Agricultural systems have been transformed over the past fifty years, moving towards a more industrialized, corporate, and globalized model of food, fuel, and fiber production. We see these tendencies in the widespread application of agri-chemical inputs such as synthetic fertilizer, herbicide, pesticide, and fungicide; in the elimination of farm diversity and shift into monocultural production (or production of a single crop); and in the changes in farm technology that enable more to be produced from the land in less time. Such technologies range from farm machinery to animal antibiotics to seed breeding innovations, including genetically modified seeds. These transformations have often brought tremendous gains in short-term agricultural productivity. However, they have had enormous ecological consequences. Water resources have been depleted, irrigated lands salinized, and aquatic ecosystems lost to eutrophication (to name just a few shifts).

As the lecture by Raj Patel for this week details, technological shifts in farming systems have also enabled a handful of corporations to control our food system, controlling not only most trade and retail in food but most of the profits as well. The result is a transnational food and agricultural system. Livestock may be raised in one spot, but they are de-boned in another, packaged in yet another, and consumed in yet another. Even fresh fruit and vegetable production is now a transnational business. Walk around a US supermarket and you may see green beans from Kenya, roses from Holland, grapes from Chile, pineapple from Mexico, shrimp from Thailand, and coffee from Indonesia. Just as often it will be impossible to identify where the food we eat was produced. This is the paradox of globalized agricultural markets, according to some human-environment geographers: food comes from everywhere, but nowhere in particular.

Proponents argue that the industrialized food system has helped to eliminate world hunger (more on this next week)! As you’ll unpack in the reading for this week and the lecture by Raj Patel, however, this is a highly debatable point. The global food system has not only tended towards overproduction, it has also systematically produced hunger and famine. Case in point, according to many: the global food crisis that occurred between 2007-2008. During this crisis, there were bumper harvests and bumper profits with food prices increasing by 45% in just 9 months. And yet about one billion people went hungry because they could not afford to buy the food being sold. These are some of the contradictions I invite you to engage this week as you begin your exploration of global food and agricultural markets. What are some of the differences between relatively more traditional and relatively more industrialized agricultural systems? What are some advantages and disadvantages of an industrialized and global food regime and why might more production (on its own) fail to solve the problem of hunger?