, declining fish stocks, energy
shortages, displacement of food by feed, agri-exports and now biofuels, and so
on, are direct consequences of the ‘age of high mass consumption’ (Rostow
1960). Poverty is increasingly an outcome, rather than an original condition, in a
corporate economy producing food for that minority of the world’s population
with purchasing power in the market. Where governments are not providing a
social wage to sustain a more widely distributed consumption of necessities and
staple foods, ‘the market’ re-allocates resources to service that quarter of
humanity who live on institutionalised credit. The exacerbation of social
inequalities is expressed not simply in class-differentiated diets, but in the
technologies of retailing geared, differently, to rich and poor consumers. From
this angle, then, the politicisation of the consumer-retailer nexus has to do with
not only how supermarkets cater to, and attempt to incorporate or appropriate
environmental symbols and practices, but also with how relatively wealthy
consumers exercise their lifestyle needs and desires through their consumption,
and how that consumption, in turn, deeply implicates social and ecological
relations on a global scale.
The turn to private consumption has two distinct consequences. It intensifies
the destabilisation of the global environment, and social life, behind the backs of
consumers, at the same time as it displaces formerly public conceptions of
development, essential to addressing the first consequence. This public vacuum,
the market, has been elevated as the site of corporate and NGO contestation over
standards of commodity exchange. The attention to environmental, social and
phytosanitary (plant health) standards symbolises a long-term struggle over the
terms of governance between elements of civil society (including firms, NGOs,
citizen and minority groups of one kind or another) and states, played out
simultaneously on domestic and transnational scales. From social justice
movements renegotiating sovereignty (including food sovereignty), through
regional groupings renegotiating economic relations (including standards), to
multilateral institutions compelled to address the crisis of the global commons,
patterns of governance – including conceptions and rules regarding the form and
content of the ‘public good’ – are in a wholesale transition.
patterns of governance – including conceptions and rules regarding the form and
content of the ‘public good’ – are in a wholesale transition.

CONCLUSION
At this time, when the future of the WTO is uncertain, and there are warnings of
a new era of protectionist backlash because globalisation has not reduced but
deepened inequalities (The Observer, 2006), it is difficult to predict how the
political infrastructure of the world economy will evolve. Transnational
corporations may directly and indirectly regulate their provisioning systems, as
part of their competitive positioning in the ‘economy of quality,’ but regulation of
capital writ large – of financial and trade relations across national borders –
remains indeterminate. Selective defiance of IMF lending (in Asia and Latin
America), experiments in regional integration such as the budding ‘cooperative
advantage’ principle of the Bolivarian Alternative for the Americas (ALBA), and
rising bilateralism suggest that the institutionalised multilateral regime of ‘free
trade’ is not working. Meanwhile, attention has shifted to third party pressure on
corporations to improve the quality of their supply chains. As Daniel Nepstad
(2006, p. 1) observes:

Finance institutions, commodity traders, consumer groups, environmental NGOs, and

human rights organisations are pushing to raise the bar on the socio-environmental
‘quality’ of the agricultural-commodity production chain. For example, the companies
that buy most of the soy produced in the Amazon recently declared a two-year
moratorium on the purchase of soy grown on recently cleared Amazon rainforest soil,
responding to a Greenpeace attack on McDonald's restaurants in Europe that fatten
their chickens with Amazon soy. And international climate negotiations provide
another ray of hope. Last year, Papua New Guinea and Costa Rica proposed the
compensation of tropical nations for their efforts to curb deforestation. Brazil advanced
a similar proposal at the Nairobi round of negotiations last week.

