Changing Agri-food Systems in the Global Economy

Abstract

Current agri-food systems are increasingly becoming globalized. Among the major drivers of this trend under the current “corporate food regime” are the large agribusiness firms. This article discusses the globalization of food and its social and spatial consequences, with a focus on agribusinesses’ disembedding of food supplies from nature. Agribusinesses have come to control food production and distribution, through the industrial appropriation of production and the substitution of natural produce with industrially-produced food, and thus have overcome the inherent constraints imposed by natural components (e. g., biological time, seasonality, and putrescence). This process disembeds food supply systems from the natural production process, through which large agribusiness firms have created a stable and global food supply. At the same time, globalized food systems have caused several problems associated with industrialization, such as a lack of food safety, unfair trade, and the mislabeling of food, which has sparked growing interest in local food systems (LFSs). Newly emerging food provisioning practices, which are linked to food production environments, are being evaluated as alternatives to industrialized and globalized food systems. Meanwhile, the boundaries between “alternative” LFSs embedded in local contexts and conventional agri-food systems that are disembedded from those contexts have become blurred or even undistinguishable in recent years. As such, the dualistic perspectives adopted by current agri-food studies are problematic, in that they risk inaccurately representing food systems with hybrid features that combine the global and the local, or the social and the natural. To understand food’s complicated geographies, further research is needed that transcends binaries such as global-local, conventional-alternative, and social-natural.