Section Goals:

1. Consider how globalization of the food industry relates to people’s local interaction with food.
2. Learn details about challenges to modern environments (cities) and modern farmers related to this process of globalization.
3. Relate global food systems and policies with the concept of a maximum sustainable yield.
4. Learn about the risk to ecosystems through a case study of cod fishing.

Globalization of Food

Many thousands of years ago, one of humanity’s ancestors might have spied a sprout emerging from a refuse pile of pits, nuts, and seeds. Perhaps it was a lightbulb moment: “Hmm, I wonder if I could do that on purpose….” Or maybe it was somebody who dug up a plant and moved it closer to camp: “Genius! Now I don’t have to walk so far!” Somehow, people discovered that they need not rely on the whims of nature to provide them with plants; rather, they could grow the plants they wanted in places more convenient to them. This basic manipulation of nature is called cultivation, and gather-hunters were experimenting with it for thousands of years before the development of farming.

Currently, most people, when they think about food, still consider it a local, individual choice based on personal preferences and economic possibilities. But food is a global commodity marketed by transnational corporations, health institutes, advertising campaigns, and subtle and not-so-subtle cultural messaging through global media such as movies, television, and online video. Most often, what people choose to eat is based on underlying structures that determine availability and cost. While there are now hothouse businesses growing year-round fruits and vegetables, affordability often prohibits everyone from having access to fresh, ripe foods. Instead, mainstream grocery stores most often stock foods imported across long distances. Most fruits and vegetables sold in the grocery store were harvested unripe (and often tasteless) so that they would last the days and weeks between harvesting and purchase.

Globalization

In her work on food and globalization, anthropologist and food studies specialist Lynne Phillips points out the “crooked pathways” (2006) that food takes to become a global commodity. Increasingly affected by transnational corporations, food today is marketed for endlessly higher profits. Food no longer goes simply from producer to consumer. There are many turns along the way.

Food globalization has numerous effects on our daily lives:

• The food chains from producers to consumers are increasingly fragile as a small number of transnational corporations provide the basic foods that we eat daily. Failures in this food chain might come from contamination during production or breaks in the supply chain due to climate crises, tariffs, or trade negotiations between countries. Our dependence on global food chains makes the food supply to our communities more vulnerable to disruption and scarcity.
• Our food cultures are less diverse and tend to revolve around a limited number of mass-produced meats or grains. With the loss of diversity, there is an accompanying loss not only of food knowledge but also of nutrition.
• As foods become more globalized, we are increasingly dependent on food additives to enhance the appearance and taste of foods and to ensure their preservation during the long journey from factory farm to table. We are also increasingly exposed to steroids, antibiotics, and other medicines in the meat we eat. This exposure poses health risks to large numbers of people.
• As plants and animals are subjected to ever more sophisticated forms of genetic engineering, there is an increasing monopoly on basic food items, allowing transnational companies to affect regulatory controls on food safety. As corporate laboratories develop patented seeds (such as the Monsanto Corporation’s genetically engineered corn) that are super-producers and able to withstand challenges such as harsh climate conditions and disease, growers become dependent on the seed sold by these corporations. No longer able to save seed from year to year, growers have little choice but to pay whatever price these corporations choose to charge for their genetic material.
• Factory farming of all types, but especially large-scale animal farms, are major contributors to global warming. Not only do they produce large amounts of water and air pollution and contribute to worldwide deforestation, but as more and more forest is turned into pasture, the sheer number of livestock contributes significant levels of greenhouse gases that lead to global warming. Worldwide, livestock account for around 14.5 percent of global greenhouse gas emissions (Quinton 2019).

