Local Food Movement



Local Food Movement

Introduction

What is alternative food? The most obvious way to answer this question is to describe that which alternative is alternative to, and so it is worth detailing in brief those characteristics of the conventional food system that many find so unpalatable (Mount (2012). The conventional food system is widely recognized as highly industrialized, increasingly corporatized, global in expanse, and operating as an advanced capitalist sector. In this system, the natural and social processes of agricultural production and consumption are subjected to the industrial logics of economic efficiency and capital accumulation, with negative implications for society and the environment.

The Conventional Food System

Industrial capitalism transforms agriculture into a vehicle of capital accumulation, and actors within it rely on several strategies to maximize this outcome. That negative social and environmental outcomes are also produced by these strategies is not intended by these actors, but rather symptomatic of this system. Appropriation of natural processes by industrial processes and substitution of natural inputs with industrial inputs are twin strategies employed to “outflank nature's constraints” (Murdoch, Marsden, & Banks, 2000, p. 116). These processes accumulate capital by extracting more marketable goods from nature than she might otherwise yield, and creating additional markets for industrial goods that replace and outperform natural processes (Goodman, Sorj and Wilkinson ctd. in Friedmann & McMichael, 1989; Guthman, 2011; Murdoch, Marsden, & Banks, 2000). These goods include fossil fuel energy, farm machinery, specialized seed or livestock breeds, chemical pesticides and fertilizers.

Farm production and labor processes are specialized to gain greater efficiencies and economies of scale (Bowler, 1992). Concentration and consolidation is also pursued to gain economies of scale and eliminate competition, resulting in fewer but larger units of production (Bowler, 1992; Grey, 2000; Marsden & Whatmore, 1994; Qualman, 2011). These remaining units gain market power to set the conditions for exchange with other supply chain actors in self-advantageous ways (Grey, 2000; Guthman, 2004c; McMichael, 2006; Weis, 2007). For example, oligopolies of input suppliers upstream of producers can set high prices for inputs, and food retailers and manufacturers downstream of producers can set low prices for farm outputs. This results in a 'price-cost squeeze' (Bowler, 1992; Weis, 2007), which reinforces the need for producers to engage in capital accumulation strategies (namely intensified appropriation, substitution and specialization) in order to remain in business. Finally, financialization is one of the more recent capitalist processes to affect the agrofood sector. Financialization refers to the increasing importance of finance capital, markets, and institutions in capital accumulation strategies in the agrofood sector (Burch & Lawrence, 2009). Financialization has grown in importance in recent decades; both facilitating increased concentration in the transnational agrofood sector (Marsden & Whatmore, 1994), as well as being seized by the agrofood industry as another opportunity for capital accumulation through the sale of finance capital (Burch & Lawrence, 2009).

Discussion

These strategies are effective in achieving their intended end (i.e., capital accumulation). However, they also produce unintended negative consequences. The appropriation and substitution of natural with industrial processes and inputs, ...