The impact of Russian food security policy on the performance of the food system

Abstract

Food security has guided Russia’s food policy since 2010. The article examines the impact of food security policy on the food system. The Russian model of food security combines government intervention in the form of assistance for domestic production while simultaneously restricting market access. Food security does not appear to have a deleterious impact on the food system. We measure impact on four dimensions. Financial support for agriculture continues to increase in nominal rubles. In food production, the beef and dairy branches continue to lag, but increased grain production has made Russia a global leader in grain exports. Average per capita food consumption improved, although the poor consume much less, and the decline of the ruble affects the way Russians shop. The largest impact of food security has been on food trade. Food security policy has brought food to the forefront as an instrument of foreign policy. Food trade is politicized, witnessed by the food embargo against the West and food import bans against Turkey and Ukraine.     

Early Processed Triticeae Food Remains in The Yanghai Tombs,Xinjiang, China

Visible food remains can provide evidence regarding ancient food processing, the spread of cereals and cultural communication. Some desiccated food remains were discovered in the Yanghai Tombs, Turpan district, in Xinjiang, China (2600–2900 bp ). These food remains were analysed by Fourier transform infrared (FT–IR) spectroscopy combined with plant microfossils, including starch grains and cross cells of pericarp from the cereal bran fragments. The results showed that these food remains were cooked dough food made from wheat (Triticum aestivum) and barley (Hordeum spp.). The cross‐sections of these remains look very dense, not porous under a microscope, which suggests that no fermentation had happened, so these foodstuffs may be some kind of flatbread. Although wheat and barley had been introduced into China by at least the third millennium bc , these remains are still the earliest known direct evidence that wheat and barley were ground into flour and then processed as foodstuffs in north‐western China.     

Feeding fears: competing discourses of interdependency,sovereignty, and China's food security

Following the release of the 1994 report ‘Who will feed China?’ by the Worldwatch Institute, there has been much debate over the implications of China's growing demand for grain. The question of China's food production has elicited a variety of responses. While for some it raises the specter of regional and global instability as China becomes an environmental threat, for others the entrance of China into the world market promises increased trade and profits. In this paper I explore the responses in China and the US to the different notions of interdependence which have shaped the debate. I first turn to how concerns over China's food supply have, despite appeals to the concepts of global environmental and economic interdependence, become linked to classical state-centered geopolitical concerns such as ‘sovereignty’ and ‘containment.’ I then look at how the debate has also been actively distanced from national security concerns through the invocation of an alternative interdependence founded on the logic of commerce. I conclude by arguing for the need within critical geopolitics to further examine the circulation of strategic texts between and within states, particularly in the analysis of texts that map worlds beyond the boundaries of North America and Europe.     

The Italian industrial districts and the crisis of the cooperative form: Part II

Part I of this paper set out the theory of the industrial district and presented the first of three case studies on the Italian districts, questioning the long‐run stability of these social formations qua locally embedded networks of symmetrically powerful small and medium‐sized cooperative competitors, governed by relations of trust and the sharing of information. That first case examined the emergence of lead firms and hierarchical control within the food packaging machinery industry of Emilia‐Romagna. Here, Part II retraces the transformation of the clothing giant, Benetton, from one among many small subcontractors into the apex of a global production and distribution network not unlike such vertical Japanese keiretsu as Toyota. The third case, on the current competitive crisis of the Pratese system of woolen textile production, emphasizes the contingent character of ‘trusting’ relations among small firms, and exposes the contradictions of excessively fragmented production systems during periods of heightened international competition.     

1956-1978年北京居民家庭的食品消费生活

1956-1978年这一时期,北京居民家庭的恩格尔系数虽有起伏,但没有明显的下降趋势.这时城镇居民家庭的主食以细粮为主,附以相当的粗粮;副食除夏季外以大白菜为主,偶尔享用其他副食品.这时乡村居民家庭的主食以粗粮为主,附以部分细粮;副食品以老咸菜为主,有时也有白菜等.总体来看,这个时期北京居民家庭处在一种勉强温饱的状态之下.北京居民的食品消费大体反映了这个时期中国人的生活状况,正是由此导致的人们普遍要求改变这种状况的愿望,成为后来中国实行改革开放的社会根源.     

