Re-regionalizing the food system?

This edition of the Cambridge Journal of Regions, Economy and Society is devoted to examining food system (re)-regionalization—a topic that has exploded in academic and public policy circles over the last 5 years. The growing interest in regionalizing food systems is linked to broader concerns that the conventional agro-industrial food system has not effectively provided a nutritious, sustainable and equitable supply of food to the world's population. Technological innovations have provided cheap food to millions, but there are costs of such a system in terms of soil and water depletion, food safety scares, animal welfare, declining rural communities, rising obesity and diet-related health problems, as well as growing food insecurity. These costs were brought into sharp focus in 2007–2008 when a price surge in world food prices led to food-related riots in over 60 countries. The majority of the papers in this issue begin with the assumption that the conventional agro-industrial food system is malfunctioning. The interpretation of how broken and what to do about it, however, is where these papers diverge and offer varied perspectives on food system re-regionalization. Papers provide evidence from both the global north and the global south, as well as rural and urban perspectives. They also enlist different conceptual frameworks ranging from urban political ecology to institutional economics. This introduction to the special issue reviews (i) definitions of food system (re)-regionalization, (ii) past and current conceptual perspectives on re-regionalized food systems, (iii) evidence of new institutional arrangements in particular regions and (iv) directions for future research. Kneafsey (2010) begins this issue with a discussion of the region in food. She suggests that the concept has had much less scrutiny than the concept of food re-localization but that many of the critical concepts applied to ‘localization’ can also apply to ‘regionalization’. She and other writers in this issue also deliberately question the extent to which food systems around the globe are returning to regionalization because the concept of a region is not always meaningful either in terms of the historic organization of food production or in relation to food consumption cultures. More specifically, regionalization of a food system may be evident in some regions of the global north (see, for example, Marsden's [2010] paper in this series), but as Field et al. (2010) argue re-regionalization is mostly a high-income country phenomenon. They point to evidence from an empirical study of Ghana's current agri-food system and the unique logistical, political, social and economic factors that influence its efforts to internationalize and also stay regional and local. For Patel-Campillo (2010), trends in domestic crop production at the regional and municipal scales in Columbia actually pose a threat to food security at the subnational scale. Kneafsey (2010) distinguishes between two types of (re)-regionalization: the trend towards local food production and consumption that embraces ‘regional foods’ and the emergence of new regional food networks. The present interest in writing from a networks perspective reflects a theoretical curiosity about the complex ways in which food is produced, distributed, consumed and discarded. Re-regionalized food systems often defy strict categorization of being completely ‘local’ or ‘global’, ‘fair trade’ or ‘green’ and ‘alternative’ or ‘conventional’. As a consequence, the network (or relational) concept is well suited because it provides a conceptual terminology for a system that deals with “flows, processes and relationships rather than static or monolithic structures and systems” (Kneafsey, 2010, 179). The more specific relational focus also opens up theoretical space for exploring the role of non-human and biological processes within the food system, although these areas are not as well represented in this set of papers. (For more on this see, for example, Whatmore, 2002.) Regionalism is still often equated with local. But as Morgan and Sonnino (2010) argue in their paper, local food is not necessarily a surrogate for either a sustainable or a just food strategy, nor does local make sense when scaled up to the regional world-city level. Their approach to urban regional governance contrasts with McClintock's (2010) who views urban agriculture as a key dimension in any re-localization strategy that seeks to de-commodify food for the benefit of society. His paper is largely based on theorizing agriculture through a lens of metabolic rift. We shall now turn to this and other conceptual perspectives put forward. Past conceptual frameworks applied to the analysis of agricultural systems have emphasized producer over consumer actions and have often been aspatial. Yet they provide a relatively useful blueprint for uncovering present—often implicit and hidden—assumptions in extant work on re-regionalized food systems. Here, we draw from Lobao and Meyer (2001) to organize current approaches to the study of re-regionalized food systems. We focus on an important issue raised in the literature, the degree to which re-regionalized food systems can transcend existing societal inequalities. Two perspectives on re-regionalized food systems can be considered ‘consensus-based’ because they view these systems as emerging