완전무결한자유

Resisting the Globalization of Food: The Return of the Bread Riot, by Ashley Dawson

음식의 세계화에 저항하며; 빵 폭동의 부활

December 20, 2007

resisting the Globalization of Food

The Return of the Bread Riot

By ASHLEY DAWSON

On September 13th, 2007, Italian shoppers, led by a confederation of consumer organizations, staged one of the country's first pasta strikes. In the elegant but rather grimy deindustrialized city of Turin where I'm currently living, erstwhile home to the FIAT auto factories, there were few signs of consumer anger boiling over. No pickets of irate housewives dressed up in inflatable spaghetti costumes outside local groceries, no sign-wavers at the local farmers' market. Was this simply another risible example of the famous Italian proclivity to strike over virtually everything?

2007년 9월 13일 소비자 연합 조직이 주도하여 이탈리안의 구매자들은 국가의 첫 번째 Pasta 불매운동의 하나를 연출하였다. 고상하지만, 더러워지고 산업의 쇠퇴화된, 현재 내가 살고 있는, 이전에 피아트 자동차 공장의 본사였던 토리노의 도시는 소비자의 분노를 넘치게 하는 조짐은 거의 없었다. 부풀어 오른 스파게티 복장으로 차려입은 화난 주부들은 식료품점 밖에서 피켓시위도 없었다. 지역 농산물시장에서도 아무런 시위는 없었다. 실질적인 모든 것들을 깨부수려는 유명한 이탈리안의 기질의 단순하고 또 한편으로는 우스운 사례였던가?

Italian consumers were encouraged to boycott pasta for the day in order to protest against price rises of up to 27% over the last year. Pasta was, however, simply a symbolic target. The consumer organizations that masterminded the strike asked shoppers to stay away from markets in general in order to protest against price run-ups in everything from gasoline to rent to the cost of a cup of espresso in the local cafe. Carlo Rienzi, head of one of these organizations, called on the Italian government to pass a decree opening markets on Sundays for special direct sales of food by farmers to consumers, which, he argued, would help lower prices in general.

이탈리아인들은 지난해보다 27% 오른 가격 인상에 대항하기 위하여 하루종일 Psata 불매운동을 하도록 고무되었다. 그러나 Psata는 단순히 상징적인 대상일 뿐이다. 불매운동을 주도한 소비자연합은 가솔린에서 카페에서 에스프레소의 컵을 빌리는 가격에 이르는 모든 것들의 가격이 오르는 것에 저항하기 위하여, 구매자에게 모든 마켓에 가지말 것을 요구하였다. 이들 조직의 대표 Carlo Rienzi는 일요일에 농부와 소비자간의 특별한 직거래를 위한 시장을 여는 법령을 통과시키도록 이탈리아 정부에 요구하였다. 그가 주장하기로는 일반적으로 더 낮은 가격으로 도움을 줄 수 있기 때문이다.

Italy is not the only country experiencing growing political turbulence over the cost of staple foods. Last January, 70,000 people marched through the streets of Mexico City in a protest that has become known as the "tortilla riot." In response to these demonstrations, president Felipe Calderon signed an agreement to stabilize tortilla prices, which have skyrocketed more than 700% since 1994, the year that the North American Free Trade Agreement became law. After NAFTA took effect, many Mexican peasants were pushed off their land as cheap U.S. corn flooded the now tariff-free domestic market. Now that many American farmers are turning over significant portions of their corn harvest to the production of ethanol, Mexican consumers have no hedge against rising international corn prices.

이탈리아는 주요 음식 상품의 가격의 증가로 정치적 격동이 커지는 것을 경험하고 있는 유일한 나라가 아니다. 지난 1월 70,000명의 사람들이 멕시코시티 거리를 행진하였다. “토르티야 폭동”으로 알려지게 된 항의 속에서 이러한 시위들에 응답한 대통령 Felipe Calderon은 북미자유무역협정이 법으로된 그 해인 1994년이래 700% 급등한 토르티야 가격을 안정시키는 협약에 서명하였다. FTFTA가 영향을 미친 후부터, 수많은 멕시코의 소작농들은 그들의 땅에서 밀려났다. 값싼 미국의 옥수수가 관세자유가 된 국내시장에서 흘러넘쳤다. 지금, 그 많은 미국의 농부들은 옥수수 수확물의 상당 부분을 에탄올 생산으로 전향하고 있다. 멕시코 소비자들은 세계적인 옥수수 값의 상승을 막을 방지책을 가지고 있지 않다.