Intertextual geopolitics and La Carte et le territoire: a cautionary tale for UNESCO and the repas gastronomique des Français?

ABSTRACT

La Carte et le territoire features a France in decline, saved, entre autres, by attracting foreign tourists with ‘heritagised’ French food. Eight days after the novel won the 2010 Prix Goncourt, the repas gastronomique des Français was inscribed on UNESCO’s Intangible Cultural Heritage list (ICH). Considering Houellebecq’s use of tropes of culinary heritage alongside the French ICH bid reveals parallels in their manipulation of culinary heritage to create globally marketable products. Yet the motivations and ramifications of the ‘gastrodiplomacy’ in the novel and in the French state’s arguably neo-imperialist initiative differ tellingly. Houellebecq’s novel brings into cautionary focus how responding to perceived geopolitical imperatives by creating narratives of cultural heritage can instead eradicate the conditions of renewal upon which it depends and limit cultural diversity. The instrumentalisation of food heritage by a global corporation, national government and UNESCO—an ostensibly benign supranational institution—risks creating new conditions of global competition. However, comparing the novel and the narratives surrounding the repas gastronomique des Français nonetheless suggests that representations of food—like language—can exceed authorial intention, and the gastronomic miscegenation that is strategically missing from Houellebecq’s novel and elided in the ICH bid may yet continue to feed French food heritage.     

Ground cereal food preparations from Greece: the prehistory and modern survival of traditional Mediterranean ‘fast foods’

Archaeobotanical remains of ground cereals from prehistoric northern Greece are discussed in this paper within the context of ethnographic and textual evidence for similar food preparations encountered in countries of the Mediterranean and the Middle East. The archaeobotanical remains consist of ground einkorn and barley grain, stored in this form, from the sites of Mesimeriani Toumba and Archondiko respectively, located in the region of central Macedonia, northern Greece. The results of published pilot studies involving macroscopic, experimental, and scanning electron microscopic examination of these archaeological finds seem to suggest that these products correspond to preprocessed cereals, stored in this form. It is also likely that some at least of these finds were produced from boiled and subsequently ground cereal grains. This practice identified in the prehistoric material is similar to various forms of processing cereals still widely encountered in rural areas of modern Greece and other circum-Mediterranean countries. These products are known in Greece under the names of pligouri (bulgur) and trachanas. Through a combined examination of archaeobotanical, ethnographic, and textual evidence it is argued that the idea of pre-processing cereals for piecemeal consumption throughout the year is of considerable antiquity in this part of the world. Drawing information from food science research on similar, modern traditional preparations of the same geographical region, the paper highlights the advantages of pre-processing cereals for later consumption, which offers insights into likely prehistoric subsistence practices. Parboiling cereal grains or mixing grains with milk products in the summer would have made excellent use of seasonally available ingredients by converting them into nutritious and storable foodstuffs, which could then be consumed as part of daily meals with very little additional cooking effort and fuel. This ease of conversion into a filling meal may justify us considering them as ‘traditional fast foods’.     

Global Public Policy,Transnational Policy Communities,and Their Networks

Public policy has been a prisoner of the word “state.” Yet, the state is reconfigured by globalization. Through “global public–private partnerships” and “transnational executive networks,” new forms of authority are emerging through global and regional policy processes that coexist alongside nation‐state policy processes. Accordingly, this article asks what is “global public policy”? The first part of the article identifies new public spaces where global policies occur. These spaces are multiple in character and variety and will be collectively referred to as the “global agora.” The second section adapts the conventional policy cycle heuristic by conceptually stretching it to the global and regional levels to reveal the higher degree of pluralization of actors and multiple‐authority structures than is the case at national levels. The third section asks: who is involved in the delivery of global public policy? The focus is on transnational policy communities. The global agora is a public space of policymaking and administration, although it is one where authority is more diffuse, decision making is dispersed and sovereignty muddled. Trapped by methodological nationalism and an intellectual agoraphobia of globalization, public policy scholars have yet to examine fully global policy processes and new managerial modes of transnational public administration.     

