Thursday, July 30, 2009
Re-thinking Industrial Agriculture
In our introduction to food politics this week, we began by thinking about the changes that have occurred across agriculture and food systems as an outcome of agro-industrialisation and the uptake of scientific and technological innovations (including hybrid seeds, harvest and plough machinery, and more recently remote sensing and genetically engineered seeds). While pre-industrial agriculture can be characterised by small scale, mixed (polyculture) and subsistence production, industrial agriculture occurs on a large scale, is often based on monoculture production, and has integrated farmers into a global cash economy. In this context, many farmers end up buying most of the food they eat, while the crops they grow are destined for distant markets. At the same time however, a growing number of movements are re-thinking ideas around scale, diversity and markets. Permaculture is one example, see http://www.ipcon.org/ for details of the permaculture movement in Africa. Does permaculture share similarities with Indigenous culinary cultures, or peasant based agriculture?
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I personally find the industrialisation of food trade and production very interesting and was first exposed to it in Costa Rica. I was doing volunteer work at the time and living with families who worked for the Palma Tica company. I think that this example clearly highlights the internationalisation of food, with particular reference to tropical fruits and cheap labour.
ReplyDeleteQuepos, Costa Rica was originally developed as a port for banana export. The Banana Company of Costa Rica came to Quepos in the 1930s, and was owned by United Fruit Company of America. People work for the equivalent of 50 cents a weeks in the early times. After unfortunate incidents with banana blights, a new crop or plant was necessary to replace the damaged banana crop. The African Palm tree was discovered to be very good for various types of oil for national and international consumption. It is now being used in the production of bio fuels. In the beginning, the company controlled the entire region and many aspects of life: hospitals, churches, schools and homes. But eventually there was less control, a handover of some power to the government and the owners of the company shifted multiple times; at one point the owner was Chiquita Banana. Wages increase by 25% under the new management. Now, The Banana Company of Costa Rica is a privately owned company called Palma Tica. Today, the Quepos division Palma Tica owns about 8500 hectares of trees, and about 3000 hectares are privately contracted. Including contracted workers in the fincas (farms), Palma Tica of Quepos employs about 1,700 people. Palma Tica still provides housing for its workers, but does not pay as many employee expenses as it used to. These housing areas have only recently been provided electricity and hot water. What is now Palma Tica was bought by a group of international men for $100 million US dollars in 2003.
I find that this example shows the internationalisation of food market some time prior to the boom of trade. In the lecture today we were discussing how food markets have expanded rapidly since the 1960’s. This example shows it has been happen for a long time before that.
Elke Watts