Where are such apparently isolated protests leading? It might be useful to get some historical perspective by considering one of the world's most famous bread riots. On the morning of October 5th, 1789, a small girl began banging a drum and chanting a protest in one of Paris's markets. According to the historian George Rude, this protest quickly drew a large crowd of sympathetic women, who set out together on a march to make their complaint heard to the royal household in Versailles. Their numbers grew quickly to six or seven thousand; as they marched, the town guards were disarmed and their weapons were handed to men who followed the crowd of enraged women through the streets. We all know where this protest led ultimately.

그렇게 명백하고 고립된 시위들은 어디로 이끌리는가? 세계에서 가장 유명한 빵 폭동 중에 하나를 고려해봄으로써 어떤 역사적 견해를 얻는 것이 유용할지도 모른다. 1789년 10월 5일 아침에, 작은 소녀가 북을 치기 시작했고, 파리 시장 중 한 곳에서 항의의 소리를 지르고 있었다. 역사가 Geoge Rude에 따르면, 이 항거는 순식간에 호의적인 여인들의 많은 무리를 끌어당겼다. 그들은 베르사유의 구왕실에 그들의 불평이 들리도록 함께 행군을 하였다. 숫자는 순식간에 6,7천명에 이르렀다. 그들이 행진함으로써 도시 호위병들은 무장해제 당했고, 그들의 무기는 거리를 가로지르는 화난 여인들의 무리를 따르는 남자들 손에 쥐어졌다. 이 시위가 결국에 어디로 이르게 됐는지를 우리는 잘 알고 있다.

Yet the march on Versailles, like the storming of the Bastille earlier that year, was motivated not by anger over the conspicuous consumption of royals like Marie Antoinette, but rather by the far more immediate issue of the cost of bread. A laboring family of four in Paris ate 1.2 tons of grain a year in this period, 80 percent of which had to get to the city from the surrounding Paris basin on a poorly maintained road network. In the 1780s a series of floods in this area led to poor harvests, provoking soaring bread prices. By 1789, a worker's daily bread took nearly 90 percent of her or his income. The demand for bread was central to practically all the journees, the popular insurrections and demonstrations that broke out repeatedly in Paris between 1789 and 1795. Women, on whose shoulders the crushing burden of domestic economy rested, were pivotal catalysts and participants in these demonstrations.

베르사유로의 계속되는 행진은, 그해 초 바스티유 습격사건과 같은, 마리앙뜨와네뜨와 같은 왕족의 눈에 띄는 과도한 소비에 화가 난 것이라기보다, 빵의 가격이 직접적인 문제였던 것이다. 파리에 노동에 종사하는 4인 가족은 1년의 기간 동안 1.2톤의 곡물을 먹었다. 1.2톤의 80%는 파리분지로부터 엉망진창으로 유지되는 도로망을 통해서 도시로 들어갔다. 1780년대에 이 지역에서 홍수의 연속은 흉년을 만들었고, 빵 값이 급상승하도록 만들었다. 1789년까지 노동자가 매일 사는 빵은 수입의 90%에 가까이 되었다. 빵의 요구는 매일같이 실질적인 핵심을 이루어왔고, 민중의 폭동과 데모는 1789년과 1759년 사이에 파리에서 반복적으로 일어났다. 가정경제의 압박되는 부담은 여자들의 어깨에 걸려있었고, 그녀들은 이러한 시위의 중심 역할자이고 참여자였다.

Of course, nothing like this could happen today, right? The past decade and a half has seen a global wave of democratization, a vital hedge against famine according to the economist Amartya Sen. In addition, we're blessed with a highly flexible food production and distribution system, the product not simply of a few decades of globalization but also of the thoroughgoing transformation of agriculture wrought by the Green Revolution following the 1950s. There are signs, however, that the energy-intensive practices of industrial agriculture spread around the world by the Green Revolution are not sustainable. As Michael Pollan recently argued in the New York Times, the mysterious disappearance of bees over the last year and the growth of drug-resistant Staphylococcus bacteria (which is now killing more Americans each year than AIDS) are both signs of the precariousness of the vast monocultures on which our current food system is based. According to Pollan, "whenever we try to rearrange natural systems along the lines of a machine or a factory, whether by raising too many pigs in one place or too many almond trees, whatever we may gain in industrial efficiency, we sacrifice in biological resilience."

As important as these symptoms of a brewing crisis are, however, one doesn't have to go as far as a hospital ward or an almond grove to get a sense of the unsustainability of the global agricultural system. A trip to the local supermarket to buy pasta will suffice. The rising cereal prices that drew protests in Italy and Mexico this year are the concrete harbingers of a calamity in the making. Over the last year, the food price index of the United Nations' Food and Agriculture Organization rose by more than 40 percent, adding to a significant increase of 9 percent in 2006. According to the head of the FAO, Jacques Diouf, prices of wheat and oilseeds are at record highs; wheat prices have risen by $130 a ton, or 52 percent, since a year ago. In tandem with this inflation in the cost of staple cereals, reserves have become severely depleted. World wheat stores declined 11 percent this year, to the lowest level since 1980. That corresponds with 12 weeks of the world's total consumption. There are only 8 weeks of corn left.

