Localized Quality in Tuscany

With its rolling hills, small farms, diverse products, and high-quality foodstuffs, Tuscany easily conjures up a world of diversification and localization. In fact, so many of the region’s products are seen as world class—notably its wines, olive oils, cheeses, and processed meats—that it is tempting to see this region as the prime example of an Interpersonal World (in Salais and Storper’s terms). Yet, Tuscany’s perceived success in this world of food is a recent phenomenon. Until the 1990s the region was thought to be rather ‘backward’ in character, mainly due to its inability to adopt conventional industrial approaches to food production and processing. While some effort was made to shift Tuscany on to a more industrialized development path during the 1960s and 1970s, by the early 1990s this was widely regarded as having failed. Out of this failure, however, came the search for a new development model, one that could work with, rather than against, the region’s core assets—notably, its localized variety in foodstuffs and environmental features. Thus, a distinctively Tuscan approach to the agri-food sector is explicitly identified in the recent Rural Development Plan (RDP) drawn up by the Tuscan regional government. The document states that the strategy elaborated in the plan is aiming at ‘strengthening the ‘‘Tuscan model’’ of agricultural and rural development’. The plan goes on to identify key characteristics of the model, including the presence of small and mediumsized farms, the existence of quality products, the diversification of agricultural production, the provision of adequate marketing networks, and the enhancement of the environment and the agricultural landscape (Regione Toscana, 2000). It is tempting to imagine that the consolidation of a diversified and localized world of food production in Tuscany owes much to the implementation of this model by governmental authorities in concert with other actors in the food sector. However, it will be argued below that the emergence of a new world of food in Tuscany owes as much to happenstance as it does to the conscious agency of differing institutions and organizations.

Geographies of Agri-food

Chapters 1 and 2 have reviewed the contemporary theoretical and policy context of agri-food with specific reference to Europe and North America. In this chapter we turn our attention to the nature of the new agri-food geographies. What are the driving forces behind these geographies, and how do they play themselves out across time and space? This theme is central to the more detailed treatment of three different regions (Tuscany, California, and Wales) in succeeding chapters. Here, we introduce a conceptual framework that helps us to understand the new agri-food geographies. The chapter starts by outlining the nature of the conventional agri-industrial system. In general terms, we see this as a system that leads to a process of deterritorialization of foods. That is not to say that it comes without any actual geography; rather, its geographies are the result of corporate capitals’ attempts to continue to intensify and to appropriate some of the functions of agriculture in ways that stretch the links, networks, and chains between production and consumption spheres. We then place this trend in conceptual juxtaposition with the more recent forces of reterritorialization (or what some scholars term ‘relocalization’), a process whereby local and regional geographies come back again to play a central role in reshaping food production and consumption systems. We argue here that it is important to see these conflicting geographical forces as distinctive, even though both processes may indeed be operating—to varying degrees and in different ways—in the same region or locality at the same time. This is at the heart of our contingent notion of ‘worlds of food’. Throughout the twentieth century, agri-industrialism struggled with resolving Kautsky’s formulation of the agrarian question, that is, how to continue to intensify production and appropriate some farming functions in processing and agri-industry while at the same time maintaining some sort of ecological or natural balance in the agricultural transformation process (Kautsky, 1988; Goodman and Watts, 1997). In the agri-industrial model, the driving force was corporate capital.

The Commodity World in Wales

As the first industrial nation, the UK was one of the earliest countries to experience the industrialization of agriculture, a process that led to an unprecedented increase in productivity, with more and more food produced by fewer and fewer people. Early exposure to intensive food production clearly left an abiding cultural legacy; to this day, one of the proudest boasts of the British food industry is that it renders cheap food to the consuming public at ever lower prices. This production ethos was both cause and consequence of a mainstream consumption culture which sets a high premium on price and treats food more as fuel than as pleasure. In his thousandyear history of British food, Spencer (2002) caught this aesthetic perfectly when he suggested that the British ‘were unexcited by the food they ate, but they knew that they had to get on and eat the wretched stuff’. In its attachment to cheap, processed food, the UK is far closer to the US, the quintessential fast-food nation, than to Italy, France, or Spain, countries where there continues to be a strong cultural appetite for fresh, local, and seasonal food. Although Britain’s cheap-food culture has complex and manifold causes, its origins lie in the early period of industrialization, especially in the system of colonial preferences from the Commonwealth countries, which created a low-cost template for locally produced food. In other words, the global–local interplay that did so much to shape economy and society in Britain also influenced the economics of food production and the culture of food consumption. To a greater extent than in other European countries, the supermarkets have become the key players in shaping food consumption patterns in the UK. As in California, retailer power is now the key to understanding the enormous asymmetries of power that punctuate the British agri-food chain from farm to fork. One reason why supermarkets seem to wield so much more power in the UK than their analogues in other countries is that there is less countervailing power at the production end of the UK food chain.