from a shared, socially desired movement towards more localized systems. These perspectives tend to take a status quo oriented, ‘what is, is what ought to be’, stance towards the development of regional food systems; i.e. they tend not to have a strong interest in the various forms of inequalities arising from the food system. It should be stressed that most studies examining regionalized food systems see these as arising in response to the limitations of conventional or industrialized farming systems. First, it is worthwhile to highlight the neoclassical economic perspective both because of its conceptual dominance in the US agricultural establishment and because it often serves as a foil to more radical critiques in the regional food systems research. The neoclassical perspective rests on several assumptions: that the structure of the present food system is socially desirable, individuals’ behaviour is guided by rational–choice decision making and human capital factors and lifestyle choices explain why producers engage in farming for local markets and why consumers seek to purchase their products. From this point of view, regional food systems develop out of a consensus between producers and consumers that advantage both groups. Inequalities amongst camps of producers and consumers are not of central conceptual interest and, in turn, do not frame empirical narratives about the manner by which re-regionalization evolves and whom it benefits. The second, kindred consensus-based approach is from the ecological perspective on farming systems. It parallels the neoclassical approach in framing the development of regionalized food systems as functional or beneficial to populations at large. However, the ecological approach tends to give greater attention to the spatial organization of food systems. Also, while it assumes (like the neo-classical approach) that consensus among producers and consumers drives the development of food systems, the ecological approach focuses on larger, more macro-societal factors creating regionalized food systems: population density, urban–rural social organization, regional environmental conditions and technological inputs and marketing infrastructure. Regionalized food systems arise, fall and adapt as a consequence of population, social organization, ecological and technological factors. The article by Clark et al. (2010) in this special issue contains elements of both frameworks. Farmers are viewed as social actors having an inherent interest in moving towards more localized food systems but regional commodity systems, social organization such as urban zoning regulations and even local culture are barriers to this adaptation. Inequality-based approaches arise out of a more critical stance in the regional food system literature and we can delineate two distinct approaches. Both emphasize tension and conflict between key food system actors but the degree of interest in inequality varies—as does the diagnosis and prognosis for reducing inequality in the future. The first perspective developed as a reaction against the inequalities in the food system brought about by corporate agriculture. It views the need to preserve family farming and community-based food systems because these are essential to democracy and civil society (see, for example, the work on civic agriculture by Lyson [2004]). It is a liberal–democratic approach that comes out of a long tradition of Jeffersonian populism. It sees agribusiness corporations as responsible for endangering family farms and the development of small-scale, local food systems as a potential remedy. Here attention to inequality is given particular emphasis on the producer side, focusing on the manner by which small-scale local producers might survive in an agricultural system where both market and state forces have long worked against them. Producer survival strategies, such as networks with other local farm and non-farm actors such as retailers and consumers, take on particular importance. Inequality among non-farm actors is also considered—though often in an amorphous way, such as calling for social justice in the food sector without clear delineation of the actors that bear the costs and benefits of regionalized food systems. The future of regionalized food systems tends to be portrayed in a relatively positive light, with incremental changes seen as heralding a movement towards a more progressive food system. For McClintock (2010), the rise of urban agriculture everywhere is evidence of a countermovement in response to economic crisis and to the commodification of land and labour. His paper makes a theoretical contribution to the urban agricultural debates through a lens of metabolic rift that can be thought of as a rescaling exercise. By exploring how urban agriculture arises from three interrelated dimensions of metabolic rift—ecological, social and individual—McClintock (2010) demonstrates how urban agriculture is rescaling production, reclaiming vacant land and ‘de-alienated’ urban dwellers from their food. For McClintock (2010), the extent to which urban agricultural practices can be scaled up remains the grand challenge. The second inequality-based perspective is grounded in a much more critical approach to the regionalized food systems. Its foundation is in radical political economy theory that gives primary attention to the structural exigencies of capitalism