Joachim von Braun, the head of the International Food Policy Research Institute, recently pointed out that crises have not materialized despite these dwindling supplies because states have literally eaten into their national grain stocks. According to von Braun, this situation may change soon because China, in particular, has nearly exhausted its supplies. In a speech in Beijing, von Braun stated that "over the next 12 to 24 months we are in a fairly risky situation. Large consuming nations, particularly China, will feel pressed to enter international markets to bid up prices to unusual levels." Chinese consumers are already facing galloping food inflation. According to a local paper quoted by the Manchester Guardian, three shoppers died recently in a stampede at a supermarket that was offering discounted rapeseed oil. With its massive foreign exchange reserves, China could potentially buy the global food crop many times over, driving international commodity prices through the roof.

Just as was true in late-eighteenth century Paris, rising food prices are also related to climatic conditions. The early ­ and still relatively mild ­ effects of global warming have seriously damaged crop yields in breadbasket regions such as Australia and Ukraine in recent years. As S. Mark Howden of Australia's Commonwealth Scientific and Industrial Research organization pointed out recently, "If there's a significant change in climate in one of our high production areas, if there is a disease that affects a major crop, we are in a very risky situation."

And, just as in the days of the French Revolution, it is the poor who will suffer the most from the spiraling cost of food. International aid agencies are having trouble keeping up with their shipments of food not just as a result of the inflated price of basic foodstuffs, but also because it has become far more expensive to transport food around the world given the surging value of petroleum. High oil prices also directly affect agriculture and, with it, food stocks, because petroleum is a vital ingredient of both fertilizers and pesticides, as well, of course, as being necessary to run the tractors and diesel pumps that are essential to industrial agriculture the world over. In addition, the threat of climate change is affecting poor countries in another way: as bio-fuels have been embraced as an important alternative to petroleum, food and fuel have entered into direct competition. According to a recent article in the Guardian, for example, Bangladeshi officials report that the price of cooking oil - of which it imports 1.2 million tons a year - has almost tripled in the past two years because it is now valued as an alternative to diesel oil.

Of course it's hard to say exactly how these disturbing trends will work out, but it's unlikely that there is going to be an easy resolution. The rising cost of oil, one of the central catalysts of the crisis, is not a product of a political showdown as in the 1970s, but rather of speculation prompted by increasingly tight supplies. Moreover, short-term thinking is not likely to resolve our problems. The specter of famine may, for example, lead farmers the world over to expand crop production to ecologically sensitive or otherwise marginal areas. Yet although this may solve a potential crisis in the short term, it obviously does not represent a viable solution to the gathering crisis of the global industrial agricultural system. A more sustainable approach is suggested by FAO head Jacques Diof. With oil and food prices at near record highs, Diof recently argued that rich countries should stop sending food aid to poor nations and should instead concentrate on helping farmers grow food locally. Mr. Diof's plan echoes the call of the international organization Via Campesina, which has made food sovereignty a cornerstone of its battle for peasant rights.

Until now, however, such an approach has fallen on deaf ears in the halls of powerful international institutions such as the World Trade Organization, which have been dominated by the notion of food security advanced by the US, which argues, as always, for free trade since its industrially produced food products have until now been able to undercut the prices of all competitors on international markets. The result has been policies of food dumping, slashing of price supports that keep small farmers solvent, privatization of credit, and the patenting of crop genetic resources that have combined to push millions of farmers off their land and into the metastasizing mega-cities of the global South. Agriculture is now one of the most monopolistic of industries, with a handful of giant transnational corporations like Monsanto controlling both ends of the production process. Mr. Diof's call for food sovereignty thus implies a wide-ranging transformation of the central institutions of globalization and, indeed, of the entire system of globalized industrial agriculture.

With the contradictions of the industrial food system piling up to potentially deadly effect, it is high time we rejected this unsustainable model of globalized food and turned instead to the more sustainable model of local production and food sovereignty championed by organizations like Via Campesina. Organizing a local pasta strike might be a good if humble way to make this point. One can only hope that it will not take bloody bread riots and large-scale famines to push the world down a more sustainable path.

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Ashley Dawson is the author of Mongrel Nation: Diasporic Culture and the Making of Post-Colonial Britain and co-author with Malini Johar Schueller of "Exceptional State: Contemporary US Culture and the New Imperialism".