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Placing Food Systems in First World Political Ecology: A

Review and Research Agenda
Ryan E. Galt*
Department of Human Ecology and Agricultural Sustainability Institute, University of California, Davis

Abstract
In this paper, I review recent political ecological scholarship on first world agrifood systems and advocate
for further development of the field. To do so, I first briefly examine the themes of first world political
ecology and argue that food systems is an underdeveloped topic in first world political ecology relative
to other themes because of the existence of agrarian political economy, a strongly allied field. This
requires interrogating and teasing apart the relationship between political ecology and agrarian political
economy. I then turn to review the current “political ecology of first world food systems” literature,
which is both in line with established political ecological contours — examining global–local connec-
tions, conservation and degradation, and the utility of ecological metrics — but also recently extending
analysis to alternative food networks and to the body–consumption nexus. In the conclusion, I outline
an agenda for political ecological research praxis focused on increased interdisciplinary work with
biophysical and technical scientists; the spatial, social, economic margins; the “invisible middle” of
the food industry and the “end” of the food system in human waste and the necessity of mending
the metabolic rift; and the need for increased societal engagement by political ecologists.

Introduction
The food system is “the set of activities and relationships that interact to determine what, how
much, by what method and for whom food is produced and distributed” (OECD, 1981, cited
in Whatmore 1996, 37) (Figure 1). It is composed of “globalized networks of knowledge
production, on- and off-farm technologies, production, consumption and regulatory systems”
(Watts 2000, 15). Although industrialization has freed much of the population from providing
labor to the food system, food production, processing, distribution, and marketing still
comprise more than half of all human work (Pimbert et al. 2001).
The food system faces serious problems, and society is paying more attention. For one,
powerful actors — agricultural input firms, food industry firms, industrialized nations, and
the World Trade Organization — have dramatically changed the world’s food system over
the last few decades through neoliberal policies that benefit the global North and leave
unchecked the ever-concentrating power of transnational corporations (McMichael 2009).
Because of inequalities and poverty, a large percentage of the world’s people face hunger
and food insecurity despite sufficient food production (Gliessman and Holt-Giménez 2012;
Lappé et al. 1998). The food system is also almost entirely dependent on non-renewable fossil
fuels for agriculture, food processing, and trade (Pfeiffer 2006). Environmental problems
stemming from food systems, including contributions to global warming, environmental
contamination, and soil erosion, are increasingly important as we reach the likely limits
of planetary ecological thresholds (Rockström et al. 2009). Thus, a great deal rides on how
we — scholars in geography and political ecology, as well as activists, policy-makers, and
engaged citizens generally — engage with the food system.

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638 Food Systems in First World Political Ecology

Fig. 1. A schematic diagram of the contemporary, industrial agrifood system in the first world (inspired by Whatmore
1996, 40, Atkins and Bowler 2001, 11). Note that its linearity of flow is anti-ecological.

In this paper, I show how first world political ecology has, and has not, engaged with the
food system as a research focus. Political ecology on first world food systems is small relative to
other topics addressed by first world political ecology, despite its applicability (Eaton 2008).
This apparent gap leads me to interrogate the relationship between a political ecology of
food systems and the field of agrarian political economy. I then review recent scholarship
falling under the heading “political ecology of first world food systems,” and outline a research
agenda that requires simultaneous attention to the workings of capital, rationalities and the
makings of meaning, and ecological flows of materials and energy. Scholarship in this area is
an opportunity to address severe problems in how humankind relates to the planet and how
we relate to one another.

First World Political Ecology

Following Blaikie and Brookfield (1987), Robbins (2004, 391) defines political ecology as
“empirical, research-based explorations to explain linkages in the condition and change of
social/environmental systems, with explicit consideration of relations of power.” Political
ecology emphasizes that “[l]ess a problem of poor management, inappropriate technology, or
overpopulation, environmental problems [are] social in origin and definition” (Watts and Peet
2004, 7, original emphasis). Many academic fields and theories shape political ecology, making
it epistemologically and methodologically pluralistic. Geographers, anthropologists, sociologists,
political scientists, heterodox economists, biologists, and ecologists contribute strongly. The field
draws on peasant studies, political economy, feminist theory, common property theory, science
and technology studies, poststructuralism, environmental history, actor–network theory, and
nonequilibrium ecology. While some lament this heterodoxy (Blaikie 1999; Peterson 2000),
political ecologists typically accept multiple roots and shoots rather than engaging in “intellectual
deforestation” (Wolf 1990, 588, cited in Greenberg and Park 1994, 1).
Yet, most academics, including political ecologists, engage in “boundary work” by
delimiting questions, methods, and areas inside their field from those outside (Gieryn
1983). The most relevant boundary work here is by Bryant and Bailey (1997), who cleaved
off “third world political ecology,” setting conditions for the later emergence of “first world
political ecology.” Although there are important precedents (Fortmann 1996; Sheridan 1995;
Wolf 1972), first world political ecological scholarship accelerated greatly in the early 2000s
(Heynen 2003; McCarthy 2002; Robbins and Birkenholtz 2003; Walker 2003). As I see it,
first world political ecology has four overlapping domains, for which I use illustrative, rather
than comprehensive, citations:

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• the politics of primary production, including fisheries and fishing communities (Dwyer and
Minnegal 2006; Mansfield 2004; St. Martin 2005), forestry and forest conservation
(Berglund 2006; Correia 2005; Kosek 2004; London 1998; Vernon 2007), cattle and rangeland
(Rico 1998; Sayre 2002), alternative food networks (AFNs) and localism (Andreatta 2000;
DuPuis and Block 2008; Eaton 2008), subsistence food cultures (Emery and Pierce 2005;
Jarvenpa 2008), and conflicts over mining (Bridge 2000);
• struggles over protected areas and common lands, including wildlife conservation (Rikoon
2006; Robbins and Luginbuhl 2005), indigenous and local struggles over environmental
control (Hornborg 2005; McCarthy 2002), and construction and contestation of the
commons (McCarthy 2005);
• conflicts over the distribution and governance of environmental goods and harms, including
rural land use conflicts around development and ecosystem services (Darling 2005; Hiner
2012; Robertson 2004; Walker and Fortmann 2003), multifunctionality and ecotourism
(Che 2006; Hollander 2004), water conflicts and politics (Kaika 2003; Prudham 2004; Smith
2004; Swyngedouw 2003), and hazardous waste and environmental justice (Holifield 2004;
Sze and London 2008); and
• analyses of everyday lived environments and society–environment entanglements and
discourses in landscapes outside of primary production, including the suburban lawn (Robbins
2007), urban and exurban political ecology (Brownlow 2006; Cadieux 2008; Heynen and
Perkins 2005; McClintock 2011), and food consumption (Bryant and Goodman 2004;
Guthman and DuPuis 2006).
Conspicuously, agriculture and food remain a fairly minor topic in first world political ecol-
ogy literature, especially vis-à-vis third world political ecology.1 Because food is both essential
and increasingly politically heated in industrialized nations and because about half of the world’s
cultivable land is in industrialized nations (Dudal 1982, cited in Blaikie and Brookfield 1987),
first world political ecology’s relative lack of engagement with agrifood systems appears curious.

Political Economy of Agriculture: Similar Crucibles, Different Places and Trajectories

A compelling reason for the scarcity of research self-identifying as “political ecology” on first
world agrifood systems is that political ecologists see similar work underway, but under a
different name: the political economy of agriculture, also known as agrarian political economy.
As Robbins (2002, 1509) notes,

First World political ecology might . . . simply be a set of broadly defined existing research projects into
the politics of natural resource management in urban environments and modern agriculture . . . work
on contemporary agriculture and rural land use . . . has for many years taken a critical political
economic stance in examining the transformation of First World farming systems.

Whereas other authors (Ishii-Eiteman 2009; McMichael 2009) group political economy
and political ecology vis-à-vis agrifood systems, following Atkins and Bowler (2001) and
Moran (2010), I treat them as distinct. I do so because of their different histories and
trajectories, even though they have substantial areas of overlap. I use Buttel’s (2001, 165)
definition of the political economy of agriculture (agrarian political economy), which includes
“structural analysis of change in agri-food systems, and thus ignores certain topics of obvious
importance to the sociology of agriculture and rural sociology/studies more generally
(technological change, gender, nature/environment, agricultural communities/localities,
and so on).”