Promising piecemeal moves such as this may inform development of a more

systematic set of multilateral rules regarding standards, trade and carbon
reduction measures. Arguably, the emphasis on ‘good governance’ meted out to
indebted states in the global South as a condition for loan repayment, has spread
to the beneficiaries of such ‘conditionalities’ – the transnational corporations and
their supply chains. Through this process, boundaries between ‘public’ and
‘private’ have become more fluid, such that governance relationships are likely to
negotiate between the normalisation of austerity capitalism (see also Soederberg
2006), and a global moral political-economy, where claims for moral authority
derive from mobilised constituents of civil society concerned with standards and
sustainability – including firms and their (competitive) appeals to ‘quality’ (see
Dixon 2002, p. 158; Marsden 2004; Mol 2000).
However, reorganising supply chains to satisfy ethical and green concerns may
not necessarily resolve social and ecological ‘externalities’ on a global scale.
Adjustments may not address the crisis of displacement, or growing food
insecurity, without a coordinated reorientation of the global food system. Thus
Nepstad (2006, p. 1) has noted: ‘High oil prices have also fuelled the replacement
of tropical forests with fields of grain and sugar cane. The most promising source
of ethanol to fuel a new fleet of cleaner cars is Brazilian sugar cane, whose
expanded production is pushing soy fields into the Amazon’. Managing carbon
reduction in this way reorients some agriculture to non-food crop production. In
the South, in addition to failing to address hunger, it may have negative effects on
the environment. In the North it might reduce the food surplus agriculture so
central to the (increasingly unhealthy) corn-fed diet (see Pollan 2006), and to the
remnants of the post-Second World War food regime of aid/trade in surpluses.
Questions about the energy-intensive nature of biofuel agriculture complicate this
scenario (Lynas 2006). How these contradictory developments may be resolved
politically is an open question. Nevertheless, the fluidity of the situation, and the
emergence of new possibilities and new understandings of the centrality of
agriculture, suggest the likelihood in the future of a regime-like resolution that is
larger than a supermarket-driven food system.
The imminence of catastrophic climate change looms as an unavoidable
constraint to refocus attention on protecting the global commons. For food, this
means reversing the trends in food swapping and food miles – especially
transforming desire in the ‘economy of quality’ towards the practicalities of local
sourcing (see Friedmann forthcoming 2007). Supermarkets already include this in
their portfolio, but it is a preference rather than a necessity thus far. With few
constraints in a liberalised world market, supply chains have been constructed
their portfolio, but it is a preference rather than a necessity thus far. With few
constraints in a liberalised world market, supply chains have been constructed
within a logic of reducing land and labour costs (while greenhouse gas emissions
have remained uncounted). With carbon unit constraints it is likely that this
‘extensive accumulation’ regime will be compelled to embrace a triple-bottom-
line accounting logic that would shorten supply chains and reinvigorate local
agricultures. Reversing the trends in animal protein consumption is a significant
part of this equation of slowing down greenhouse gas emissions. Again, Nepstad
(2006, p. 1) warns of the growing taste for meat: ‘… it takes up to 16 times more
farmland to sustain people on a diet of animal protein than on a diet of plant
protein….The emerging meat-eaters of the emerging economies – especially
China – are driving industrial agriculture into the tropical forests of South
America, sending greenhouse gases skyward in a dangerous new linkage between
the palate and the warming of the planet’. In a statement upon release of the FAO
Report entitled Livestock’s Long Shadow, Christopher Matthews (2006, p. 1)
notes:

