The Dictionary of Human Geography (5 page)

agribusiness
A term coined by economists Davis and Goldberg (1957, p. 3) at the Harvard Business School, who defined it as (NEW PARAGRAPH) the sum total of all operations involved in the (NEW PARAGRAPH) manufacture and distribution of farm sup (NEW PARAGRAPH) plies; production operations on the farm; (NEW PARAGRAPH) storage; processing and distribution of farm (NEW PARAGRAPH) commodities and items made from them. (NEW PARAGRAPH) The term emphasizes the increasingly sys temic character of food production, in which the activities of farming are integrated into a much larger industrial complex, including the manufacture and marketing of technological inputs and of processed food products, under highly concentrated forms of corporate own ership and management. Agribusiness has since become used in much looser and more ideologically loaded ways as shorthand, on the Left, for the domination of capitalist corpor ations in the agro food industry and, on the Right, for the role of] in the modernization of food production capacities and practices. In this looser sense it has become a synonym of the industrialization of the agro food system. (NEW PARAGRAPH) The classic model of agribusiness centres on the vertical integration of all stages in the food production process, in which the manufacture and marketing of technological farm inputs, farming and food processing are controlled by a single agro food corporation. This model was based largely on the US experience, where corporations such as Cargill and Tenneco gained control of particular commodity cHains through a combination of direct investment, subsidiary companies and contracting relationships. Numerous studies in the 1970s drew attention to its significance for commodities such as fresh fruit and vegetables, broiler chickens and sugar cane (e.g. Friedland et al., 1981). It should be noted that a rival term, ?la complexe agro alimentaire', coined contemporaneously in the French research literature, proposed a much more diffuse model of the industrial development of the agro food complex (e.g. Allaire and Boyer, 1995). (NEW PARAGRAPH) The ?US school' of agribusiness research had considerable influence over the develop ment of agricuLturaL gEographY in the English speaking world, particularly in the 1980s. But it has increasingly attracted criti cism both because of a disenchantment with its theoretical debt to systems theory, and because vertical integration proved too empir ically specific to support the larger claims of agribusiness as a general model of food production today (Whatmore, 2002b). sw (NEW PARAGRAPH)
agricultural geography
In the second half (NEW PARAGRAPH) of the twentieth century, agricultural geog raphy has undergone profound changes, as has its subject. Until the 1950s, agricultural geography was a subset of economic gEog raphy, concerned with the spatial distribution of agricultural activity and focusing on vari ations and changes in the pattern of agricul tural land use and their classification at a variety of scales (see also FARMing). As the economic significance of agriculture declined in terms of the sector's contribution to GDP and employment, particularly in advanced industrial countries, so interest in the subject diminished in the geographical research community. Thus, by the end of the 1980s, leading practitioners were advocating the end of agricultural geography and the dawn of a ?geography of food? (see also food, gEog raphy of). (NEW PARAGRAPH) The importation of new theoretical concepts from political economy and a shift in the substantive focus of study to the Agro food system as a whole, rather than farming as a self contained activity, renewed the field of agricultural geography. Research agendas framed in terms of the agro food sys tem (see, e.g., Marsden, Munton, Whatmore and Little, 1986), set the parameters for a new phase of geographical interest; the initial momentum for the shift came from encoun ters with interdisciplinary networks and ideas, notably those of rural sociology, as much as with conversations with the broader geo graphical community. (NEW PARAGRAPH) By the early 1990s, researchers had taken the field beyond the farm gate in two direc tions. First, it had expanded to the wider organization of capital accumulation in the agricultural and food industries, focusing on the social, economic and technological ties between three sets of industrial activities: food raising (i.e. farming), agricultural tech nology products and services, and food pro cessing and retailing. Second, it now encompassed the regulatory infrastructurE underpinning these activities, focusing on the political and policy processes by which national and supranational state agencies intervene in agricultural practices and food markets. (NEW PARAGRAPH) The contemporary agro food system is a composite of these various perspectives and concepts (see Millstone and Lang, 2003), as depicted in the accompanying figure. The fig ure illustrates the enlargement of the scope of agricultural geography from a focus primarily on activities taking place on the farm itself (B) to one spanning the diverse sites and activities of food production and consumption (A D). In addition