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The political economy of agriculture started in the late 1970s as part of the “new rural
sociology” that sought to infuse a critical edge into rural sociology (Buttel et al. 1990)
because of a “widespread questioning of the social and technical bases of modern U.S.
agriculture” because of problems such as soil erosion, rapid inflation of food prices, difficulties
of migrant workers and family farmers, and agribusiness’s “antisocial tendencies” (Buttel
1983, 105). During the 1970s and 1980s, agrarian political economy addressed classical and
neo-Marxian questions vis-à-vis the social relations of production, specifically: (1) the “agrarian
question,” first posed by Kautsky, as to why smallholders persisted in the face of concentration
of the means of production (Friedmann 1978; Mann and Dickinson 1978), which included an
emphasis on contingent structuring by political economic processes (Pudup and Watts 1987);
(2) the class position of farmers as independent capitalists, simple commodity producers, or
“propertied proletarians,” and class relations generally (Davis 1980; Mooney 1988); (3) agribusiness,
especially the penetration of capital through backward and forward linkages to the farm via
appropriation and substitution (Friedland et al. 1981; Goodman et al. 1987; Kloppenburg
1988); and (4) commodity systems analysis that focused on organizational and social
characteristics in the production of specific commodities (Friedland 1984).
Four major themes emerged in agrarian political economy in the 1990s, strongly
influenced by Friedmann and McMichael’s (1989) food regimes concept. Geographers and
sociologists created anthologies on globalization of agribusiness and food industries
(Blanchetti-Revelli 1995; Bonanno 1994; Goodman and Watts 1997; McMichael 1994;
McMichael 1995) and continued with detailed case studies.2 Buttel (2001) noted that the
approaches, which continue as current emphases in agrarian political economy, included
(1) world-systems and world-history analyses of agrifood systems aimed at connecting
production systems, commodity chains, and state agrifood policies in the global South and
global North (Friedland 2004; McMichael 2009); (2) global commodity chain/systems
analysis using empirical studies of multinational firm structures and strategies (Clapp and
Fuchs 2009; McMichael 1994); (3) studies that explore changing food system governance,
including an emphasis on food quality, organic food, local food and AFNs, certification,
and labeling (Allen et al. 2003; Goodman 2004; Guthman 2004; Marsden et al. 1999;
Rosin and Campbell 2009); and (4) analyses of agriculture informed by engagements with
science and technology studies and actor–network theory (Henke 2008; Warner 2007;
Whatmore and Thorne 1997). Most recently, food sovereignty has become a prominent
organizing concept in agrarian political economy (Martínez-Torres and Rosset 2010;
Perfecto et al. 2009; Wittman et al. 2010).
Agrarian political economy and political ecology share many features. Both are interdisciplinary,
although their disciplinary compositions are slightly different; agrarian political economy is
centered mostly in rural sociology with contributions from geography and anthropology,
while the same mix, but centered more in geography, constitutes political ecology. The fields
arose in similar crucibles of neo-Marxist thought seeking to displace less radical predecessors.
In the 1990s, both fields experienced a lessening of theoretical coherence, in part due to the
decline of neo-Marxism. Many theoretical and methodologies approaches and issues are
shared: globalization and the interplay of global and local, homogenization/resistance, society–
nature dualism, and actor–network theory (Buttel 2001, 177). Many scholars contribute to both
fields, including Susan Andreatta, Lucy Jarosz, Michael Watts, Julie Guthman, and myself.
Yet, three important distinctions remain as I see it. First, political ecology is considerably
broader because of its vast topical expanse (noted above) and more extensive geographical
coverage in its case studies (the spatial coverage has historically been the converse of agrarian
political economy). The geographical focus of case studies in agrarian political economy has
been on the USA, Europe, Australia, and New Zealand, although in the 1990s, it expanded

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to include the global agrifood system. Yet these global analyses typically are not rooted in
specific places nor informed by ethnographic fieldwork, the norm of political ecology where
context-specific work is highly valued.
Second, the fields’ engagements with poststructuralism are different. Agrarian political
economy has avoided the most “depoliticizing forms of postmodernity” (Buttel 2001: 176).
In contrast, political ecology in the 1990s and 2000s strongly embraced poststructuralism
(Peet and Watts 1996) and its attention to discourse, power/knowledge, feminist theory,
postcolonial theory, critical race studies, and social constructivism (Braun and Castree 1998;
Castree and Braun 2001; Forsyth 2003; Kosek 2006; Rocheleau et al. 1996; Wainwright
2008) I should note, however, that the commitment to poststructural perspectives varies
greatly within political ecology, from largely structuralist reads following Harvey and Smith
in which powerful structures produce discourses and subjectivities, to perspectives where
the very category of “economy” is constituted and maintained through discourse along the
lines of Gibson-Graham’s work (e.g., St. Martin 2005). But political ecology’s greater
openness to poststructuralism means that the fields differ in their engagement with questions
of ontology. Most political ecologists, following Smith (1984) and others, are resolutely
opposed to the Western ontological binary of nature/society, with much theorizing to get
beyond this problematic dichotomy. As Watts and Peet (2004) note, most political ecologists
would likely call themselves critical realists, a philosophy that employs a “very inclusive . . .
luxuriant” ontology or theory of what is (Collier 2005, 334). Agrarian political economists
show less concern about ontological foundations, and, as Buttel did, shy away from social
constructivism probably because it is seen as politically debilitating.
Third, agrarian political economy has typically treated “nature” as an obstacle to the
penetration of capitalist social relations in agriculture and a modifier of, or a barrier to, the
accumulation of capital (Boyd et al. 2001; Mann 1990).3 In contrast, most political ecology
conceptualizes nature as having causal powers or “agency” that must be taken into account
for better explanations of social and socio-ecological phenomena (Bassett and Koli Bi 2000;
Bennett 2010; Galt 2010; Robbins 2007; Zimmerer 1996). For example, Grossman (1998)
and I (Galt 2010) have critiqued agrarian political economy’s commodity chain analysis for
not taking nature seriously enough, arguing that political ecology can better explain farmer
decision-making and local environmental outcomes because it is more attentive to the inter-
actions of local ecological conditions and farmers’ agency (see also Galt 2008).
Given the strengths and very important contributions of agrarian political economy, what
does a political ecology of agrifood systems look like? What would it add? Like agrarian
political economy, it would maintain political economy as a foundation but simultaneously
expand its theoretical lens in two directions to (1) interpretivism, by examining meanings,
values, and rationalities, and (2) strategic positivism (cf. Wyly 2009) for analyses of ecological
and socio-ecological relations. Thus, a first world political ecology of agrifood systems offers
the potential for better analysis and action through paying simultaneous attention to the work-
ings of capital, rationalities and the makings of meaning, and ecological flows of materials and
energy (Figure 2). Inklings of this integration exist in the literature, which I review below,
but the terra incognita of integration is much larger than what has thus far been carried out.

