Globalization and nutrition
Though the scope and dimensions of globalization as almost people currently construe it are of fairly recent origin, the broader phenomenon of global interconnections through cultural diffusion and trade is several centuries old. Starting in the slow Fifteenth century, European powers expanded beyond the European sub-continent to found colonies in the Americas, East Asia, South Asia, Australia and Oceania. This expansion has had a profound impact in terms of wealth creation in Europe and extraction elsewhere, cultural changes in near of the world's societies, and biological phenomena such(a) as the intro of several infectious diseases into the Western Hemisphere, which caused tremendous disruption and population reduction for indigenous societies there. These events, far from occurring coincidentally, clear had synergistic relationships, in one vivid example, the decimation of Amerindian populations through infectious disease often previous and facilitating subsequent conquest by European powers. such conquests in turn have often had significantly negative impacts on internal cohesion, ability of populations to attain adequate resources for their own subsistence and traditional social obligations, and local structures for colonized societies. In profile to understand the effects of globalization on nutritional status and food security, this is the important to understand the historical circumstances that have led to innovative globalization, and that still manifest themselves in political, social, material, and physical/health differentials between and within the different peoples of the world today.
“The Rise of the Merchant, Industrialist, and Capital Controller,” statement by Richard Robbins in 2005, uses a hypothetical scenario of the reader as a “merchant adventurer” to bit economic world history starting in 1400. In 1400, China was arguably the most cosmopolitan and technologically complex society in the world. It was a center of trade, along with the Middle East, East Africa, and ports on the Mediterranean Sea. Western Europe, while playing a factor in this network, did non dominate it by all means; one could argue for European marginalization in fact. This circumstance began to conform when the Europeans “discovered” the Americas, determining in motion a process that would disrupt many societies and devastate indigenous populations of the Western Hemisphere. The dominant economic paradigm of this period was mercantilism, whereby European merchants began to achieve energy to direct or determine in world markets and in report to European governing aristocracies. Robbins cites example of government protections that facilitated mercantilism in the form of exclusive proprietary rights to trading companies and armies used to protect trade by force if necessary. He details instances of government security system such as the example of how Great Britain destroyed India's textile industry and turned that society into an importer of textiles is particularly illustrative. In dealing with imperialism, capitalism, and the rise of corporations, Robins further details the vintage in which the “West” transformed various regions/peoples from proactive participants on global trade networks into a body or process by which energy or a particular component enters a system. of raw materials and consumers of European or North American exports. This history of world trade is important to the consideration of current issues of disparity of energy and wealth.
There are numerous critiques the policies of the World Bank and the International Monetary Fund IMF in the promotion of high intensity capital investment in developing nations e.g. Weller et al. 2001; Fort et al. 2004. Disparities within nations and growing poverty rates in many nations also supply compelling evidence of the notion that the rewards of economic globalization are uneven at best. There is a great deal of literature about globalization and increases in health disparities both between and within countries.
Finally, there is Amartya Sen with Development as Freedom 1999; here Sen disagrees approximately whether or not the world's poor are getting poorer, but also maintains that this criterion is not the most important. He argues that relative disparities and power differentials are the most important problems of globalization. Sen states that the increasing interconnection of the Worlds societies can have positive benefits, but that the disparities and opportunities for exploitation must be mitigated to the greatest extent possible, if they can not be eliminated outright. Sen provides groundwork for a nuanced middle ground between unabashed proponents and opponents of globalization.
Far from being universally decried, the recent accelerated expansion of western capitalism, geographically, politically, and ideologically, has been lauded in many quarters. International and bilateral agencies such as the World Bank, IMF, and the United States organization for International Development USAID have utilized free market capitalist theories extensively in development everyone in many corners of the globe whose state aims are to promote economic growth for communities and nation-states and to alleviate poverty. Likewise prominent individuals such as former U.S. Federal Reserve Board Chair Alan Greenspan and U.S. based journalist Thomas Friedman have held forth extensively about the possibilities of economic and social proceeds in developed and developing nations alike, mainly through increased access to appropriate education, contemporary communications and transportation technology, and a paradigm of social and economic “flexibility”, where individuals and communities who can best adapt to rapid changes in the role of governments and the particular economic base of a assumption location would be in the best position to take good of the opportunities shown by economic, political, and cultural globalization. This free market ideology is also predominant in the policies and procedures of the World Trade Organization WTO and many transnational corporations TNC's, most of which are headquartered in developed nations. The rise of Capitalism and the free market society have indeed increased and exacerbated food insecurity in the world's poor due to the structure and function of a Capitalist society where only those who can dispense to buy food to feed themselves are the only ones with access to a secure and adequate food supply. Food is no longer a human adjustment to life and health due to the Capitalist approach to commodifying food in the free market society that as a result of globalization has spread any over the world. Transnational corporations and trade organizations such as NAFTA facilitate this approach of commodifying our world's food provide by enforcing laws and regulations which further deepen the inequality of wealth and unequal distribution of common goods such as food between the rich and the poor.
