Production and consumption, where does blame lie?

This week, the global food system and its impacts on people and the environment was a major organising theme in many of the readings (Young 2001; Grossman 1993; Guthman 2011; Emel and Neo 2011; Mansfield 2011; Eden 2011; Wainright and Mercer 2011). It is evident that the global system from an environmental perspective is perpetuating local environmental crises, whether this is to local fisheries as described by Young (2001), or to terrestrial areas of food production where Emel and Neo illustrate the threats to public and environmental health presented by the history of ‘intensification’ and ‘consolidatation’ in the US livestock industry through “GHG emissions, water pollution and supply issues, air pollution, and biodiversity impacts” (p.71).

However, when it comes to a crisis, there’s always someone that gets blamed. And the person to blame in public discourse is usually the producer (irresponsible fishermen and farmers – e.g. in the Amazon or in Newfoundland) or the consumer (e.g. obese people, or people making bad decisions because of alienation or distancing from production {the deficit model of science communication}). The reason for this is often the mistaken or purposefully misleading framing and understanding of causality. Take for example the narrative that Guthman (2011) challenges, where excess body fat is implicated in excess consumption, and excess consumption is assumed to be the driver of excess production, which in turn drives environmental destruction.

Excluding the disputed scientific causes of obesity, this narrative may seem intuitive given that supply and demand are often thought (by the non-economically minded) of as being dynamically coupled. But the important logical correlate here is, if they stopped over consuming, that production (and environmental destruction) would in turn decrease proportionately. This is certainly not the case. Guthman vividly points out this fallacy of reasoning by describing the historical development of US farm policy and the way in which it combines with the structure of the US food system, leading to increasing supply irrespective of demand (as illustrated by Engel’s Law: that markets fail to expand with supply). In particular, the peculiarities of agrarian political economy; economic power of special interests; technology and industrial linkages as well as US geo-political interests are all identified as key drivers of overproduction that would occur irrespective of consumer demand.

For me and my thinking, I feel a crucial role of Political Ecology is to explore the nature of causation from a wider perspective that digs deeper into causal chains (historically), and looks wider (through political-economy) than just proximate causes of environmental problems.