Crisis, Disruption, and Renewal in Global Food Supply Chains and Beyond

Global food supply chains, we have been told often in recent

years, are in crisis. How much, though, does this language of crisis-as

particular, contextual, temporally bound-suffice to describe the conditions

of the present? This chapter, and the book it introduces, take the

COVID-19 pandemic as a springboard to interrogate a larger set of structural,

environmental and political fault lines running through the global

food system. In a context in which disruptions to the production, distribution

and consumption of food are figured as exceptions to the smooth,

just-in-time efficiencies of global supply chains, we examine the pandemic

not simply as a particular and acute moment of disruption but rather as a

lens on a deeper, longer set of structural processes within which disruption

is endemic. At a time when it is more likely to be grasped in terms of speculative investment than as a common good, food offers a vital prism

for grappling with the logics by which power circulates in the world.

Attending to this constellation of forces calls for attention to supply chains

as key mechanisms in the organization of the capitalist food system but

also demands that we extend our thinking beyond the bounded linearities

of supply chain models.