Cultural Interaction in Agriculture

Agriculture and the Economy: Local-Global Food Provisioning

As European maritime explorers brought far-flung cultures into contact with one another, a multitude of crops were diffused around the globe. The processes of exploration, colonization, and globalization created new regional cuisines (imagine Italian cuisine without tomatoes from the Americas) and at the same time simplified the global diet to a disproportionate reliance on only three grains: wheat, rice, and maize.

The expansion of European empires in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries was inseparable from the expansion of tropical plantation agriculture. Plantations in warm climates produced what were then luxury foods for markets in the global North, which had developed seemingly insatiable appetites for sugar, tea, coffee, and other tropical crops. The expansion of plantation agriculture had profound effects on local ecology, all but obliterating, for example, the forests of the Caribbean and the tropical coasts of the Americas.

In short, we have witnessed the development of a global food system, which, for better or worse, has freed consumers in the affluent regions of the world from the constraints of local ecologies. Fresh strawberries, bananas, pears, avocados, pineapples, and many other types of temperate, subtropical, and tropical produce are available in our urban supermarkets any day, any time of the year. On the other hand, the emphasis on a relatively small number of staple crops desired by northern consumers can mean the abandonment of local crop varieties and a decline in the associated biological diversity. Imported refined wheat from the global North enters poor tropical countries by the shipload, altering local dietary cultures and undercutting the ability of local farmers to sell their crops at a profitable price.

These are the general patterns, but the globalization of food and agriculture has complex effects on culture and ecology that vary by location and spatial scale. These complexities are best illustrated by a case study from the Peruvian Andes. Geographer Karl Zimmerer conducted extensive fieldwork among Quichua peasant farmers in the Paucartambo Andes to determine the effects of economic change on indigenous agricultural practices and the genetic diversity of local crops. Zimmerer’s study produced surprising findings on the complex relationships among culture, economy, and the environment. On the question of whether farmers must abandon crop diversity in order to adopt new, commercially oriented high-yielding varieties, he found there was no simple answer. In fact, it was the better-off peasants, heavily involved in commercial farming, who had the resources and land to cultivate diverse crops and “enjoy their agronomic, culinary, cultural, and ritual values.” Among these values was the use of diverse noncommercial potato varieties in local bartering. The ability to use noncommercial varieties in this way is valued in the local culture because it is a traditional way to cement interpersonal bonds. Such uses emphasize the cultural importance of crop diversity. Zimmerer discovered that the cultural relevance of crops was a strong motivation for planting by well-off farmers. At least 90 percent of the genetically diverse crops had been conserved, even as the Quichua were further integrated into commercial production for the market. In short, cultural values, and not merely a strict economic or ecological calculus, critically influenced Quichua farming decisions.

Agriculture and Transportation Costs: The von Thünen Model

Geographers and others have long tried to understand the distribution and intensity of agriculture based on transportation costs to market. Long before globalization took hold, the nineteenth-century German scholar-farmer Johann Heinrich von Thünen developed a core-periphery model to address the problem. In his model, von Thünen proposed an “isolated state” that had no trade connections with the outside world; possessed only one market, located centrally in the state; had uniform soil and climate; and had level terrain throughout. He further assumed that all farmers located the same distance from the market had equal access to it and that all farmers sought to maximize their profits and produced solely for market. von Thünen created this model to study the influence of distance from market and the concurrent transport costs on the type and intensity of agriculture.

Figure 8.25 presents a modified version of von Thünen’s isolated-state model, which reflects the effects of improvements in transportation since the 1820s, when von Thünen proposed his theory. The model’s fundamental feature is a series of concentric zones, each occupied by a different type of agriculture, located at progressively greater distances from the central market.

Figure 8.25: Von Thünen’s isolated-state model. The model is modified to fit the modern world better and shows the hypothetical distribution of types of commercial agriculture. Other causal factors are held constant to illustrate the effect of transportation costs and differing distances from the market. The more intensive forms of agriculture, such as market gardening, are located nearest the market, whereas the least intensive form (livestock ranching) is the most remote.

Thinking Geographically

Question 8.29

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For any given crop, the intensity of cultivation declines with increasing distance from the market. Farmers near the market have minimal transportation costs and can invest most of their resources in labor, equipment, and supplies to augment production. Indeed, because their land is more valuable and subject to higher taxes, they have to farm intensively to make a bigger profit. With increasing distance from the market, farmers invest progressively less in production per unit of land because they have to spend progressively more on transporting produce to market. The effect of distance means that highly perishable products such as milk, fresh fruit, and garden vegetables have to be produced near the market, whereas peripheral farmers have to produce nonperishable products or convert perishable items into a more durable form, such as cheese or dried fruit.