to emulating economic geogra phy?s enduring emphasis on transnational corporations, this broadening focus of agri cultural geography includes particular atten tion to the regulatory agencies and processes that are so prominent in the organization of advanced industrial food production and con sumption (see Marsden, Munton, Whatmore and Little, 2000). (NEW PARAGRAPH) Research within this political economy tradition has been driven by two contradictory impulses. On the one hand, it has sought to treat agriculture and food production as just another industrial sector, like cars or steel, thus aligning it much more closely with the broader community of industrial gEographY and its concerns with gLobaLization, corpor ate capitalism and the so called transition from fordism to post fordism. Indeed, many concerns associated with the agrarian quEStion, such as the uneven process of capitalist development, came to preoccupy industrial geographers in the past decade. On the other hand, researchers have sought to make sense of the distinctive features of the industrial organization of farming that persist, particularly the adaptive resilience of family and peasant forms of production (e.g. Whatmore, 1991; Watts, 1994a), and their intimate relationship with rural land scapes and national historiographies, which magnifies their political significance in the electoral and policy processes of developed and developing countries to this day (e.g. Moore, 2005). The tensions between these two impulses have proved potentially creative, and geog raphers' efforts to recognize and work through them have been a major contribution to the interdisciplinary field of agro food studies. These efforts bring quite different levels of analysis into common focus to examine the social and economic connections between, for example, global and local networks, corporate and household actors, production and consumption processes. The influential collection of essays Globalising food, edited by David Goodman and Michael Watts (1997), exemplifies these contributions. But, as this same volume indicates, the tensions between the two impulses in agricultural geography have also generated some significant analytical disagreements and silences, including a grow ing divergence between North American and European agro food research in terms of theoretical influences, analytical foci and pol icy engagement. Crudely put, the divergences revolve around the extent to which the social, political and cultural diversity of food produc tion and consumption processes are admitted into the compass and terms of analysis. (NEW PARAGRAPH) However, there is arguably a more widely shared sense emerging among geographers and others about the need to direct attention to (at least) three critical issues that have been eclipsed and/or marginalized by the terms of political economic analysis. First, there is the question of ?nature? and farm ing's impact on valued environments, cul minating in the reorientation of agricultural subsidies (notably the European Common Agricultural Policy) towards the promotion of environmental rather than productivity outcomes (Lowe, Clark, Seymour and Ward, 1998). Second, there is the rise of consumption as a key focus of analysis, not least in the political significance of consumer anxieties around industrial agriculture asso ciated with a series of ?food scares? (Fried berg, 2004). Linking these two themes is a growing interest in so called ?alternative food networks' or ?quality foods' such as fair trade, organic and animal welfare foods. Here, attention focuses on the bodily cur rency of agro food networks as they connect the health and well being of people (both as food consumers or producers), the animals and plants that become human foodstuffs, and the ecologies that they inhabit (Stassart and Whatmore, 2003). sw (NEW PARAGRAPH) Suggested reading (NEW PARAGRAPH) Freidberg (2004). (NEW PARAGRAPH)
agricultural involution
A term coined by the anthropologist Clifford Geertz (1963) to refer to the intensification and elaboration of the agrar ian labour process without substantial gains in per capita output. Based on his studies of rice paddy production in post colonial Java and concerned with prospects for deveLopment, Geertz posited that rice production there hin dered the modernization process. Without the application of new methods, it absorbed virtually all existing labour, so that productivity merely kept up with population growth. His thesis can be contrasted with the boserup tHesis (Boserup, 1965), which sees population growth as inducing technological change. (See also intensive agricuLture.) jgu (NEW PARAGRAPH) Suggested reading (NEW PARAGRAPH) Harriss (1982). (NEW PARAGRAPH)
Agricultural Revolution