The Political Ecology of First World Food Systems: A Review

In this section, I review work that is attentive to political economy and prioritizes ecological
and/or human well-being in agrifood networks. More specifically, I include work that uses
seminal political ecological scholarship in its argument and/or specifically identifies with po-
litical ecology. This differs from some political ecology reviews that examine work in cognate

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642 Food Systems in First World Political Ecology

Fig. 2. Three views of the relationship between ontology and epistemology to be productively brought together in a
political ecology of food systems (inspired by Sheppard 2005, 11).

fields (e.g., Elmhirst 2011; Watts and Peet 2004), but the existence of agrarian political econ-
omy and the need for brevity cause me to bypass considerable work on agrifood systems that
could fall under political ecology broadly construed, but whose authors do not identify the work
with the field (e.g., Guthman 2004). This means that I leave out important developments in
posthumanist research related to food (Bennett 2010; Roe 2006) and political ecology’s
intersections with actor–network theory and science and technology studies (Goldman et al. 2011;
Whatmore 2002).
The literature reviewed below has followed common political ecological contours —
connections between households and global processes, conservation and degradation, and
use of ecological metrics — and has more recently used political ecology to examine AFNs
and to the body–consumption nexus.

HOUSEHOLDS AND LIVELIHOODS IN THE GLOBAL AGRIFOOD SYSTEM

One political ecological focus has been on the connections between farm household
livelihoods, society–environment relations, and the global agrifood system. Many broad political
ecological accounts of agriculture and food are quite focused in space and time, although they
also cut across countries and continents (Butzer 2002; Carney 2001; Galt 2011; Hamilton
2003; Stone and Downum 1999). Here, I focus on world-systems oriented accounts.
Friedmann (1999), a towering figure in agrarian political economy, provides a historical
overview of the ecological relationships between households and agriculture over time and
space, from domestication to colonization to commodification to industrialization to
relocalization. For millennia, “the circles of growing and eating were contained by the lands on
which human beings managed the dependent species which fed them . . . . The first stage in
breaking the apparent reciprocal dependence between the human species and local ecosystems . . .
began with colonial conquest and settlement 500 years ago” (Friedmann 1999, 39). Colonialism
reconfigured households in relation to racial, gender, and generational hierarchies. She ana-
lyzes the contradictory results of these changes in the case of English high farming (ecologically

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sustainable but socially unsustainable) and settler farming in the “neo-Europes” (ecologically
disastrous but socially sustainable). While a rich overview, Friedmann’s ecology relies upon an
equilibrium view of annual crop agriculture, thereby missing opportunities to engage with
non-equilibrium ecology (Botkin 1990; Zimmerer 1994).
Pimbert et al. (2001) also provide an overview of the world’s agrifood system and argue for
making it more environmentally sustainable, socially just, and democratic, a precursor to later
calls for food sovereignty (Pimbert 2006). Through political ecology they combine a “food
system perspective” to understand powerful actors within the agrifood system who wield
considerable political–economic power and a “livelihoods perspective” focused on economic,
ecological, and sociocultural assets, capabilities, and activities necessary to make a living. Striking
a prevalent theme (Lappé et al. 1998; Patel 2007), they note, “[t]he modern food system only
meets the needs of a small group of farmers and multinational manufacturers and sellers of
agricultural inputs, as well as food processors, distributors, retailers and certain groups of
consumers” (Pimbert et al. 2001, 3). The piece adds a helpful conceptualization, drawing
on Reimer’s (1996) work, of diverging rural worlds created through different positions
vis-à-vis global trade (Table 1). By increasingly sourcing food from new areas, trade liberalization
subjects more farmers to cost–price squeezes through increased competition, forcing farmers
to neglect conservation, use agrochemicals, and use shorter rotations and cultivate fewer crops
or livestock breeds. Downward price pressure from liberalization is made worse by farmers
increasing production to make up for lower prices, further decoupling the costs of production
from market prices because of increased overproduction (see also Cochrane 1979, Bell 2004).
The answer is participatory research to address “the causes of economic marginalization”
because this is “key to making the multifunctional role of agriculture a reality, and to rebuilding
the resilience of agriculture and rural communities” (Pimbert et al. 2001, 12).

CONSERVATION AND DEGRADATION

Conservation and degradation in first world agriculture has generated a large social science
literature, but relatively little from political ecology. Blaikie and Brookfield (1987) address the
farmer, state, and land in the first world and note the special context: population and poverty
as explanations of land degradation are not commonly advanced and the industrialization of
agriculture is more widespread, creating greater food surpluses, decreases in farm labor, and
increased productivity per unit labor input. They highlight soil conservation institutions in
the USA, noting the 1985 Farm Bill as “an important departure in the role of the state”
(Blaikie and Brookfield 1987, 230) with more conservation provisions, and the structural
changes in agriculture such as concentration and vertical integration with contract farming,
which means that food processing and marketing firms play a role in land-use decisions. They
conclude that land degradation remains serious and that farm subsidies tend to encourage poor
management (see also Swanson 1993). Gillman (1996) follows these contours with his study of
ten counties in the US Midwest.
Messer’s (1987a,1987b) work on farmland degradation in Australia provides an example of
political ecology’s attention to the causal powers of nature. The failure of farmers, policy-
makers, and professionals to understand “the nature and complexities of the land” is the
“primary causal variable” leading to continued degradation (Messer 1987b, 233). This
includes a lack of integrated understanding because of single-discipline approaches, an
overemphasis on technical solutions to degradation, and an agrarian ideology that allows land
users and the state to ignore the land’s ecological limits and the problems of small-scale
farmers. Her analysis highlights security of tenure, the role of the state, integration into world
markets, and the power of off-farm capital and suggests the still-current need for empirical

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© 2013 The Author(s)

Table 1. Characteristics of farm households in diverging rural worlds, global South and North.