Networks, Conventions, and Regions: Theorizing ‘Worlds of Food’

Food is a long-standing productive activity which carries a number of different production and consumption attributes. However, much of the recent literature focuses on a limited number of such attributes—namely, the transformation of the food chain and, more in general, of production sites. In particular, much attention has been paid to globalization, the growing power of transnational corporations and their relentless exploitation of nature. In this chapter we argue that this kind of focus is not alone sufficient to account for the growing complexity of contemporary agri-food geography. Growing concerns about food safety and nutrition are leading many consumers in advanced capitalist countries to demand quality products that are embedded in regional ecologies and cultures. This is creating an alternative geography of food, based on ecological food chains and on a new attention to places and natures, that, as we will see in Ch. 3, reveals a very different mosaic of productivity—one that contrasts in important respects with the dominant distribution of productive activities so apparent in the global food sector (Gilg and Battershill, 1998; Ilbery and Kneafsey, 1998). Our aim is to develop an analytical approach that can aid our understanding of this new agri-food geography and can introduce a greater appreciation of the complexity of the contemporary food sector. To this end, we begin by considering work on the globalization of the food sector and by showing that recent analyses have usefully uncovered some of the key motive forces driving this process—most notably the desire by industrial capitals both to ‘outflank’ the biological systems and to disembed food from a traditional regional cultural context of production and consumption. After considering the recent assertion of regionalized quality (which can be seen as a response to the outflanking manoeuvres inherent in industrialization), we examine approaches such as political economy, actor–network theory, and conventions theory that have made significant in-roads into agri-food studies and have revealed differing aspects of the modern food system.

Introduction

When Guillermo Vargas from Costa Rica visited the British House of Commons in 2002 to publicize Fairtrade Fortnight, he delivered a stark message. ‘When you buy Fairtrade’, he said, ‘you are supporting our democracy’. It is hard to imagine a more powerful testament to the ripple effect of our food choices. Buying food may be a private matter, but the type of food we buy, the shops or stalls from where we buy it, and the significance we attach to its provenance have enormous social consequences. Our food choice has multiple implications—for our health and well-being, for economic development at home and abroad, for the ecological integrity of the global environment, for transport systems, for the relationship between urban and rural areas and, as the Fairtrade story shows, for the very survival of democracy in poor, commodity-producing countries. Although food consumption habits show considerable differences between countries, and between social classes within countries, a number of generic trends have emerged in recent years, some of which have been attributed to the globalization of style and taste. In the processed food cultures of the US and the UK, for example, the key trends include the increasing popularity of convenience foods, the decreasing amount of time devoted to preparing meals, the falling share of money devoted to food in the household budget, the primacy of price when buying food, and, more recently, burgeoning concerns among all classes of consumer about the quality and safety of food. Some of these trends appear to be contradictory, particularly the emphasis on cheap food on the one hand and the growing demand for healthy food on the other. Another example might be the growing interest in local food, which is often equated with fresh and wholesome produce, and ‘global sourcing’, which aims to transcend the constraints of locality and seasonality. Conventional food retailers are acutely conscious of the need to accommodate these conflicting signals, as a trade body in the UK freely acknowledged when it said that ‘the industry challenge is to find a balance between supporting British farmers and reducing food miles, and satisfying consumer demand for year round availability of an increased number of products, at ever lower prices’ (IGD, 2002).