The concentric-zone model describes a situation in which highly capital-intensive forms of commercial agriculture, such as market gardening and feedlots, lie nearest to market. The increasingly distant, successive concentric belts are occupied by progressively less intensive types of agriculture, represented by dairying, livestock feeding, grain farming, and ranching.

How well does this modified model describe reality? As we would expect, the real world is far more complicated. For example, the emergence of cool chains for agricultural commodities—the refrigeration and transport technologies that bring fresh produce from fields around the globe to our dinner tables—have collapsed distance. Still, on a world scale, we can see that intensive commercial types of agriculture tend to occur most commonly near the huge urban markets of northwestern Europe and the eastern United States (see Figure 8.1). An even closer match can be observed in smaller areas, such as in the South American nation of Uruguay (Figure 8.26).

Figure 8.26: Ideal and actual distribution of types of agriculture in Uruguay. This South American country possesses some attributes of von Thünen’s isolated state, in that it is largely a plains area dominated by one city.

Thinking Geographically

Question 8.31

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The value of von Thünen’s model can also be seen in the underdeveloped countries of the world. Geographer Ronald Horvath made a detailed study of the African region centering on the Ethiopian capital city of Addis Ababa. Although noting disruptions caused by ethnic and environmental differences, Horvath found “remarkable parallels between von Thünen’s crop theory and the agriculture around Addis Ababa.” Similarly, German geographer Ursula Ewald applied the model to the farming patterns of colonial Mexico during the period of Spanish rule, concluding that even this culturally and environmentally diverse land provided “an excellent illustration of von Thünen’s principles on spatial zonation in agriculture.”

Can the World Be Fed?

Are famine and starvation inevitable as the world’s population grows, as Thomas Malthus predicted (see chapter 3)? Or can our agricultural systems successfully feed nearly 7 billion people? In trying to answer these questions, we face a paradox. Today, nearly 1 billion people are malnourished, some to the point of starvation. Almost every year, we read of famines occurring somewhere in the world. In 2008, there were food riots in 30 countries around the world when food prices shot beyond the reach of hundreds of thousands of the urban poor. Between 1990 and 2010 the number of hungry people in western and southern Asia and sub-Saharan Africa increased by tens of millions (Figure 8.27).

Figure 8.27: Mapping hunger worldwide. While food supply has outpaced population growth on a global scale, many world regions continue to suffer from malnutrition.

(Source: UN FAO, 2008.)

Thinking Geographically

Question 8.32

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Yet—and this would astound Malthus—food production has grown more rapidly than the world population over the past 40 or 50 years. Per capita, more food is available today than in 1950, when only about half as many people lived on Earth. Production continues to increase. From 1996 to 2006 world food production increased at an annual rate of 2.2 percent, and hunger was reduced by 30 percent in more than 30 countries. Thus, paradoxically, on a global scale there is enough food produced to feed everyone, while famines and malnutrition prevail.

What explains this paradox? If the world food supply is sufficient to feed everyone and yet hunger afflicts one of every six or seven persons, then cultural or social factors must be responsible. Ultimately, international political economics, not global food shortages, causes hunger and starvation. International trade favors the farmers of wealthier countries through systems of government subsidies that make the prices of their agricultural exports artificially low. Farmers in developing countries find it difficult to compete. Many developing countries do not grow enough food to feed their populations, and they cannot afford to purchase enough imported food to make up the difference. As a result, famines can occur even when plenty of food is available. Millions of Irish people starved in the 1840s while adjacent Britain possessed enough surplus food to have prevented this catastrophe. Bangladesh suffered a major famine in 1974, a year of record agricultural surpluses in the world.

Internal government policies are also an important cause of famine. The roots of the largest famine of the twentieth century lie in the agricultural policies of the Chinese government’s 1958–1961 Great Leap Forward. The Chinese government required peasants to abandon their individual fields and work collectively on large, state-run farms. This policy of collectivization succeeded in boosting food production in some cases but failed in most. Thirty million rural Chinese died of starvation during the Great Leap Forward.

Misguided government policies triggered one of the first famines of the twenty-first century as well. In the early 2000s, Zimbabwe’s President Robert Mugabe clung to power by demonizing white commercial farmers. In 2002 he threatened Zimbabwe’s commercial farmers with imprisonment if they continued to farm. Other government policies discouraged planting and cultivation, thus producing another human-caused famine.

Even when major efforts are made to send food from wealthy countries to famine-stricken areas, the poor transportation infrastructure of developing countries often prevents effective distribution. Political instability can disrupt food shipments, and the donated food often falls into the hands of corrupt local officials. Such was the case in Somalia in the 1990s, when warring factions in the capital city of Mogadishu prevented food aid from getting to starving populations. So while the trigger for famine may be environmental, there are deep-seated political and economic problems that conspire to block famine relief.