Proportion Social Position Returns Connection Likelihood

of farms in relations of vis-à-vis vis-à-vis to agrifood State of social
category production global markets off-farm capital industry support reproduction

Geography Compass © 2013 John Wiley & Sons Ltd

Rural Small Capitalist Globally Capital Contracts, Strong, especially Very high
world 1 minority corporate and competitive accumulation farmers as in North
family farms extension of
food industry
Food Systems in First World Political Ecology

Rural Minority Peasant/family Shrinking in Declining Wholesale Varies greatly High to low
world 2 farms, relying on importance returns mostly across nations
off-farm work increasing and world-system
niche
marketing
in North

Rural Majority Fractured Redundant, Surplus Off-farm Minimum, fragile Very low
world 3 livelihoods, focus on extraction and migrants entitlements
supported by survival self-exploitation become farm
diverse work workers
strategies

Source: Paraphrased and modified from Pimbert et al. (2001: 7–8).

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 Food Systems in First World Political Ecology 645

analysis to “differentiate between land degradation that has occurred as a result of the
opportunity for capital gain and that due to income maintenance, or simply survival”
(Messer 1987b, 237).
With the separation of animal and crop production in the first world, degradation from
industrial animal production looms large. Durrenberger and Thu (1997) focus on conflicts
over pollution from industrial hog operations in Iowa and North Carolina, analyzing how
various actors use science and powerful connections to amplify or dampen policy signals.
With the goal of seeing how complex states act as part of complex ecological systems, they
demonstrate connections among powerful players in the industrial swine industry, government,
and the land grant universities in North Carolina and Iowa and posit environmental changes in
hog production as resulting from food industry changes along the lines of vertical integration,
with new locations sought in areas where resistance to industrial animal production is lower.
Although peoples’ complaints “are an integral part of the environmental system,” “rural
residents who are affected cannot automatically affect the remedies” (Durrenberger and
Thu 1997, 35).

ECOLOGICAL METRICS AND ENERGETICS OF PRODUCTION

A few political ecologists have engaged with studies of energetics, treating farms as input–
output systems à la systems ecology. Bayliss-Smith (1982) provides a comparative political
ecology of agriculture from non-industrialized to fully industrialized systems. His work
combines energetic analysis from systems ecology (Pimentel and Pimentel 1979) and cultural
ecology (Rappaport 1968) with attention to exploitation and agrarian change caused by
capitalism and industrialization. The book provides a number of important insights, with
one case showing that English farm workers produced five times the food energy
consumed by their families, a vindication — via energy metrics — the Marxian concept of
exploitation. As Friedmann (1999, 43) notes, Bayliss-Smith “refuses to accept as useful the
‘abstract’ measure of gross energy productivity (total food energy, including fodder, divided
by total population) — eight times higher than New Guinea labor — because of the unequal
distribution of the product compared to egalitarian shifting cultivators.”
With more focus and detail, Moseley and Jordan (2001) continue with energetics to compare
no-till and conventional tillage corn systems in Georgia. As a political ecologist–ecologist
collaboration, the work contributes to discussions of sustainability metrics. Using agronomic
plots to experiment with no-till versus conventional corn production and to test energy
input/output analysis as a metric of sustainability, the authors find that determining the more
sustainable system depends upon the measurement used, as conventional till corn has a higher
ratio of kernel calories to total energy subsidies (e.g., machinery, fuel, etc.), but no-till corn
had a higher ratio of total aboveground biomass to total energy subsidies, which is the most
important measurement for farmers because of higher returns. They conclude that energy
input/output analysis “is appealing as an indicator of ecological sustainability because it is a
whole ecosystem measure” (Moseley and Jordan 2001, 113). This kind of engagement is
needed to move beyond the bizarre divide often seen between critical analysis and
quantification.

ALTERNATIVE FOOD NETWORKS

A considerable literature has followed the rapid expansion of AFNs in the last decade
(Campbell et al. 2011; Goodman et al. 2012). Farmers’ markets, community supported
agriculture, food cooperatives, fair trade, and community gardens are meant to build closer links