Beyond the Placeless Foodscape: Place, Power, and Provenance

The foregoing chapters bring us to the point where we can directly address the three themes that constitute the subtitle of the book—namely place, power, and provenance. Reflecting the binary thinking that pervades the agri-food literature—global versus local, embedded versus disembedded, conventional versus alternative, quantity versus quality, and so forth— these themes tend to be treated in a highly compartimentalized fashion, with place and provenance being the preserve of the alternative food literature, while power seems to be the proper object of analysis in the conventional food literature. This binary conceptual tradition has the effect of segmenting the food sector into unduly rigid and path-dependent worlds of production. It could even lead to the (erroneous) conclusion that the conventional food chain is inextricably tied to a particular world of production, invariably the Industrial World, while alternative food chains are embedded in, and tethered to, the Interpersonal World. To overcome this unwarranted division of labour, we propose to examine the roles of place, provenance, and power in both the conventional food chain and the ecological food chain. However, we also want to suggest that the borders between these worlds are more porous and much less static than the worlds of production literature sometimes implies, leaving open the possibility that firms and regions can move from one world to another. Each world of production may have its own nuanced regulatory environment, where a specific mix of rules, regulations, and quality conventions defines its distinctive milieu, but all worlds are subject to some meta-regulatory trends that are emerging in the global food sector, two of which have the potential to induce significant changes. For the sake of simplicity, we shall refer to these meta-regulatory trends as the new moral economy on the one hand and the neo-liberal economy on the other. Taken in isolation, these regulatory trends could trigger very different trajectories of development, with major implications for place, power, and provenance in the food chain, because the former involves reregulating the food sector, while the latter aims to deregulate it.

California: The Parallel Worlds of Rival Agri-food Paradigms

The aim of this chapter is to explore the nature of the contemporary agri-food worlds—the conventional and the alternative—in California. More specifically, we ask: what are the variations within each world? What sources of contestation are leading to (1) convergence and potential appropriation by the dominant agri-industrial complex; or (2) separation and real ecological modernization; or (3) a sort of coexistence and spatial multifunctionality and regulation of the two systems? In this chapter we make some preliminary assessment of the agri-industrial pathway that distinctively marks out California as one of the most highly productivist agrarian regions in the world. This region has applied successive waves of capitalist and endogenous development, with or against a series of ‘obstacles’. As the literature has traditionally emphasized, the history of agri-food in California is the history of a tension within a regional brand of agrarian capitalism continually wrestling with its own contradictions between economic accumulation and social legitimacy. The chapter first examines the historical and contemporary dynamics of the agri-industrial paradigm as it has played itself out in this bountiful but peculiar agrarian space. Specifically, it describes how the agri-food system in California has (quite successfully) attempted to overcome ‘the obstacles’ of what we term ‘first’, ‘second’, and ‘third’ natures. More so than any other region, California has developed since 1849 an agri-industrial dynamic that continues to exploit its natural and social conditions in ways that sustain an exceptional and endogenous form of ‘agri-cultural economy’. After exploiting the natural resource ‘initial endowments’ through a very effective ‘extractive’ mode (i.e. ‘first nature’), the agri-industrial paradigm assembles a specific form of fictitious circulation of capital, goods, and services. This creates a ‘second nature’: a longstanding framework of flows of capital and labour, infrastructure and technologies, which provide a superstructure for the state to overcome the well-documented obstacles of labour and production time in the agri-food sphere. However dominant or celebrated this peculiar model becomes at the end of the twentieth century, we see another set of profound challenges ahead. These are ‘third nature’ obstacles which were in part created out of the very success of a century of Californian agri-industrialism.

The Regulatory World of Agri-food: Politics, Power, and Conventions

The history of agriculture in developed countries over the past seventy years is first and foremost a political history because of the intense interplay between farming and the state. Indeed, it is difficult to think of any other ‘industry’ which has been so comprehensively regulated by the state, over such a long period of time, as agriculture. Even neo-liberal governments in OECD countries have accepted the political compact between farming and the state on account of the ‘exceptionalism’ of agriculture. The rationale for its exceptional status might vary from country to country, but it invariably has something to do with one major aspect that distinguishes agriculture from all other industries: the fact that we ingest its products. In other words, the centrality of agriculture to human health is far and away the most important reason why many countries have sought to ensure a measure of food security by protecting their national farm sectors through permutations of production subsidies, price supports, and import controls—the origins of which stretch back to the 1930s in the case of the US and as far back as the nineteenth-century Corn Laws in the case, for example, of the UK. Agricultural history can be read in a number of different ways. The most polarized readings are the productivist and the ecological interpretations. The productivist discourse, which emphasizes the phenomenal productivity gains that have been achieved since the Second World War, is essentially a story of unalloyed economic success due to a tripartite alliance of state, science, and farmers. The ecological discourse, by contrast, points not to the economic benefits of the post-war productivity miracle, but to the social and environmental costs of agricultural intensification. In the US, where intensive farming practices are most advanced, such problems as soil erosion and animal welfare were attributed to the regulatory regime operated by the United States Department of Agriculture (USDA), which actively encouraged unsustainable farming practices. Similar connections have been made in Europe, where the Common Agricultural Policy (CAP) was deemed to be the main culprit.