American Food System Research Articles

Toward the recovery of the local in the globalizing food system: the role of alternative agricultural and food models in the US

The American food system has come to be defined by three significant developments: globalization, consolidation, and industrialization. These developments have not emerged as defining elements of t...

Reweaving the food security safety net: Mediating entitlement and entrepreneurship

The American food system has produced both abundance and food insecurity, with production and consumption dealt with as separate issues. The new approach of community food security (CFS) seeks to re-link production and consumption, with the goal of ensuring both an adequate and accessible food supply in the present and the future. In its focus on consumption, CFS has prioritized the needs of low-income people; in its focus on production, it emphasizes local and regional food systems. These objectives are not necessarily compatible and may even be contradictory. This article describes the approach of community food security and raises some questions about how the movement can meet its goals of simultaneously meeting the food needs of low-income people and developing local food systems. It explores the conceptual and political promise and pitfalls of local, community-based approaches to food security and examines alternative economic strategies such as urban agriculture and community-supported agriculture. It concludes that community food security efforts are important additions to, but not subsitutes for, a nonretractable governmental safety net that protects against food insecurity.

Transnational Corporations and Asymmetries in the Latin American Food System

Several years ago Bacha identified three intellectual streams in the burgeoning literature on unequal exchange. For Marxists such as Emmanuel, the problem was analysed as a central feature of the development of capitalism on a world scale which had its source in the existence of higher real wages in the developed Centre than in the underdeveloped Periphery. For neo-Ricardians such as Steedman, the phenomenon arises as a result of extending their critique of standard capital theory to the sphere of international trade. Lastly, there has been a long standing debate in development economics as to the distribution of gains from trade between developed and underdeveloped countries ever since the contributions of Lewis, Prebisch and Singer. This paper, which is concerned with the relationship between transnational corporations (TNCs) and markets in the Latin American food system, is situated within the institutionalist tradition of development economics. More specifically, my aims are twofold. Firstly, a transactional framework is outlined for identifying and explaining the presence of asymmetries in national and international food chains where TNCs may be present. Different types of asymmetry are distinguished in the context of a world economy increasingly integrated by means of both markets and hierarchies. Secondly, this general framework is used to analyse a specific transactional form which appears to be of increasing importance as a link between TNCs and agricultural producers in the region, namely production contracting. The analysis complements my earlier work on the determinants of foreign investment in the Latin American food industry, and on comparative advantage versus food security as agricultural development criteria for the region (Scott, 1981, and forthcoming).