Investigating Private Motorised Travel and Vehicle Fleet Efficiency: Using New Data and Methods to Reveal Socio‐Spatial Patterns in Brisbane,Australia

Australian cities have seen continued long‐term growth in private motor vehicle travel that has imposed increasing vehicle energy consumption and greenhouse gas emissions. This paper investigates the spatial patterns of vehicle energy consumption on urban areas through an analysis of vehicle travel and of vehicle fleet efficiency in Brisbane, Australia. This is achieved by combining motor vehicle registration records and Australian government's ‘Green Vehicle Guide’ of vehicle fuel efficiency database. The results of a spatial analysis of the private vehicle trip distances derived from journey to work data and fuel energy consumption associated with the private‐owned vehicles decomposed to local areas show that private vehicle energy use tends to increase with increasing distance from the city centre (e.g. central business district). This analysis demonstrates that differences in vehicle trip distances and lower proportions of high‐efficiency vehicles in the outer suburbs aggravate vehicle energy consumption in those locations. The paper further compares vehicle energy use results for Brisbane against spatial patterns of suburban socio‐economic disadvantage. The paper demonstrates that access to vehicle fleet technology may compound other forms of socio‐economic disadvantage and vulnerability.     

Traditional post-harvest processing to make quinoa grains (<Emphasis Type="Italic">Chenopodium quinoa</Emphasis> var. <Emphasis Type="Italic">quinoa</Emphasis>) apt for consumption in Northern Lipez (Potosí, Bolivia): ethnoarchaeological and archaeobotanical analyses

The aim of this paper is to generate information to assist in the archaeobotanical recognition of post-harvest processing activities related with different enhancement and consumption patterns of quinoa in the Central Andes. Enhancement of the grains involves what local people call “mejorado de los granos”. Their main purpose is to reduce as far as possible the presence of saponins, a toxic metabolite, in the grain. Ethnobotanical data were recorded in the village of Villa Candelaria (Southern Bolivian highlands) through the application of standard ethnographic techniques. The types of grain enhancement vary depending on the meal that people want to prepare. We registered three different quinoa enhancements based on intended consumption, (1) as a whole seed, (2) in soups or (3) as pitu (a kind of toasted refined flour). Laboratory analysis aimed at identifying distinctive features of grains in different processing stages, as well as evaluating the effects of charring. For both desiccated and charred remains, quinoa processed for pitu can be distinguished from that for whole seed/soup. As a case study, archaeological grains of the pre-Inka site of Churupata, located 3 km from Villa Candelaria, were interpreted as quinoa prepared for consumption as whole seed/soup.     

Children, ‘healthy’ food,school and family: the ‘[n]ot really’ outcome of school food messages

ABSTRACT

This paper draws on a multi-method study with 50 families in Victoria, Australia. Primary school children were asked about food knowledge from school and whether they felt motivated to bring knowledge home. Generally, children and parents felt school food messages are unclear, contradictory and not relevant to them and this reduced the likelihood of messages coming home from school. We identify a critical difference in how families thought about healthy eating and food practices at home and the framework of school messages. Families focused on children’s eating in a pragmatic way, infused with nurturance as well as concern. We argue their practices can be viewed as a form of relational consumption (Lindsay and Maher 2013. Consuming Families: Buying, Making, Producing Family Life in the Twenty-First Century. New York: Routledge.) where food is part of the everyday exchange of love and care. A disjunction exists between familial relational approaches and the regulatory framework of school food messages that impacts how messages move between these spaces. Attention to relational aspects of food consumption at school might allow for a more valuable exchange between family and schools that supports family endeavours to feed children well.     

THE POTENTIAL OF CARBONIZED GRAIN TO PRESERVE BIOGENIC 87SR/86SR SIGNATURES WITHIN THE BURIAL ENVIRONMENT*

Carbonized grains survive for millennia in many archaeological contexts. Their stable structure raises the possibility that they preserve biogenic strontium isotope signatures. This hypothesis was investigated using short‐term, laboratory experiments with modern grain immersed in Chalk solution. HCl leaching removed > 95% of secondary alteration from charred grain, and isotope ratios close to the starting value were recovered. This could not be achieved with uncharred grains. HCl leaching of archaeological carbonized grains produced comparable levels of decontamination. Although preliminary, these results suggest that strontium isotope analysis of archaeological carbonized grains from calcareous burial contexts could be used to investigate ancient trade and agriculture.     