… the livestock sector generates more greenhouse gas emissions as measured in CO2
equivalent – 18 percent – than transport. It is also a major source of land and water
degradation… The environmental costs per unit of livestock production must be cut by
one half, just to avoid the ​level of damage worsening beyond its present level…
When emissions from land use and land use change are included, the livestock sector
accounts for 9 per cent of CO2 deriving from human-related activities, but produces a
much larger share of even more harmful greenhouse gases. ​
Ecological catastrophe includes the social catastrophe of slum-dwelling, related
to the more general possibility of what archaeologists call ‘demographic
collapse’, precipitated by agri-industrialisation, the elements of which include the
new ‘population biology’ resulting from industrial farming and livestock
operations, which multiply not only the number of humans but of the beings
favoured in agro-food markets, all at the expense of the many beings and
relationships in self-organising ecosystems’ (Friedmann 2006, p. 464).
Apocalyptic imagining (see, for example, Attali 1991; Diamond 2006; Saul 2006)
has a new currency in these circumstances, and will inform political thought
regarding new multilateral arrangements.
As we have argued, new multilateral arrangements will also be compelled to
address welfare and equity concerns across the state system. Short-term cycles of
redistribution of land and access to food will be necessary to stabilise the
conditions for basic social reproduction of the majority of the world’s population.
The path trodden by corporate agriculture and the deepening food circuits
associated with supermarketisation is inevitably inter-weaving social and
environmental justice concerns – as populations lose more habitat and access to
food, water and other resources. Intensified political mobilisations and relentless
images and experiences of environmental and economic refugees may, in the
short-run, promote protectionism and ethnic nationalism, but in the longer-run
(before we are all dead) a collective survival ethic will be necessary to preserve
human life on this planet. We cannot divine this long term here, but we can
perhaps identify some emergent principles that are first steps towards recognising
the problem, if not providing the solution in a new, post-corporate food regime.
The Latin American revolt perhaps signals a significant step towards
recognising the selectivity and anti-democratic principles of (corporate) ‘free
trade’ and the importance of the principle of equitable trade based on political
cooperation rather than economic competition. Embedded in this revolt is a re-
turn to public authority, in the guise of a politics of populism. Another, incipient,
political direction may emerge from China, where state capitalism is likely to
evolve to manage China’s huge human and ecological crises, and perhaps model
a new ‘development’ paradigm in the wake of the collapse of the US model.
Projection of that model into the multilateral arena may be one future solution, as
China becomes increasingly consequential geo-politically. But this is ultimately
not about a new cycle of hegemony, so much as a politics of necessity as the
world confronts an increasingly fouled nest, and the need to avoid a cascading
‘demographic collapse’. ​
With positive imagination, we can perceive trends that may contribute to a
new ‘global politics of moderation’ premised on states, collectively, elevating
public regulation of food production, trade and carbon exchange, under an ethics
of sovereignty and sufficiency driven by networks of mobilised labour and
peasants, and their ethical consumer allies. At present the lead appears to be taken
by rural social movements, in conjunction with human rights and fair trade
peasants, and their ethical consumer allies. At present the lead appears to be taken
by rural social movements, in conjunction with human rights and fair trade
groups committed to modelling green and ethical relationships (see Hughes,
Chapter 9). To the left of these groups, perhaps with a longer-term vision, are
movements like La Vía Campesina, the international peasant federation that has
developed a politics of ‘food sovereignty’ as a substantive alternative to, and
incorporating in new terms, ‘food security’ – hitherto a formalistic conception
appropriated by the forces of privatisation. The ‘food sovereignty’ movement not
only introduces a substantive rights-driven food politics to ‘move away from
productivist language to a discourse of ‘growers and eaters’,’ rendering food
relations context-specific and subject to democratic practices at local, national
and multilateral scales (Patel 2007, p. 91; see also Friedmann 2003), but also it
re-values agriculture and food, and, most of all, agrarian peoples, in an attempt to
stem and reverse the telos and practice of de-peasantisation associated with
corporate-driven ‘development’ (McMichael 2006). To politicise (and de-
naturalise) food relations is to open up the question of the production regime and
its social and ecological consequences, and possibly to reverse the paradigm that
supermarkets are deepening.
Climate change anxiety, even if channelled in a cost-effective direction by the
Stern Report (2006), may be the midwife of these concerns and, ironically, this
constraint may intensify the re-localisation of food production and consumption.
No one knows whether states can once again become masters rather than servants
of capital. Perhaps there is a solution that will emerge from ecological regions
crosscut by political borders, whose contours will emerge from piecemeal
responses to local social or natural crisis. Humanity’s present course, of which
the supermarket revolution is symbol and symptom, is likely, however, to prove
unsustainable.

NOTES

1. ​By ‘economy of quality’ we refer to the priority given to consumption in the ‘supermarket
revolution’, and in particular the premium on food product standards for supermarkets, whose
competitive relations are increasingly governed by uniform/unblemished, ready-made, green or
ethical criteria, where consumer loyalty to supermarket brands with such ‘quality’ criteria over-
determines price.

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