A collection of so cial, technological and productivity changes, which took place somewhere between the sixteenth and the nineteenth centuries, and which collectively revolutionized English agri culture. These changes are generally associ ated with the industriaL revoLution and are widely thought to have promoted industriaL ization, both by reducing agriculture's share of the workforce and by enabling a much larger population to be fed. The same term is also sometimes used to describe similar agri cultural changes in Scotland and Wales in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, as well as in Continental Europe in the nineteenth century. Whilst there is general agreement amongst historians and historical geographers that an Agricultural Revolution took place in England, there is profound disagreement both as to when and where it took place, and as to what it entailed. (NEW PARAGRAPH) Writers on the Agricultural Revolution have drawn attention to one or more of three major areas of change (Overton, 1996): (NEW PARAGRAPH) A change in the social organization of agriculture, usually described as a shift from peasant agriculture to agrarian cap itaLism, a process sometimes termed an ?agrarian revolution'. This process had two central features. First, there was a long term shift away from production for use to production for sale; such commercialization clearly began in the medieval period and may have been essentially completed before 1700. Sec ond, there was a shift away from the dominance of small farms worked mainly by family labour to a system whereby most land was owned by large estates, let as large farms at commercial rents to cap italist tenant farmers and worked by wage labour. Both the chronology and causes of this second shift have been the subject of much debate. There is no agreement over whether the key period of change was the sixteenth, seventeenth or eighteenth cen tury, but the primacy once accorded to enclosure is now usually displaced by causes such as population change and long term price movements. (NEW PARAGRAPH) Technical changes, particularly in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, have loomed large in accounts of the Agricul tural Revolution. In the arable sector, the key innovation was the introduction of more complex crop rotations including clover and turnips, which provided high quality fodder for animals, thus allowing the area of grassland to be reduced without decreasing the production of animal prod ucts. It now seems clear that these and associated changes allowed an extension of the arable area between 1750 and 1850 (Campbell and Overton, 1993; William son, 2002). In the pastoral sector, technical improvements were related largely to se lective animal breeding aimed at increasing carcass weight, decreasing the age at ma turity (slaughter) for meat animals or in creasing the yields of wool or milk. (NEW PARAGRAPH) Until recently, discussions of agrarian change were not informed by any direct accounts of productivity, but measure ments of changes in productivity and their connection with technical change have since been placed on a more secure statistical footing (Wrigley, 1985a; Allen, 1992, 1999; Overton, 1996). (NEW PARAGRAPH) In the early twentieth century, the historio graphical emphasis was on technical and social change, and the most important changes were held to have taken place in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, in parallel with what was then thought to be the key period of industrialization. Chambers and Mingay?s classic (1966) account more or less repeated this framework, but its restatement coincided with a series of major revisions: Jones (1965) identified the century from 1650 to 1750 as the key period, while Kerridge (1967) argued that the Agricultural Revolution?s key achieve ments were between 1570 and 1673. The debates have multiplied ever since. (NEW PARAGRAPH) Although recent work has generally focused on productivity, different measures of product ivity have been emphasized. Wrigley (1985a) has stressed the growth of labour productivity between 1550 and 1850, and the way in which that allowed a wider restructuring of the econ omy through a shift in occupational structure away from agriculture towards manufacturing and services. Grain yields are known to have doubled between 1500 and 1800. Allen (1992; cf. Glennie, 1991) put the growth in wheat yields in the seventeenth century at centre stage, and in his subsequent (1999) account emphasized the growth in total food output between 1600 and 1750 and between 1800 and 1850, as well as the growth of wheat yields. Overton (1996) has emphasized three features of the century after 1750: the unpre cedented increase in total food production im plied by the tripling of population over any previously achieved level, a rise in overall grain yields, and the fact that these productiv ity changes coincided with a period of funda mental technical change. Turner, Beckett and Afton (2001) have argued that the key changes took place between 1800 and 1850, though they pay no attention to the un doubted achievements of the period before 1700. (NEW PARAGRAPH) A series of major and historically unpreced ented achievements can be identified in Eng lish agriculture for every identified sub period between 1550 and 1850, therefore, and it is probably unhelpful to isolate one particular element and identify the period of its achieve ment as ?the Agricultural Revolution?. Such a broad perspective sits comfortably alongside recent views of industrialization as a process that began well before 1750. lst (NEW PARAGRAPH) Suggested reading (NEW PARAGRAPH) Allen (1992); Campbell and Overton (1991); Overton (1996); Wrigley (1988). (NEW PARAGRAPH)