THE RENEWED VIABILITY OF GRAIN CORN PRODUCTION IN SOUTHERN ONTARIO, 1961–1971, AND CHANGES IN HARVESTING AND STORAGE METHODS

The decade 1961–1971 was one of remarkable expansion in grain corn production across southern Ontario, most notably reflected by the increase in the average scale of production. The complex of factors related to the renewed viability of the crop is discussed, with particular attention to developments in harvesting and storage methods. This serves to illustrate the process by which new developments in harvesting and storage methods were adopted and relates technological change to the economics of grain corn production and adaptive decision-making.
De 1961 à 1971, l'ensemble du Sud de l'Ontario a connu une expansion remarquable de la production de grains de maïs, une expansion surtout reflétée par une augmentation notable du niveau moyen de production. Dans notre article, nous discutons les facteurs complexes reliés à ce renouveau de la viabilité du maïs. Nous nous concentrons sur le développement des méthodes de récolte et d'entreposage. Notre perspective nous permet d'illustrer le processus d'adoption des nouvelles méthodes de récolte et d'entreposage, et de lier le changement technologique à l'économie de la production de grains de maüs et aux prises de décisions conséquentes.     

Fruits of Their Labour: Urbanisation,Orchard Crops,and Dental Health in Early Bronze Age Jordan

The analysis of dental remains, which outlast most other tissues in the human body, provides insight into past diet, activity patterns and ancestry. The remains from Bab edh‐Dhra' represent the only skeletal sample available to assess the impact of agricultural intensification in the Early Bronze Age of the southern Levant (ca. 3500–2000 bce ). This era ushered in a period of ‘urbanisation’, evidenced by fortified towns, planned roadways, developments in irrigation and growing population density. During this time, the cultivation, trade and consumption of orchard taxa (such as figs, grapes and olives) increased. This paper examines changes in the teeth associated with agricultural intensification involving orchard crops as well as grains. Dental caries, ante mortem tooth loss and dental wear are examined for Early Bronze IA (EBIA; 3500–3300 bce ) and Early Bronze II–III (EBII–III; 3100–2300 bce ) teeth from the site of Bab edh‐Dhra', located in modern‐day Jordan. Due to the commingling, general tooth groups (e.g. molars) and specific tooth types (e.g. lower left canine) were used to compare periods. Although age and sex could not be identified for every tooth, analyses of crania and os coxae showed no significant difference in demographic profiles of EBIA and EBII–III. No statistically significant increase was found over time in dental caries frequency; however, teeth for which the cause of pulp exposure could be determined suggested that caries increasingly led to exfoliation. Indeed, ante mortem tooth loss rose significantly with time, whereas dental wear decreased. In general, changes in oral health were consistent with an archaeological record of greater consumption of softer, stickier foods, such as fruits. Copyright © 2013 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.     

The Urban Village,Agrarian Transformation,and Rentier Capitalism in Gurgaon,India

Gurgaon, India's “millennium city”, is today synonymous with India's embrace of global real estate capital and private sector‐led urban development. This paper asserts that Gurgaon's spectacular urbanisation has been fundamentally underpinned by an uneven process of land acquisition, exemption and agrarian transformation. Shifting away from dispossession‐centred analyses of contemporary urbanisation in India, this paper explores Gurgaon's “urban villages” to consider the uneven integration of agrarian classes into emerging urban real estate markets. Through an examination of differential experiences of land acquisition and agrarian social change among Gurgaon's landowning classes, the paper seeks to trace complex and nonlinear processes of agrarian transformation which make possible landscapes of global accumulation.     

Geographies of capital formation and rescaling: A historical‐geographical approach to the food desert problem

Although the “food desert” concept has captured the public imagination and spurred public policy efforts in many North American cities, the term has been critiqued by academics for being definitionally and methodologically vague, and for providing an incomplete picture of the complexity of food access. Rather than dismiss the study of urban, inner‐city food deserts, however, scholars can study disparities in retail food access through a historical, critical political economy lens to understand underserved retail landscapes as a product of capital formation and rescaling over time. The purpose of this article is to conduct such an analysis, using the case study of a low‐income community in Kingston, Ontario. Using historical research and qualitative interviews, the major finding of this analysis is that the physical accessibility of retail food appears to have declined over time in relation to the capitalization of the retail food sector. An imperfect relationship can be outlined over three phases of Canadian urban economic history to suggest that the food desert problem emerged largely in the transition from a decentralized, small‐scale, and neighbourhood‐embedded retail food industry to the scaled‐up, disembedded industry that now dominates the landscape. This industry‐level rescaling is contributing to a new urban politics of class and consumption through subtle, everyday activities such as food shopping.     