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between production and consumption, and/or decrease surplus extraction from the
farm. Patricia Allen (2004, 141), an extremely influential figure in agrifood studies, has
called for agrifood scholars to draw on political ecology “as a new epistemological approach
for alternative agrofood movements and institutions.” Although academics have carried out
some of this, the links between AFN practitioners and political ecology as an epistemology
are tenuous.
Political ecologists have created detailed case studies of AFNs, focusing especially on
production–consumption linkages. Andreatta (2000) explores the growth in organic
agriculture, its regulation by certification agencies and the state, and the specificities of
organic agriculture, marketing, and consumption in North Carolina. She creates a
“political ecology of organic production” that elucidates the relations that support a
more ecologically oriented agriculture in North Carolina: “state and federal standards
for certifying organic food, government decisions about the location and management
of farmers’ markets, tax codes affecting farm income, and the eligibility of growers for
farm subsidies and emergency relief based on politically determined criteria” (Andreatta
2000, 48). Qazi and Selfa (2005) focus on the development of AFNs in Washington
counties dominated by industrial agriculture and conservative ideologies. In these areas,
AFN farmers face large challenges, relative to those in urban and exurban regions, that
Qazi and Selfa (2005, 48) identify through a political ecology approach focused on the
“producer–consumer nexus” and “on broader structural forces with an examination of
regionally distinctive social histories, natural environment, and institutions, that helps
to explain the local emergence of agro-food networks.” They uncover hostility toward
organics because of the implication that conventional fruit is less healthy: “organics pose
a threat to the values ascribed to conventionally grown, local produce as nutritious,
healthy commodities produced by hard-working families who care about the land they
farm” (Qazi and Selfa 2005, 57). Given specific discourses and circumstances, the rural
consumer base in the area provides few opportunities for AFN growth. In a similar vein,
DuPuis and Block (2008, 1989) show that “[d]ifferent localist politics create different
political ecologies in part through different politics of scale.”
Turning to consumption in AFNs, Bryant and Goodman (2004) examine representational
practices around fair trade and green “alternative consumption.” Taking political ecology to
task for its poor understanding of consumption and a lack of attention to how everyday social
processes in the global North shape the global South, they draw on a commodity cultures
approach focused on commodification and the social-material life of commodities. Alterna-
tive commodities, in contrast to silent conventional commodities veiled by the commodity
fetish (Harvey 1990), “veritably shout to consumers about the socionatural relations under
which they were produced through carefully wrought images and texts” (Bryant and
Goodman 2004, 348). Along with many others (Guthman 2011; Johnston and Szabo 2011;
Szasz 2007), they critique the current neoliberal construction of consumption as the way to
politically engage: “‘resistance’ itself is commodified insofar as protest over perceived environ-
mental degradation or social injustice is expressed through the strategic manipulation of
consumption practices and exchange relations” (Bryant and Goodman 2004, 345).
This stands in contrast to other political ecologists’ interpretations of AFNs, such as those
claiming that they “aim to de-commodify food and agriculture” (Pimbert et al. 2001, 19).
Indeed, a great deal of theoretical work is needed to bring political economy and Gibson-
Graham’s (2006b) community/diverse economy approach (e.g., Harris 2009; Slocum
2007) into dialogue around AFNs, as there are considerable tensions between them
(compare, for example, Jarosz 2011 and Galt in press). Finding ways to make these tensions
productive and spark off each other is an exciting challenge for future political ecology.

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THE CONSUMPTION–BODY NEXUS

Recent work in food studies has focused on the relationship between cultural norms and
identities, consumption, and bodies. While Guthman and DuPuis (2006, 438) note “political
ecology has been astoundingly silent” on “eating and bodies,” anthropological political
ecologists have been expanding the literature on eating, ranging from highly proletarianized
consumers to those still engaging in subsistence production (Heyman 1994; Heyman 2005;
Jarvenpa 2008; Kawamura 2004; Wilk 2006). For example, Jarvenpa (2008) provides,
through food, an account of the intersection of dominant and subordinate (somewhat
subsistence-oriented) societies in Canada and Finland (see also Emery and Pierce 2005;
Kawamura 2004). By providing a typology of meals in different contexts and thick descriptions,
he theorizes culture as a “fund of historical experience” and the means by which people
negotiate contradictions between local ecology and external political economy. He concludes
that continual juxtaposition of subsistence foods with industrial foods “is a transcendent form
of communication, a means of inserting the past into the narrower vision of the social present”
and that subsistence foods are a “demonstration of ecological competence” (Jarvenpa 2008:
20, 24).
In one of the first political ecological analyses to turn to the body (see also Hayes-Conroy
and Hayes-Conroy 2013), DuPuis’s (2000, 132) political ecology of milk consumption
explains how cows’ milk became a US staple. She shows the importance of religious
promoters who deemed milk to be the perfect food, industry advertising, and cultural changes
in women’s roles. Contra a political economy perspective (Goodman and Redclift 1991),
it was not incorporation of women into the workforce that led to the increased use of
purchased milk as a substitute for breastfeeding, because working-class mothers were the most
likely to breast feed. Rather, urban, upper- and middle-class women’s feeding of cows’ milk
to their infants — in the face of known dangers of deadly diseases — emerged from cultural
changes in Victorian times: (1) demands like visiting, entertaining, furnishing, and running
a home separated women from their children because they were seen as incompatible with
children’s presence; (2) earlier networks of “helping out” eroded with the expansion of the
practice of the romantic ideal of friendship; and (3) older children who were formerly
apprenticed outside the home required greater time for in-house education and discipline.
Thus, “[t]he cultural declaration by religious reformers that milk was a ‘perfect food’ and nec-
essary for infants . . . melded with the contradictions of the middle-class urban family to create
a new food habit” (DuPuis 2000, 147).
Expanding this political ecological lens further, Guthman and DuPuis (2006) argue that
adequately explaining obesity in the USA requires rejecting single-factor explanations. They
employ an “ontological rapprochement” between literatures typically occupying specific
sections of the food system: political economy (focused on food production and industry),
cultural studies (focused on consumption), and politicized notions of nature from political
ecology. Specifically, and as an example of the promise shown in Figure 2, political ecology
allows them to “maintain sensitivity to the social construction of obesity, to the political
economy of obesity, and to the materiality of nature” (Guthman and DuPuis 2006: 438).
In an expanded analysis, Guthman (2011) employs a critical political ecology approach
(cf. Forsyth 2003) with a healthy dose of science studies to problematize the “problem
closure” that has occurred around obesity in the USA, in terms of its common explanations,
its “cures,” and the consequences of these framings. The work forces a thorough rethinking
of obesity by showing problems with how obesity is defined and measured, contradictory
epidemiological evidence, and, finally, pointing in new causal directions, especially around
epigenetics and the role of toxic environmental exposures in producing fat cells. She seeks to

