I am invariably confused by the question of why some people are still hungry even with the advanced agricultural technologies, productions, and transportation chains in today’s agricultural system. If we are producing enough to feed everyone on the planet, are the skewed distributions of outputs and wealth the major contributing factors to world hunger? Regarding financial sustainability, farmers and consumers are usually the weak ones. Allen et al. (1991) pointed out that sustainability programs 25 years ago were putting too much attention on environmental sustainability. When it comes to ecological damages due to agriculture, it is usually automatically assumed that farmers should hold the liability. However, the piece pointed out that the decision-making power has shifted from on-the-farm to off-the-farm. Neither farmers nor consumers can decide what to grow on the farms anymore. In my opinion, power holders of the farms are still the leading causes of significant environmental, economic, social, and health problems in today’s food system.
Lang and Heasman (2015) emphasized in the book that the most dominant food paradigm after World War II, the productionist paradigm, should no longer be used to support future food system. In my opinion, farmers and consumers are not the beneficiaries in any of the three paradigms. According to Allen et al. (1991), life sciences integrated paradigm and ecologically integrated paradigm failed to consider the social and economic influences toward agriculture. Since the life sciences, integrated paradigm is driven by the market, and new technologies are developed due to the profitability of interest groups, such as large corporations with economic strengths. As a result, the controlling power in the agricultural system remain off-the-farm, and the welfare of individual farmers and consumers is less considered. As there is currently overproduction of food around the globe, a re-distribution of food products and wealth could be a more sustainable way to eliminate the prevalence of malnutrition. Even though ecologically integrated paradigm focuses on supporting less powerful groups to increase financial and social capital, the products of the ecologically integrated paradigm, such as organic foods, are only affordable by a small group of consumers. According to Allen et al. (1991), “some efforts tend to serve certain clientele selectively and don’t evaluate the social consequences of the technologies that sustainable agriculture encourages.” (p4).
While inequality exists even in today’s agricultural system, Locke (1968) interpreted the natural occurrence of variation in a more idealistic way. Locke (1689) explained his theory that private property was utilizing god’s land, which is “common to all mankind,” to generate products of individual labor. However, Locke’s theoretical framework (1689) assumed that the size of the property was big enough to contain all the population. Problems related to population growth were certainly not taken into accounts. Also, Locke suggested that trading occurred to eliminate wastes among individuals since “money cannot be wasted.” However, trading is not the ultimate way to eliminate wastes. As the market grows, wastes could still occur due to unequal distribution of products and wealth. One of the best examples would be in our food system today. Global overproduction of foods is causing a tremendous amount of waste. Foods are discarded along processing and transportation chains due to various reasons, such as unqualified shapes or past expiry date. However, hunger is still prevalent around the globe. This indicates that food products are not currently being well distributed, and trading becomes a part of the problem as the market grows.
Fairlie’s description (2009) of the progression of British common land from social convention to economic market reminds me of the agricultural transformation from communism to capitalism in China. With the confiscation of individual property rights post-1949, everyone in the society was expected to share equal prosperity. Not long after, the “tragedy of the commons” took place in many industries in China. A great famine took away millions of lives because of shortfalls of agricultural productions.
In agreement with Locke’s statement (1968), natural inequality occurs because people can have different potentials. In an open system, people lose the incentives to increase efficiency and productivity. With the adoption of capitalism, Chinese agricultural system re-established with the introductions of property rights, private retails, and global investments and trades.
In fact, the process of enclosure followed by division of labor truly marked the advancement of global agricultural productivity. The concept of division of labor in Smith’s book (1776) was applied to the grain industry in Cronon’s piece (1992). In my opinion, grain standardization in Chicago served as the antecedent of Fordism in the national agricultural system. With the standardization process in every step of agricultural production, according to Kenney et al. (1991), the productionist paradigm achieved the most efficient outputs, secure farmers’ incomes, and affordable food products. However, the assembly line production method took away farmers and workers’ freedom of making decisions. The specialized division could also take away people’s motivation, creativity, and productivity. In my opinion, the assembly line production method shares one common characteristic the with the concept of pluralism introduced in Sheingate’s book (2003): the diffusion of power and responsibilities will likely lead to blame avoidance. With specialization, no one will feel responsible towards collective consequences such as environmental damages. The American hegemonic power described by Friedmann and McMichael (1989) allowed agricultural industrialization around the globe. The global diffusion of responsibilities serves as one of the contributing factors toward the current food war.
As Cochrane (1993) explained the progression of agricultural revolution from extensive to intensive practices, I started to wonder who is/are the most important beneficiaries of the surplus of grains productions and profits. Advanced machineries that have been introduced to farms and food factories did not necessarily lighten farmers’ and workers’ burdens. For example, food factory workers today often need to work rotating shifts on the assembly line to maintain the quality and efficiency productions.
After retrenchment, farmers could get more stable incomes with the occurrence of subsidies and contracts, according to Key and MacDonald’s article (2006). However, some production contracts favor unequal income to farmers due to the uneven nature of relationships between big corporations and farmers. Big companies usually have more bargaining and legal power. This problem draws my attention back to inequality. What are the factors of the skewed distribution of productions and wealth?
In my opinion, the nature of pluralism encourages growths of large corporations, which leads to inequality within the market. As diffusion of power fosters innovations and entrepreneurial behaviors, conflicts of interest can also take place among different political and commodity groups. This drives to inequality among power distributions of political groups, processors, and producers. The overpowering group tends to have access to various benefits to grow even bigger, while the less powerful group remains being oppressed.
Whenever I see a big bag of apples selling for $1 at Costco, I started to question how can the current agricultural system permit farmers to sell their produce at this price.
As vertical integration brings better deals to consumers, according to Martinez (2007), great bargaining power has been obtained by large wholesalers. Individual farmers and food retails are often left with not many choices but to cooperate with the large corporations.
I strongly disagree with the statement on the website of The National Chicken Council website that vertical integration in the chicken industry provides “better health programs for the welfare of birds.” In my opinion, the sanitation, housing technologies, vaccination, and other testing programs are present not to make the breeder farms safer, but to solve problems caused by existing irrationalities. Current contract system encourages farmers to accelerate the turnover rates to maximize profitability. Due to this fact, farmers have driven to breed birds as much and as soon as possible under given instructions. If birds can stay out of cages with adequate spaces to exercise, they will develop stronger immune systems to resist bacteria and germs. In this way, strict vaccination and sanitation may not even be necessary. Sexton’s description (2002) of the consolidation of beef packing reminds me of a documentary called “lucent.” In the documentary, pigs in Australia were being raised in confined cages without proper care. Inhumane slaughtering methods, such as carbon dioxide chambers, electricity, and drowning, make me wonder why do consumers worldwide choose to ignore? Streamline consolidation of the poultry industry makes poultries with consistent qualities available in the supermarkets year-round. Consumers are used to seeing pieces of chicken, beef, and pork on the shelves of the supermarket, and it is hard for them to correlate the meat wrapped with plastic films and trays with the actual animal anymore. Because of industrialization, animal farms, slaughtering houses, and meat processing factories are far out of consumers’ sights. The growths slaughter, processes of poultry have been made invisible to consumers. Even though that I am always agitated by animal welfare documentaries, it is just too hard to find out where did the piece of beef on my dinner table come from, was this cow treated with humanity? Did this farm cause any environmental damages? While keeping the benefits that industrialization brought to us, what are the ways to re-present these problems to consumers, and to redistribute power and wealth to make our food system more efficient?