- Email: [email protected]
Feast or famine. Effects of food aid on local production and food security in Africa
Abstracts / Appetite 56 (2011) 516–549
certain vegetables and fruits is no longer necessarily passed on to the next generation. Through use of historic documents, interviews with retired Bavarian farm women and a farm economic teachers, Köhler–Busch investigates how these changes in garden practice also affect the garden’s changing form and function—as social space, its source of prestige for the women, and a loss of lexicon. doi:10.1016/j.appet.2010.11.223 Feast or famine. Effects of food aid on local production and food security in Africa SEAN KRUEGER University of Rhode Island, United States E-mail address: [email protected]. Over the last 50 years, global attention has been increasingly focused on famine and poverty and the global inequality of food distribution. One of the most frequent solutions for addressing these issues has been to increase food assistance from wealthy countries to impoverished countries. However, a number of studies argue that international food aid depresses local food prices and is harmful to local producers (Getaw & Tadesse, 2010) and may decrease long term food security. For example, Elliesen (2002) has estimated that approximately 30% of total food aid distributed in Ethiopia is re-packaged for sale in local markets. Studies to date focus on short to medium term trends in food assistance and food prices. The impact of food aid on local food prices and human development in Africa is important; Africa receives the largest share of global food aid. The effect food aid has on local markets may disincentivise local food producers in the long term by undermining food prices to extraordinarily low levels. Food aid may decrease food prices temporarily without driving out local food producers from existing markets. Kruger examines the long-term trends and relationship between food aid and food security in Africa by using data on food pricing and food aid from the FAO, and development indicators including infant mortality levels. doi:10.1016/j.appet.2010.11.224 Agricultural biotechnology, socioeconomic effects, and the fourth criterion WILLIAM B. LACY 1 , DINA BISCOTTI 1 , DAVIS LELAND GLENNA 2 , RICK WELSH 3 1 University of California, United States 2 Pennsylvania State University, United States 3 Clarkson University, United States E-mail address: [email protected] (W.B. Lacy). Transgenic crops, an early product of agricultural biotechnology, have experienced one of the fastest adoptions of crop technologies in history. Global acreage planted with transgenic crops increased 67-fold between 1996 and 2007 for a total of 284 million acres in 23 countries. Herbicide tolerant (HT) soybeans and insect-resistant Bt maize constituted over 80% of this acreage. Proponents of transgenic crops see a very positive future with the number of farmers adopting transgenic crops increasing tenfold up to 100 million or more between 2006 and 2015. However, numerous scholars and policy makers have raised questions about these optimistic goals. Much of the debate has focused on health and environmental safety issues. Increasingly, a fourth criterion which refers to the social and economic effects of a product or technology has been proposed for product approval and regulation. These concerns have become part of the policy and regulatory process, even though the significance of the fourth criterion may vary according to ideological and organizational factors in different countries. Lacy et al. discuss a number of both positive and negative social and economic impacts agricultural biotechnology may have on (1) farmers, rural communities, and the food system; (2) the structure and organization of agribusiness and industry; (3) consumers; (4) science, and technology transfer; and (5) developing countries and the global economy. The authors concludes with a review of a number of alternatives
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which have emerged for incorporating socioeconomic issues into a broader public discussion and eventually into informed decision making. doi:10.1016/j.appet.2010.11.225 Good cooking as moral force. Progressive Era nutritional advice and the buttressing of the middle class ELISE S. LAKE University of Mississippi, United States E-mail address: [email protected]. During the Progressive Era, people of the “middling sorts” came to define themselves as a group with a shared culture. The domestic science movement, through mass media, brought the public a new understanding of nutrition and moralistic prescriptions for middle-class lifestyles. Even as middle-class identity emerged, expansion of a poorly paid group of retail/clerical workers, along with improvements in manual laborers’ wages, began to blur distinctions between the middle and working classes, giving rise to middle-class anxieties about their own social position. By emphasizing “right living” and contrasting middle- and working-class lifestyles, domestic