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challenge the lack of attention to policy moves that would “undermine a food (and industrial)
system that simultaneously brings hunger, danger, and unremittingly undercompensated toil;
. . . the absence from public discussions of acknowledgement that our food system is part of a
political economy that systematically produces inequality; . . . [and] the reluctance of much of
the alternative-food movement to take on the big fights” (Guthman 2011: 186).
Looking back as a whole at the reviewed work above, political ecology has been extended
to first world agrifood systems on a variety of scales and topics. Recent work on AFNs and
the body–consumption nexus usefully applies and expands political ecological theory, but
many possibilities remain.

A Research Agenda for a Political Ecology of Food Systems

A large challenge ahead is creating a democratic, just, and ecologically sustainable agrifood
system that provides sustenance for all humans and does not unduly take away from non-
human communities and future generations. While both agrarian political economy and
political ecology can and should contribute to these changes, my focus below is on a research
agenda for political ecology.
Political ecology’s key insight is that transformations, first and foremost, require rethinking and
recreating social relations and structures. As we face peak oil, the more ecological-oriented food
systems replacing industrial food systems will be diversified, reliant on fewer fossil-fuel-based
inputs, more efficient in nutrient cycling, and more labor intensive. An important question is
how they will be embedded in plural and just agrifood economies that meet food needs through
various combinations of subsistence production, entitlement programs, gift and other alternative/
community economies, and market-oriented activities. Social movements must forge these new
conditions, as they will not occur under self-regulating markets (cf. O’Connor 1993).
In relation to this challenge, I maintain that as a form of knowledge creation for praxis, a
political ecology of agrifood systems provides a partial antidote for a tendency in the field of
food studies to look inward toward food, rather than outward to larger context. In going
forward, I think political ecology should:
• maintain critical realism as a philosophical foundation given the materiality of agrifood
systems, social inequalities, inadequate nutrition, and environmental exposures, and the
space within critical realism for productive tensions between interpretivism, structuralism,
and positivism. This means furthering political ecology’s strength of drawing upon major
philosophical traditions usually treated as separate by making it act as a meeting ground
between philosophies with different ontologies and epistemologies. By possessing
knowledge of biophysical and social sciences, political ecologists can facilitate boundary
crossing in a divided academy, thereby helping to join agroecology, food studies, and
political economy to produce new insights and actions (Figure 2).
• be relentlessly reflexive about the effects of new knowledge production and the position of
the researcher to the research problem and subjects (Taylor 2005, 246).
• work toward socioecological configurations on the basis of greater equality, non-
exploitation, re-valuing the commons and public goods, and decreased material
consumption in industrial economies by continuing to produce critique, and aiming
more for positive visioning and creative projects by working with social movements
(Rocheleau 2008).
Below I identify themes I consider important research areas for deepening political
ecology’s engagement with first world agrifood systems. The first three are topical, whereas
the last addresses how we do political ecology.

