International Security, Crime, Terrorism & Conflict

The Food System in Crisis - social movements, food in-security and bio-politics

Dr Matt Reed

– David Kilcullen !

- “Out of the Mountains: The coming age of the urban guerilla” 2013

“Just as living things require inputs..so do cities. That is cities cannot exist without those inputs - urbanites require clean air, water, food, fuel and

construction goods to subsist …” pg.41

Outline- The political ecology of understanding the creation of the international order!- Social movements and the challenge to existing orders!- Linking the body and spaces of resistance

Key terms - political ecology, climate, food security, food system, social movement theory, ordering, bio-politics!Key thinkers - Davis, Castells, Foucault

Food Security - Increasing public policy concern

❖ Projections of shortage - climate change, limits of physical inputs (peak oil, water etc)!

❖ Global demographic changes (young, southern)!

❖ Urban-rural transition (urban, littoral, unplanned)!

❖ Dietary transition (plants to meat)!

❖ Changes to international order (rise of China, US hegemony)

ENSO

- ENSO - El Nino - Southern Oscillation!

- Global climatic change, irregular!

- shown as nations but regions effected!

- changes to heat/rain fall patterns

flows across pacific!

reversed

Shifts in weather patterns

impacts on monsoon

ENSO impacts

❖ Droughts in Australia, China, India and Southern Africa !

❖ Profound impact on agricultural production, particularly cereals (wheat, corn, rice) but also pastoral production systems!

❖ These are traded as commodities globally

Making of the 3rd world❖ Davis argues that severe ENSO cycles in late 19th C allowed

imperial expansion, intersection of imperialist militarism, global market and climate!

❖ India, China - people often had higher standards of living and were centres of industrial production - “Even outcaste agricultural labourers in Madras earned more in real terms than English farm labourers” p.55!

❖ Whole of free trade system held up funds from Asian trade ‘the starving Indian and Chinese peasantries were wheeled in as unlikely saviours’ p58

Mike Davis, - Late Victorian Holocausts/The Origin of the Third World

“Nineteenth-century peasant producers in India and China - and, to a lesser extent, in Brazil and southern Africa - existed increasingly in the late

Victorian world market but not of it.” p54

“Between 1875-1900 - a period that included the worst famines in Indian history - annual grain

exports increased from 3 to 10 million tons; as Dutt pointed out, this quantity equaled the annual

nutrition of 25 million people.” p59

19th Century China

- Massive ethnic violence and revolts!- Imperial government forced to abandon mechanisms protecting against ENSO induced famines!- ‘Britain’s dominant role in Chinese foreign trade, built by Victorian nacrotrafficantes with gunboats, thus leveraged the whole free trade imperium’ Davis p.60

HEILONGJIANG

HARBIN

CHANGCHUNJILIN

SHENYANGLIAONING

SHANDONGJINAN

JIANGSU

SHANGHAISHANGHAI

HANGZHOU

ZHEJIANG

SHIJIAZHUANG

TIANJINTIANJIN

ÜRÜMQI

XINJIANG

TIBET (XIZANG)

LHASA

QINGHAI

XINING

GANSU

INNER MONGOLIA

HOHHOT

NINGXIASHANXI

HEBEI

BEIJINGBEIJING

GUANGZHOUHONG KONGHONG KONG

MACAU

SICHUAN

CHENGDU

YUNNAN

KUNMING

HAINAN

GUANGXI

NANNING

LANZHOU

NANJING

CHONGQING HUBEIANHUI

HEFEIZHENGZHOU

HENAN

YINCHUAN

XI’AN

SHAANXI

TAIYUAN

FUJIAN

FUZHOU

GUANGDONG

HAIKOU

HUNAN

CHANGSHANANCHANGJIANGXIGUIZHOU

GUIYANG

CHONGQING WUHAN

Contemporary China, and place names

The British Raj 19th Century

“If the history of British rule in were to be condensed in a single fact, it is this; there was no increase in India’s per capita income from 1757 to 1947. There was no economic development in the usual sense of the term.” Davis p.63!!- Commercialisation of agriculture - wheat, cotton, opium, indigo led to impoverishment and starvation.!!- Raj choked off the development of peasant agriculture into capitalist agriculture.