science provided the anxious middle class with a means of asserting its superiority to the laboring classes. Promoting its views in women’s periodicals, the movement gave middle-class homemakers a language—a symbolic resource—whereby they could differentiate themselves from the lower classes, a process sociologists call “boundary work.” Lake examined Good Housekeeping for the period 1885–1920 to reveal themes in dietary advice that might have served as resources for boundary work. Such advice shows that homemakers of the laboring classes were deemed wasteful and extravagant. Their poor cooking and disorganized housekeeping were thought to drive men to taverns and to create ill-tempered children susceptible to crime, alcoholism, and even anarchy. Among the prominent themes is the notion that occupation dictates dietary needs, reinforcing occupational differentiation: the middle-class “brain worker” needed a diet different from that of the manual laborer. Good cooking and proper eating marked the self-control, abstemiousness, and thrift of the middle class, and ensured tranquil relations within the household as well as order within the broader society. Such imagery arguably served as a symbolic resource for buttressing middle-class identity. doi:10.1016/j.appet.2010.11.226 Vocabularies of the environment. Conserving and preserving in early American literature HEIDI OBERHOLTZER LEE Messiah College, United States E-mail address: [email protected]. Lee argues that the language of early American food preserves and conserves offers those interested in literary environmentalism and sustainability a provocative means by which to analyze and account for the transition from colonial American use and abuse of landscape to later nineteenth-century efforts to advocate the preservation and conservation of nature. Turn of the century ecological writers like John Muir, John Burroughs, and Mary Austin seem by most literary scholars’ accounts to have risen out of the mire of colonial ecological disaster and a sad proto-history of environmental destruction, with brief exception made for Henry David Thoreau. While certainly not refuting the idea that early Americans were in many ways poor caretakers of the spaces they inhabited, an examination of their discussions of jams and jerked meat illustrates important continuities, both positive and negative, between these early American writers’ understanding of the relationship between their individual bodies and the land on which they resided and later authors’ articulation of that same relationship. As historian Trudy Eden notes in The Early American Table,
certain vegetables and fruits is no longer necessarily passed on to the next generation. Through use of historic documents, interviews with retired Bavarian farm women and a farm economic teachers, Köhler–Busch investigates how these changes in garden practice also affect the garden’s changing form and function—as social space, its source of prestige for the women, and a loss of lexicon. doi:10.1016/j.appet.2010.11.223 Feast or famine. Effects of food aid on local production and food security in Africa SEAN KRUEGER University of Rhode Island, United States E-mail address: [email protected]. Over the last 50 years, global attention has been increasingly focused on famine and poverty and the global inequality of food distribution. One of the most frequent solutions for addressing these issues has been to increase food assistance from wealthy countries to impoverished countries. However, a number of studies argue that international food aid depresses local food prices and is harmful to local producers (Getaw & Tadesse, 2010) and may decrease long term food security. For example, Elliesen (2002) has estimated that approximately 30% of total food aid distributed in Ethiopia is re-packaged for sale in local markets. Studies to date focus on short to medium term trends in food assistance and food prices. The impact of food aid on local food prices and human development in Africa is important; Africa receives the largest share of global food aid. The effect food aid has on local markets may disincentivise local food producers in the long term by undermining food prices to extraordinarily low levels. Food aid may decrease food prices temporarily without driving out local food producers from existing markets. Kruger examines the long-term trends and relationship between food aid and food security in Africa by using data on food pricing and food aid from the FAO, and development indicators including infant mortality levels. doi:10.1016/j.appet.2010.11.224 Agricultural biotechnology, socioeconomic effects, and the fourth criterion WILLIAM B. LACY 1 , DINA BISCOTTI 1 , DAVIS LELAND GLENNA 2 , RICK WELSH 3 1 University of California, United States 2 Pennsylvania State University, United States 3 Clarkson University, United States E-mail address: [email protected] (W.B. Lacy). Transgenic crops, an early product of agricultural biotechnology, have experienced one of the fastest adoptions of crop