Food has long been an international commodity, even during the 17th and 18th centuries, when traders sought spice and trade routes connecting Europe and Asia. Today, however, food has become transnational, with production sometimes spanning many different countries and fresh and processed foods moving long distances from their original harvest or production. Because these migrating foods must be harvested early or packaged with preservatives that we may not know or even be able to pronounce, there has been a parallel development in local food movements, organic food movements, and farm-to-table establishments as people see the dangers of food globalization. In the very popular The Omnivore’s Dilemma: A Natural History of Four Meals (2006), American author and food journalist Michael Pollan advocates that people should know the identity of the foods they eat and should make every effort to eat locally sourced products. Shortly after the book’s publication, chef and author Jessica Prentice coined the term locavore to refer to those who eat locally and know the origins of their foods.

Urban Food: Local Food and Short Supply Chains

The various aspects of this principle include: local food production; regional supply; an emphasis on urban farming and agriculture, including “eat local” and “slow food” initiatives. The sustainable city makes provision for adequate land for food production in the city, a return to the community and to the allotment gardens of past days, where roof gardens become an urban market garden. It is essential that we bridge the urban-rural disconnect and move cities towards models that deal in natural eco-systems and healthy food systems.

The people of the eco-city would garden and farm locally, sharing food, creating compost with kitchen scraps and garden clippings and growing community vegetables. Buying and consuming locally will be necessary to cut down on petrol-based transport. Such things as re-using bags and glass containers, paper recycling and the cost of food processing will need reconsideration. We will need to reduce our consumption of meat and other animal products, especially shipped-in beef, as the meat cycle is very intensive in terms of energy and water consumption and herds create methane and demand great quantities of electricity.

Contemporary Challenges of Farming Societies

Communities relying primarily on extensive horticulture or intensive agriculture are generally able to meet their own subsistence needs. However, with the development of cities into regional empires, many cultivators became incorporated into larger structures of trade and government. Under pressure from these structures, farmers past and present were and are obliged to sell their surplus for cash in order to pay taxes and purchase agricultural inputs such as seed and fertilizer. As cities and states grow, they exert pressure on cultivators to produce ever higher yields to support greater populations and more elaborate state projects. As cultivators become incorporated into demanding states, they become a class of peasants. A peasant is a farmer with a small plot of land incorporated into a larger regional economy. Nearly all contemporary cultivators are part of a peasant class in their nation-states (Sillitoe 2018). Peasants are often marginalized and disadvantaged, reliant on economic and political structures they cannot control, and exploited by urban elites. Many farmers now make up a rural underclass.

Trade-offs: From Foragers to State Systems of Agriculture

As the world population continues to grow (currently at around 7.9 billion people), climate change accelerates, and food production becomes more and more concentrated in the hands of a few corporations, access to food will become increasingly critical to our survival. The story of progress embraced by Western society tells us that globalization and agricultural developments have stabilized and secured our food chains, but anthropological studies of foragers suggest otherwise.

Agricultural production is tied to access to arable land, clean water, stable climate, and a reliable workforce. Periodically, crops (and animals) fail due to disease, drought, and even disruption from warfare and extreme weather, leading to scarcity and famine in many parts of the world. In addition, as families and communities produce less and less of their own food and become more and more dependent on intermediaries to gain access to food, their vulnerabilities increase.

While there are many differences between state societies and foragers, there are valuable lessons we can learn from them. Foragers, facing the same unstable conditions that we all face worldwide, have a more varied and flexible diet and are able to adjust their needs seasonally based on local availability. They eat locally, and they adjust their needs to what is available.

Maximum Sustainable Yield

Some resources might be better managed if they are understood to be a global resource, such as fish caught in international waters. One way to conceptualize the management of fish populations is to think about how fish can be harvested without causing a collapse in the reproduction of the population; or being an example of the tragedy of the commons.

The useful concept of maximum sustainable yield (MSY) comes from population ecology and economics. It is theoretically the largest yield (or catch) that can be taken from a species’ stock over an indefinite period. Fundamental to the notion of sustainable harvest, the concept of MSY aims to maintain the population size at the point of maximum growth rate by harvesting the individuals that would normally be added to the population, allowing the population to continue to be productive indefinitely. Under the assumption of logistic growth, resource limitation does not constrain individuals’ reproductive rates when populations are small, but because there are few individuals, the overall yield is small. At intermediate population densities, individuals are able to breed to their maximum rate (Figure 1). At this point, there is a surplus of individuals that can be harvested because growth of the population is at its maximum point due to the large number of reproducing individuals.