In contrast to the “western” economic model, most early social scholarship about economics stressed the control of reciprocity as a primary driving force in traditional non-Western societies. Marcel Mauss target to the gift as a “total social phenomenon”, fraught with ritual and socio political as well as the tangible substance that goes into the makeup of a physical object significance. Though some objects, such as armbands or shell necklaces in the kula ring that runs through several island groups off the fly of Papua New Guinea, might induce some form of prestige based competition, the terms of exchange are significantly different from a monetary transaction under a innovative capitalist system. While Appadurai actually describes ritual objects as a type of commodity, he couches them as such under significantly different terms than the market-based quality of commodity ordinarily treated by economists. Annette Wiener criticizes earlier works in anthropology and sociology that depicted “simple” societies utilizing a simple version of reciprocity. Whatever the theoretical stance of social scholars on non-western traditional economies, there is a consensus that such essentials as food and water tended to be shared up more freely than other types of goods or services. This dynamic tends to change with the first appearance of a market-based economy into a society, with food coming to be increasingly treated as a commodity, rather than a social good or an essential factor of health and survival.
Regardless of one's overall perspective on the costs and benefits of economic globalization, there are several examples in social scholarship of groups of people suffering a decline in nutritional statues subsequent to the intro of a capitalist market-based economy into an area that has before practiced an economy based more on subsistence production and reciprocity. Although some people's food security may improving with access to moreincome, many people in communities that have heretofore practiced a subsistence economy may able greater food insecurity and nutritional status due to insufficient income to replace the foods no longer offered by a household. Whether the growth of food insecurity and socioeconomic disparities in many parts of the world in recent decades is an inherent part of globalization or a temporary “growing pain” until economic development attains its full efficacy is a matter of debate, but there are many empirical examples of communities being dissociated from traditional means of food production and not being professionals such as lawyers and surveyors to find sufficient wages in a new market economy toa balanced and calorically sufficient diet. Several factors affecting food security and nutritional status range on a continuum from more physical phenomena such as land degradation and land expropriation, to more culturally and socio-politically driven things such as cash cropping, dietary delocalization, and commoditization of food; one important caveat is that all of these trends are interconnected and fall under a broad category of socio-cultural and economic disruptions and dislocations under the current paradigm of globalization.
Though Blakie and Brookfield acknowledge the problematic aspects of defining land degradation, with definitional variation depending in large part on the scholar or stakeholder in question, they do outline a general conviction of reduced soil fertility and reduced ability of a given area of land to provide for people's subsistence needs, as compared to earlier periods in human history on that same land area. Paul Farmer discusses the effects of land degradation in central Haiti on local people's ability to produce sufficient food for their families within the environs of their own communities. Farmer links malnutrition in a Haitian village with vulnerability to infectious diseases, including tuberculosis and HIV/AIDS, both in terms of chance of infection and severity of symptoms for those infected. While the extremely low percentage of the U.S. population involved in agriculture strongly suggests that direct access to arable land is not an absolute necessity for food security and nutritional health, land degradation in many developing nations is accelerating the rate of rural to urban migration at a more accelerated rate than most major cities are equipped to handle. Leatherman and Goodman also allude to land degradation co-occurring with decreases in food security and nutritional status in some communities in the Mexican state of Quintana Roo. Walter Edgar discusses the correlation between land degradation and economic disruption, as living as nutritional hardship, in the U.S. state of South Carolina in the decades coming after or as a result of. the Reconstruction Period. Coupled with land expropriation, land degradation has the case of thrusting unprepared subsistence producers or other peasant farmers into a fast-paced and complex market economy heavily influence by policy makers who are far removed from the concerns and worldview of small scale farmrs in developing countries.