technologies in history. Global acreage planted with transgenic crops increased 67-fold between 1996 and 2007 for a total of 284 million acres in 23 countries. Herbicide tolerant (HT) soybeans and insect-resistant Bt maize constituted over 80% of this acreage. Proponents of transgenic crops see a very positive future with the number of farmers adopting transgenic crops increasing tenfold up to 100 million or more between 2006 and 2015. However, numerous scholars and policy makers have raised questions about these optimistic goals. Much of the debate has focused on health and environmental safety issues. Increasingly, a fourth criterion which refers to the social and economic effects of a product or technology has been proposed for product approval and regulation. These concerns have become part of the policy and regulatory process, even though the significance of the fourth criterion may vary according to ideological and organizational factors in different countries. Lacy et al. discuss a number of both positive and negative social and economic impacts agricultural biotechnology may have on (1) farmers, rural communities, and the food system; (2) the structure and organization of agribusiness and industry; (3) consumers; (4) science, and technology transfer; and (5) developing countries and the global economy. The authors concludes with a review of a number of alternatives
535
which have emerged for incorporating socioeconomic issues into a broader public discussion and eventually into informed decision making. doi:10.1016/j.appet.2010.11.225 Good cooking as moral force. Progressive Era nutritional advice and the buttressing of the middle class ELISE S. LAKE University of Mississippi, United States E-mail address: [email protected]. During the Progressive Era, people of the “middling sorts” came to define themselves as a group with a shared culture. The domestic science movement, through mass media, brought the public a new understanding of nutrition and moralistic prescriptions for middle-class lifestyles. Even as middle-class identity emerged, expansion of a poorly paid group of retail/clerical workers, along with improvements in manual laborers’ wages, began to blur distinctions between the middle and working classes, giving rise to middle-class anxieties about their own social position. By emphasizing “right living” and contrasting middle- and working-class lifestyles, domestic science provided the anxious middle class with a means of asserting its superiority to the laboring classes. Promoting its views in women’s periodicals, the movement gave middle-class homemakers a language—a symbolic resource—whereby they could differentiate themselves from the lower classes, a process sociologists call “boundary work.” Lake examined Good Housekeeping for the period 1885–1920 to reveal themes in dietary advice that might have served as resources for boundary work. Such advice shows that homemakers of the laboring classes were deemed wasteful and extravagant. Their poor cooking and disorganized housekeeping were thought to drive men to taverns and to create ill-tempered children susceptible to crime, alcoholism, and even anarchy. Among the prominent themes is the notion that occupation dictates dietary needs, reinforcing occupational differentiation: the middle-class “brain worker” needed a diet different from that of the manual laborer. Good cooking and proper eating marked the self-control, abstemiousness, and thrift of the middle class, and ensured tranquil relations within the household as well as order within the broader society. Such imagery arguably served as a symbolic resource for buttressing middle-class identity. doi:10.1016/j.appet.2010.11.226 Vocabularies of the environment. Conserving and preserving in early American literature HEIDI OBERHOLTZER LEE Messiah College, United States E-mail address: [email protected]. Lee argues that the language of early American food preserves and conserves offers those interested in literary environmentalism and sustainability a provocative means by which to analyze and account for the transition from colonial American use and abuse of landscape to later nineteenth-century efforts to advocate the preservation and conservation of nature. Turn of the century ecological writers like John Muir, John Burroughs, and Mary Austin seem by most literary scholars’ accounts to have risen out of the mire of colonial ecological disaster and a sad proto-history of environmental destruction, with brief exception made for Henry David Thoreau. While certainly not refuting the idea that early Americans were in many ways poor caretakers of the spaces they inhabited, an examination of their discussions of jams and jerked meat illustrates important continuities, both positive and negative, between these early American writers’ understanding of the relationship between their individual bodies and the land on which they resided and later authors’ articulation of that same relationship. As historian Trudy Eden notes in The Early American Table,