as expressed through specific corporate behaviour and the state's role in maintaining vested interests in the food system. Often analysts situate regional food systems in the context of the neoliberal development model. From this perspective, an unequal society begets an unequal food system that will be difficult if not impossible to change. Though political economy theorists share many concerns as the above liberal–democratic approach, they are not intrinsically concerned with preserving small, locally oriented farm businesses. Nor are these analysts convinced that regionalized food systems best serve the interests of the poor and working classes and within the farm sector, women and farm labour. In fact, regionalized food systems may be a barrier to alleviating hunger and poverty insofar as they function as a cosmetic solution to real changes in the allocation of societal resources. Overall, the political economy framework sees regionalized food systems as socially produced and regulated in ways that benefit large capital within and outside the farming sector. The result will continue to be a food system that fails to benefit most farmers, consumers, the poor and working classes and the environment. While most of papers in this special issue combine elements from both sets of inequality oriented approaches, the papers addressing developing nations by Patel-Campillo and by Field et al. offer a particularly pessimistic view of the limitations of any changes in food systems for the poor or mass population. The papers by Morgan and Sonnino (2010) and Marsden (2010) provide the most detailed analyses of what a re-regionalized food system could potentially look like. Morgan and Sonnino draw on the evolution of urban food strategies in two world cities, London and New York, to suggest that ‘culturally diverse cities that wish to develop “sustainable food strategies” need to strike a balance between the localization of their food chains, where the aim should be to calibrate the local production and consumption …, and globalization, where the aim should be to promote the use of fairly traded produce from developing countries’ (Morgan and Sonnino, 2010, 212). They recommend that these cities promote ‘cosmopolitan localism’, rather than ‘localism per se’, giving the city a dual identity: ‘as a bounded space, with a local territorial identity, and a relational space, which allows urban diasporas to commune with their countries of origin’. (212) This does not mean, however, that rural spaces necessarily just practice some form of ‘defensive localism’. Rather, as Marsden (2010) points out, re-localized food systems can play a pivotal role in forging a sustainable rural economic development strategy. Using the example of Devon and Shetland in the UK, he develops the concept of the ‘rural web’ to describe the complex processes and relationships that successful rural places have developed in moving towards a more sustainable ecological and economic future. As this suggests, regionalizing the food system is a contested concept. But unlike its local and global cousins, it can provide a clearer conceptual terminology for a system that describes the complex flows, processes and relationship of present-day food systems rather than more bounded structures and systems most often associated with either a conventional global agri-food system or a highly localized one. Drawing on a relational perspective—albeit from different theoretical positions—many of the papers in this issue demonstrate the contested and complex ways in which food systems are re-organizing in light of the fundamental costs associated with conventional agro-industrial food systems. While the papers offer diverse conceptual perspectives and geographies—rural, urban, north and south—they also suggest missing dimensions in the literature that point to directions for future research. First, there remains a surprising lack of research on the actual business practices and competitive strategies of new food firms as they adopt a more regionalized food system strategy. A closely related topic is the role of major food retailers and supermarkets in a (re)-regionalized food system. How regional food networks relate to the advanced distribution, storage technologies and market research capacity of global supermarket chains is an area that needs further study (See for example, Donald, 2008). Third, much more work needs to be done from an environmental perspective, especially in light of current political and media interest in carbon foodprints and a system that privileges sun-based agriculture over more carbon-based models. Fourth, theoretical development is needed to better understand regionalizing processes at different spatial scales while addressing key social relationships such as class, gender and ethnic inequalities in production and consumption and the state and market forces embedded in a region. Fifth there is a need for greater bridging among the social science disciplines that have long been engaged in the study of regional food systems—geography, rural sociology and regional economics. Finally, the paper by Allen (2010) advances debates about justice in the food system, but this is a topic that still requires a great deal of reflection given the profoundly unequal relationships that leave far too many people hungry and malnourished.

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