SRINAGAR

JAMMU & KASHMIR

JAMMUHIMACHAL PRADESHSHIMLAPUNJAB

CHANDIGARH

DELHI

HARYANA

RAJASTHAN

JAIPUR

GUJARAT

GANDHINAGAR

UTTARAKHANDDEHRADUN

UTTAR PRADESH

LUCKNOW

MADHYA PRADESH

BHOPAL

MAHARASHTRAMUMBAI

SILVASSADAMAN

DADRA & NAGAR HAVELI

ANDHRA PRADESH

HYDERABAD

KARNATAKA

BANGALORE

GOAPANAJI

KERALA

THIRUVANANTHAPURAM

TAMIL NADU

PONDICHERRY

CHENNAI

BHUBANESWAR(ODISHA) ORISSA

CHHATTISGARH

RAIPUR

BIHAR

PATNA

JHARKHANDRANCHI

WEST BENGALKOLKATA

SIKKIM

GANGTOK ASSAM DISPUR

ARUNACHAL PRADESH

ITANAGA

NAGALANDKOHIMAIMPHAL

MANIPURAIZAWLMIZORAMTRIPURA

AGARTALA

SHILLONGMEGHALAYA

British India - Pakistan, India, Bangladesh, Burma

Why all this talk of the 19th C?

❖ Importance of:!

❖ Agricultural commodities - food (wheat, tea, coffee), drugs (opium) & industrial inputs (indigo)!

❖ Global trade and international order!

❖ Consequences of financialization of commodities for poorer people!

❖ Intersection of climatic variation and social systems.

http://www.hbo.com/documentaries/in-tahrir-square-18-days-of-egypts-unfinished-revolution

Global/Arab Spring 2010 -

❖ Food price spikes after ENSO events - draught/floods - increased financialization/speculation of food commodities!

❖ US and Europe bio-fuels - food = fuel!

❖ Urbanised populations very reliant on often subsidised food products.!

❖ Then it all kicked off! [http://youtu.be/bu9YBJ_wp3I]

Social movement definitions❖ Shared Identity!

❖ may transcend class/gender/ethnicity!

❖ Informal networks!

❖ not one single organisation

❖ Solidarity!

❖ support one another!

❖ Unconventional protests

Protest

❖ Transcending ‘normal’ politics!

❖ Bearing witness - sincerity and sacrifice!

❖ Numbers - mass protests!

❖ Symbolic acts - images!

❖ Cultural protest - tailored to the governance system!

❖ Control of (urban) space

Hybrid urban spaces❖ Castells!

❖ "In our society, the public space of the social movement is constructed as a hybrid space between the Internet social networks and the occupied urban space: connecting cyberspace and urban space in relentless interaction, constituting, technologically and culturally, instant communities of transformative practice.' p 11!

❖ Co-ordination across time/space !

❖ Increase speed of communication and experimentation !

❖ Diffusion and availability

Protest movements 2008 - 2014

- Arab spring (Tunisia, Egypt, Syria, Morocco, Turkey, Yemen, Bahrain) + protest in Iran!

- Occupy movement (US, UK …..)!

- Indignadas (Spain) + Greek & Italian protests!

- Brazilian protests

- Riots in the UK, Sweden and China! - On-going protests in Thailand!- Suppressed peaceful Sunni protests in Iraq

Stuffed & Starved❖ A focus of governance on the body !

❖ The starved - those without food or insecure!

❖ threat of insurrection!❖ The stuffed - those who’s bodies

are over fed!❖ threat of illness and drain !

❖ Regulation of the body - medical interventions!

❖ Also national security - competition between nations - eclipse of liberal order?

–Michel Foucault (1998:375)

“The body and everything that touches it: diet, climate, and soil – is the domain of the Herkunft: “The body manifests the stigmata of past experience and also gives rise to desires, failings and errors” (Foucault 1998:375)!

Herkunft - descent - as discussed by Nietzche

Future thoughts❖ The nexus of the global commodity chain written on the

body !

❖ Security in this context multifaceted - national, familial, personal….!

❖ Food system vital in a wider political ecology !

❖ Borders of the licit/illicit commodities - central role of drugs!

❖ Opportunities not just for repression but revolt

Contact

mreed@glos.ac.uk!!@Reedmtweet!!