In Situ Urbanization in Rural China: Case Studies from Fujian Province

In most parts of the developing world, the urbanization process has been dominated by rural–urban migration and the growth of existing cities. However, case‐studies in China’s Fujian Province suggest that this process can also be achieved mainly by in situ transformation in rural areas. Such in situ transformation of rural areas has been driven mainly by two forces, the development of township and village enterprises (TVEs) and the inflow of foreign investment; and facilitated by the relevant policies adopted by the Chinese government since 1978. The former has been very effective in the transformation of rural employment structure, while the latter has brought many physical changes to the previously rural landscape. Being mutually complementary, these two ways of rural transformation have not only benefited and urbanized the rural areas, but kept many farmers in their hometowns, replacing the dominant role of rural–urban migration and the growth of existing cities in the urbanization process.     

Globalising Economic Governance,Political Projects,and Spatial Imaginaries: Insights from Four Australasian1 Cities

This paper explores how territorial economic governance is discursively constituted in a globalising and neoliberalising world. It acknowledges both the increasingly recognised formative role of spatial imaginaries in economic interventions and the workings of co‐constitutive political projects that link particular imaginaries with political ambitions and policy strategies. Embracing recent calls for comparative ethnographic urban research at the local‐global interface, it explores currently dominant spatial imaginaries across the four Australasian cities of Auckland, Sydney, Melbourne, and Perth. Based on multiple qualitative methods, this study claims that a considerable number of actor's spatial associations and reference points can be related to particular city‐specific governmental projects; Auckland's Super‐City, Sydney's Global and Green City, Melbourne's Liveable City, and Perth's Vibrant City. It is demonstrated how discursive governance techniques such as ‘story‐telling’, benchmarking, and policy transfer have been pivotal in the activation, circulation, and performance of those spatial imaginaries and their transformation into temporarily dominant visions for strategic urban interventions aimed at repositioning urban actors, spaces, and activities. While spatial imaginaries can be related to differently framed global aspirations, the effects of spatial political projects on urban governance and investment trajectories differ significantly across space. Theoretically, the paper stresses the importance of particular conceptions of territorial relations and time‐ and place‐specific institutional mediation in shaping context‐dependent discursive material governance alignments.     

Mushrooms Their Consumption,Production and Culture Development

Abstract

In the last 20 years, mushroom consumption and production have increased at a faster rate than almost any other agricultural food product. The consumption and production of Agaricus (A. bisporus and A. bitorquis) and the Shiitake (Lentinus edodes) mushrooms account for 74% and 14%, respectively, of the total world production and demand for cultivated mushrooms. Since the origin of Agaricus cultivation in France, much progress has been made and the bulk of the scientific and engineering progress has been achieved since the beginning of this century. Mushroom science, a composite science of many disciplines including plant pathology, entomology, horticulture, food science, agricultural engineering, agricultural economics and rural sociology has contributed a great deal to the worldwide growth of the industry. Future improvements in mushroom culture will come not only from a more thorough understanding of single facets within the overall process, but from a more complete understanding of the interrelationship of these facets with each other.     

Maize as a nightmare: Food safety and toxicity in rural Kenya

This article discusses how Kenyan farmers engage with potentially toxigenic mould growing on the maize they produce, buy, process, consume and feed their animals. Aflatoxins, a group of mycotoxins produced by strains of Aspergillus flavus, can severely harm the livers of humans and animals, causing cancer, liver failure and death. Detection of the invisible, tasteless, and odourless toxins is only possible through expensive scientific testing, largely absent in rural Kenya. Yet local conceptions of aflatoxin focus on the visible mould in everyday food production and consumption practices. This includes constant inspection and separating mouldy kernels and grains during drying and storing to prevent the potentially present mould from spreading and to ensure food safety. This article investigates how practices like separating grains from maize kernels and inspecting the dried maize before grinding show how food is handled under constant, yet flawed, engagement with potential toxicity.