Global inequality and the financialization of food

Gresh, Rebecca

The global financial crisis has generated new debates over needs. While the financial crisis in the North is primarily understood as a housing crisis, for the global South the financial crisis has meant an emergency of hunger. In 2009 the number of hungry people worldwide increased to one billion as food prices soared to unprecedented levels. This has especially hit hard the world’s poor who on average spend 60-80% of their budget on food, resulting in an extraordinary number of food protests around the world (De Schutter 2010; FAO 2011).

Rural sociologists have focused on transnational forces contributing to the food crisis such as trade agreements, uneven subsidies, and climate change. Less recognized is the role of financial speculation in the valuation of food – namely, monetary gains realized from production, processing, distribution, sale, and speculation of food commodities. How the modes of food provision are rendered calculable and how these financial techniques allow for disproportionate monetary gains is worthy of analysis. Financial instruments such as commodity indexes become increasingly important factors in shaping both the length and nature of the value chain.

This paper contributes to a clearer understanding of the financialization of food by employing the lens of standards recently developed within STS literature using a transnational focus. A standards approach is a corrective to accounts that render the activities of finance intangible and subjects to scrutiny the embedded and taken-for-granted models that underlie the value of food. At the same time, a transnational approach to economic sociology expands US centered approaches whose empirical boundaries stay largely within the North. In conclusion, I argue that seeing food with standards in mind helps us to rethink the ways that food systems are configured, as well as the impact of different systems of valuation on meeting basic human needs.

736.7 Global inequality and the financialization of food