Globalization and the Growth of Agribusiness

Globalization and its impact on agriculture have been referred to throughout this chapter. Such references have frequently been accompanied by the term agribusiness.

Globalization involves the restructuring of the world economy by multinational corporations thriving in an era of free-trade capitalism, rapid communications, improved transport, and computer-based information systems. When applied to agriculture, globalization tends to produce agribusiness: a modern farming system that is totally commercial, large-scale, mechanized, and dependent upon chemicals, hybrid seeds, genetic engineering, and the practice of monoculture (raising a single specialty crop on vast tracts of land). Furthermore, agribusinesses are frequently vertically integrated; that is, they own the land as well as the processing and marketing facilities. The green revolution is part of agricultural globalization, as are countless “rural development” projects in developing countries, usually funded by the World Bank or the International Monetary Fund. These projects typically displace peasant farmers to make way for agribusinesses. The family-run farm is one victim of agricultural globalization.

Genetically modified (GM) crops, the products of biotechnology, are seen by many as another aspect of globalization. Genetic engineering produces new organisms through gene splicing. Pieces of DNA can be recombined with the DNA of other organisms to produce new properties, such as pesticide tolerance or disease resistance. DNA can be transferred not only between species but also between plants and animals, which makes this technology truly revolutionary and unlike any other development since the beginning of domestication. Agribusinesses are often able to patent the processes and resulting genetically engineered organisms and thus claim legal ownership of new life-forms.

Commercial production of GM crops began in the United States in 1996. The technology has now spread around the globe, but the United States still dominates, accounting for 43 percent of the world’s total production (Figure 8.28). Two crops, soybeans and corn, account for the rapid growth of GM food production in the United States. By 2011, 94 percent of all soybeans and 88 percent of all corn produced in the United States were genetically modified. There have also been recent increases in the adoption of GM cotton, alfalfa, sugar beets, and papaya in the United States.

Figure 8.28: Worldwide use of genetically altered crop plants. The diffusion of GM crops has occurred despite the concerns of health scientists, environmentalists, and consumers.

(Source: James, Clive. 2011. Global Status of Commercialized Biotech/GM Crops: 2011. ISAAA Brief No. 43. ISAAA: Ithaca, NY.)

Thinking Geographically

Question 8.33

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If you shop in a U.S. supermarket, you have undoubtedly ingested GM foods. Whether or not one finds this troubling is closely related to the strength of certain cultural norms and values that vary from region to region and country to country. In England and western Europe, where national identities are strongly linked to the countryside, agrarian culture, and regional cuisines, there has been a lot of opposition to biotechnology in agriculture. In response to public pressure, major supermarket chains, such as Sainsbury’s in England, have refused since 1998 to sell GM foods. In the United States, the response has been far more muted, so much so that the expansion of GM crop planting has proceeded virtually without public debate.

Food Fears

A globalized food system is vulnerable to events that threaten food safety. Recent events, such as outbreaks of mad cow disease in Great Britain and the contamination of imported produce by Salmonella or the virus that causes hepatitis A in the United States, have raised anxiety levels among consumers about eating food transported from distant lands. The way that national governments and consumers respond to a particular food safety problem can fundamentally reshape geographic patterns of agricultural production on a global scale. Conversely, the idea that a culturally symbolic food may be tainted and life-threatening can shake the strongest of cultural identities.

The case of mad cow disease in Great Britain—where beef and dairy consumption has long been associated with British cultural identity—provides a good illustration. Mad cow disease is the vernacular term for bovine spongiform encephalopathy (BSE), a disease that attacks the central nervous system of cattle. The U.K. industry suffered three BSE crises (1988, 1996, and 2000) that had the net result of reducing their exports of live cows to zero (Figure 8.29). Consumers’ fears of contaminated beef initially reduced demand for cattle worldwide, though the downward trend has been reversed, mostly because of new demand in middle-income countries. In the United Kingdom and the European Union, the BSE scares have reinforced a long-term pattern of declining demand for beef. Similarly, in Japan consumers continue to be wary of imported beef; demand has yet to recover. In 2003, when BSE was discovered in a single cow in the United States, all exports were temporarily curtailed and the industry’s global competitiveness suffered long-term damage.

Figure 8.29: Vulnerabilities in the global food system. The industrialization and globalization of agriculture have heightened the possibilities for and consequences of food contamination, most sensationally illustrated by the case of mad cow disease. The cow shown here has been quarantined because it was infected with BSE.

(Kevin P. Casey/Corbis.)

Thinking Geographically

Question 8.34

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The case of mad cow disease demonstrates the global interconnectivity of food-producing and food-consuming regions, the vulnerability of the global food system, and the role of cultural norms and values surrounding questions of food safety.