Beyond Global Food Supply Chains Crisis, Disruption, Regeneration

Abstract

Global food supply chains, we have been told often in recent years, are in crisis. How much, though, does this language of crisis—as particular, contextual, temporally bound—suffce to describe the conditions of the present? This chapter, and the book it introduces, take the COVID-19 pandemic as a springboard to interrogate a larger set of structural, environmental and political fault lines running through the global food system. In a context in which disruptions to the production, distribution and consumption of food are fgured as exceptions to the smooth, just-in-time effciencies of global supply chains, we examine the pandemic not simply as a particular and acute moment of disruption but rather as a lens on a deeper, longer set of structural processes within which disruption is endemic. At a time when it is more likely to be grasped in terms of speculative investment than as a common good, food offers a vital prism for grappling with the logics by which power circulates in the world. Attending to this constellation of forces calls for attention to supply chains as key mechanisms in the organization of the capitalist food system but also demands that we extend our thinking beyond the bounded linearities of supply chain models.