However, the concept of maximum sustainable yield is not always easy to apply in practice. Estimation problems arise due to poor assumptions in some models and lack of reliability of the data. Biologists, for example, do not always have enough data to make a clear determination of the population’s size and growth rate. Calculating the point at which a population begins to slow from competition is also very difficult. The concept of MSY also tends to treat all individuals in the population as identical, thereby ignoring all aspects of population structure such as size or age classes and their differential rates of growth, survival, and reproduction.

As a management goal, the static interpretation of MSY (i.e., MSY as a fixed catch that can be taken year after year) is generally not appropriate because it ignores the fact that fish populations undergo natural fluctuations (i.e., MSY treats the environment as unvarying) in abundance and will usually ultimately become severely depleted under a constant-catch strategy. 

Case Study: Cod Fishery Collapse

The MSY approach has been widely criticized as ignoring several key factors involved in fisheries management and has led to the devastating collapse of many fisheries. One specific and devastating to the local economy is the cod fishing industry in Newfoundland.

Cod fishing in Newfoundland was carried out at a subsistence level for centuries, but large scale fishing began shortly after the European arrival in the North American continent in 1492, with the waters being found to be preternaturally plentiful, and ended after intense overfishing with the collapse of the fisheries in 1992 (Figure 2).

The challenge and what led to the eventual devastation to the cod populations were commercial fishing practices, estimated to have started with super-trawler vessels in 1951. The cod catch peaked in 1968 at 810,000 tons, approximately three times more than the maximum yearly catch achieved before the super-trawlers. Approximately eight million tons of cod were caught between 1647 and 1750, a period encompassing 25 to 40 cod generations. The factory trawlers took the same amount in 15 years.

The industry collapsed entirely in the early 1990s owing to overfishing and debatably, greed, lack of foresight and poor local administration. By 1993 six cod populations had collapsed, forcing a belated moratorium on fishing. Spawning biomass had decreased by at least 75% in all stocks, by 90% in three of the six stocks, and by 99% in the case of ‘northern’ cod, previously the largest cod fishery in the world. After a 10-year moratorium on fishing begun in 1992, the cod had still not returned. 

The economic impact of the closure of the Atlantic cod fishery on Newfoundland has been compared to the effect of closing every manufacturing plant in Ontario. Cod fishing as a way of life came to an abrupt end for 19,000 workers after a 500-year history as a main industry.

Attributions

Essentials of Environmental Science by Kamala Doršner is licensed under CC BY 4.0. Modified from original by Joni Baumgarten.

Introduction to Anthropology 7.5 by Jennifer Hasty, David G. Lewis, and Marjorie M. Snipes is licensed under CC BY 4.0. Modified from original by Joni Baumgarten.

Introduction to Anthropology 14.2 by Jennifer Hasty, David G. Lewis, and Marjorie M. Snipes is licensed under CC BY 4.0. Modified from original by Joni Baumgarten.

Introduction to Anthropology 14.4 by Jennifer Hasty, David G. Lewis, and Marjorie M. Snipes is licensed under CC BY 4.0. Modified from original by Joni Baumgarten.

Maximum Sustainable Yield by Wikipedia is licensed CCA-SA 3.0. Modified by Joni Baumgarten. Accessed March 8, 2023.

Cod Fishing in Newfoundland by Wikipedia is licensed CCA-SA 3.0. Modified by Joni Baumgarten. Accessed March 8, 2023.

History of Newfoundland and Labrador by Wikipedia is licensed CCA-SA 3.0. Modified by Joni Baumgarten. Accessed March 8, 2023.