Ronald J. Herring

The Oxford Handbook of Food, Politics, and Society - Oxford Handbooks Ronald J. Herring

Marc Notes: This volume confronts the issue of food in politics through three major dimensions - ecology, technology and property. Biographical Note: Ronald J. Herring is Professor of Government and International Professor of Agriculture and Rural Development at Cornell University. Table of Contents: List of ContributorsIntroduction: Food, Politics, and Society1. How is Food Political? Market, State, and KnowledgeRonald J. Herring Part I Production: Technology, Knowledge, and Politics2. Science, Politics, and the Framing of Modern Agricultural TechnologiesJohn Harriss, Drew Stewart3. Genetically Improved CropsMartina Newell-McGloughlin4. Agroecological Intensification of Smallholder FarmingRebecca Nelson, Richard Coe5. The Hardest Case: What Blocks Improvements in Agriculture in Africa?Robert L. Paarlberg6. The Poor, Malnutrition, Biofortification, and BiotechnologyAlexander Stein7. Biofuels: Competition for Land, Resources, and Political SubsidiesDavid Pimentel, Michael Burgess8. Alternative Paths to Food SecurityNorman UphoffPart II Normative Knowledge: Ethics, Rights, and Distributive Justice9. Ethics of Food Production and ConsumptionMichiel Korthals10. Food, Justice, and LandSaturnino M. Borras Jr., Jennifer C. Franco11. Food Security, Productivity, and Gender InequalityBina Agarwal12. Delivering Food Subsidy: The State and the MarketAshok Kotwal, Bharat Ramaswami13. Diets, Nutrition, and Poverty: Lessons from IndiaRaghav Gaiha, Raghbendra Jha, Vani S. Kulkarni, Nidhi Kaicker14. Food Price and Trade Policy Biases: Inefficient, Inequitable, yet not InevitableKym Anderson15. Intellectual Property Rights and the Politics of FoodKrishna Ravi Srinivas16. Is Food the Answer to MalnutritionDavid E. SahnPart III Nature: Food, Agriculture, and the Environment17. Fighting Mother Nature with BiotechnologyAlan McHughen18. Climate Change and Agriculture: Countering Doomsday ScenariosDerrill D. Watson II19. Wild FoodsJules Pretty, Zareen Bharucha20. Livestock in the Food DebatePurvi Mehta-Bhatt, Paolo Ficarelli21. The Social Vision of the Alternative Food MovementSiddhartha ShomePart IV Food Values: Ideas, Interests, and Culture22. Food Values Beyond NutritionAnn Grodzins Gold23. Cultural Politics of Food Safety: Genetically Modified Food in Japan, France, and the United StatesKyoko Sato24. Food SafetyBruce Chassy25. The Politics of Food Labeling and CertificationEmily Clough26. The Politics of Grocery Shopping: Eating, Voting, and (Possibly) Transforming the Food SystemJosee Johnston, Norah MacKendrick27. The Political Economy of Regulation of Biotechnology in AgricultureGregory D. Graff, Gal Hochman, David Zilberman28. Coexistence in the Fields? GM, Organic, and Conventional Food CropsJanice ThiesPart V Global Meets Local: Contestations, Movements, and Expertise29. Global Movements for Food JusticeM. Jahi Chappell30. The Rise of the Organic Foods Movement as a Transnational PhenomenonTomas Larsson31. Global Meets Local in Food Narratives: The Case of the Thai PapayaSarah Davidson Evanega, Mark Lynas32. Thinking the African Food Crisis: The Sahel Forty Years OnMichael J. Watts33. Transformation of the Agrifood Industry in Developing CountriesThomas Reardon, C. Peter Timmer34. The Twenty-first Century Agricultural Land RushGregory Thaler35. Agricultural Futures: The Politics of KnowledgeIan ScoonesIndex"Publisher Marketing: Food has, for most of our species history, been intensely political: who gets to eat what, how often, and through what means? The scale of polity in question has shifted over time, from very local institutions dividing up grain piles to an international community imagined in the Millennium Development Goals of the United Nations. Simultaneously, the numbers and interests of people asserting political stakes in food and agriculture have likewise shifted up and out. Global networks advocate social justice in distal agrarian systems, promotion of some farming techniques and prohibition of others, food sovereignty or efficiencies of markets and trade. Political consumerism allows the well-endowed to "vote with their dollars" for changes in food systems far from home, but depends on certification and labeling from unseen institutions. As an object of governmentality, food has never been so prominent. The thirty-five handbook chapters confront four major themes in the politics of food: property, technology, justice and knowledge. Ronald Herring's editorial introduction asks how food is political, highlighting contention around the role of market, state and information in societal decisions. The first section of the handbook then examines technology, science and knowledge in food production. What is known - and disputed - about malnutrition, poverty and food security? The second section addresses ethics, rights and distributive justice: agrarian reform, gender inequality, entitlements and subsidies, and the social vision of the alternative food movement. The third section looks to intersections of agriculture and nature: wild foods, livestock, agro-ecological approaches to sustainability, and climate change and genetic engineering. The fourth section addresses food values and culture: political consumerism, labeling and certification, the science and cultural politics of food safety, values driving regulation of genetically modified foods and potential coexistence of GMOs, and organic and conventional crops. The fifth and final section looks at frontiers of global contentions: rival transnational advocacy networks, social movements for organic farming, the who and why of international land grabbing, junctures of cosmopolitan and local food narratives, the "supermarket revolution" and the international agrifood industry in low-income countries, and politics of knowledge in agricultural futures.

Contributor Bio:  Herring, Ronald J Herring is Director of the Mario Einaudi Center for International Studies, the John S. Knight Professor of International Relations and Professor of Government at Cornell University.