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POLITICAL AGROECOLOGY

Agroecology, a rapidly growing field, was initially defined as “the science of applying ecological
concepts and principles to the design and management of sustainable agroecosystems” (Gliessman
1998, 339). Francis et al. (2003, 100) argue for an extended definition — “the integrative study of
the ecology of the entire food system, encompassing ecological, economic and social dimensions”
— to which political ecology can greatly contribute. This will require “inveterate weavings” of
transdisciplinary inquiry (Zimmerer and Bassett 2003) between political ecology and the biophys-
ical sciences relevant to agriculture, creating a political agroecology (see also Gonzalez de Molina
2013). In working with biophysical scientists, political ecologists should contribute a critical
understanding of material and discursive social processes — capital accumulation, competition,
marginalization, domination, identity formation, resistance, social movement action, and so on
— that are featured in more politically-oriented agroecology (e.g., Perfecto et al. 2009).
One of the most promising areas for political agroecology is linking social phenomena —
social units engaged in food systems processes, social relations of production and exchange,
and institutional arrangements — and environmental change at multiple scales (cf. Friedmann
1978; Galt 2010; Moore 2010). Many types of agro-environmental analysis can be conducted
(Giampietro 2004; López-Ridaura et al. 2002) and connected to political ecological analysis,
but particularly needed engagements between agroecology and political ecology involve the
measurement of the well-being of farms and the energy efficiency and greenhouse gas emissions
from the food system, including its “conventional” side and AFNs. Although the return of food
energy (at the farm gate) to fossil fuel energy is about 2:1 in highly industrialized agricultural
systems (Bayliss-Smith 1982), when expanded to the food system, the industrial food
system’s ratio is 10:1 at the point of consumption (Giampietro and Pimentel 1995, cited in
Pfeiffer 2006, 21). Declines in fossil fuels will likely create a heightened crisis of high food
prices disproportionately affecting households already on the margin of adequate nutrition
and plunging those below the margins into deeper crisis. The magnitude of the crisis will
depend upon how quickly we can preemptively shift food systems to renewable energy
systems and create entitlements for households and individuals and/or self-provisioning and
regional production systems. In preparation for this shift, life cycle analysis gives us tools
through which to analyze energy returned on energy invested (e.g., Andersson and Ohlsson
1999) and environmental impacts, especially greenhouse gas emissions.
In these engagements, a valuable contribution from political ecology can be a critical
understanding of sustainability to show that it is not just a technical problem with technical
solutions but also (1) a problem of social organization, because the main problem is production
pressure on resources, created through pressures for accumulation and social mechanisms of
surplus extraction, that is, the quest to maximize short-term capital accumulation at the farm
level and beyond (Blaikie and Brookfield 1987); and (2) a challenge of reorienting agrifood
systems from domination and exploitation to values of respect and recognition of radical
interdependence. Thus, justice and fairness toward all humans and non-humans involved
in the agrifood system remain a necessary component of sustainability (Allen 1993), and
political ecologists can be advocates for this view in broader circles.

REINVIGORATING THE FOCUS ON THE “MARGINS”

Blaikie and Brookfield (1987) focused on the margins, combining concepts from ecology, social
science, and economics. The “margins”, more appropriately called interstices, are necessary for
resilience as they tend to harbor resources important for transformation. Focusing on interstices
gestures to three topics. First, political ecologists should continue to engage in geographical

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analysis of AFNs, including production, consumption, disposal/cycling, and all sections in

between. A key question for these often interstitial practices is to what extent will AFNs be
co-opted, or remain isolated islands in capitalism’s thrust to commodify and accumulate, or be
propelled into the mainstream by success in reworking current food systems and access to
productive and consumptive resources? Spaces and practices of non-capitalism/post-capitalism
(Gibson-Graham 2006a, 2006b) — for example, subsistence, barter and non-monetized trade,
reciprocal relationships, gift economies, and cooperatives — offer potential monkey-wrenches
for the gears of continued capital accumulation by the wealthy. The relationships between
these community economies and urban and community food systems will require more
political ecological analysis of a number of its forms, including community garden allotments,
dooryard/backyard gardens and subsistence production, community supported agriculture
(CSA), foraging, and urban agriculture generally (Galt in press; McClintock 2010).
Socially, the “margins” can offer alternatives to the white, masculine agrarianism that
dominates AFNs, especially in the USA (Guthman 2008). These agrarian myths infuse the
image of farming in the USA with whiteness and maleness, as did the now-infamous Dodge
Ram advertisement for the 2013 Superbowl, often erasing people of color and women
as farmers from public consciousness (Carlisle 2013; Carney 2001; Filan 2011). A large num-
ber of other ethnic groups are important in agriculture as farmers and farmworkers, although
many are ignored in popular accounts and have been subjected to institutional racism by
institutions such as the USDA (Gilbert et al. 2002). These include black farmers in the South;
Hmong and Mien farmers in California and Minnesota; Latino farmers and ranchers in the
West; Chinese, Japanese, Punjabi, and Filipino farmworkers and farmers in California; and
Mexican and Central American farmworkers in much of the USA. Political ecologists — to-
gether with other food justice scholars (Alkon and Agyeman 2011) — should be producing
anti-essentialist understandings of the intersections of identities and agrifood systems to help
overcome racism, sexism, other forms of discrimination, and structural inequalities in food
production and access (Carlisle 2013).
Economically, by focusing on the margins I mean increasing public scrutiny of the appro-
priation and distribution of surplus value (Cf. Gibson-Graham 2006b), including the processes
of capital accumulation, surplus extraction, farmer self-exploitation, and farmworker exploita-
tion. Political ecology has long argued that surplus extraction from producers is a primary reason
why farmers’ practices often undermine ecological integrity (Blaikie 1985), leading to the ques-
tion: what is the relationship between curtailing surplus extraction and sustainable production?
Unfettered profit maximization runs counter to sustainability, so surplus extraction by off-farm
capital cannot be replaced by unmoderated capital accumulation at the farm level. Sustainabil-
ity, then, requires not just the absence of surplus extraction from farms but also a commitment to
ecologically sensitive techniques and practices, and off-farm support for these. In other words,
once external surplus extraction is overcome, we need structures that allow for a land ethic to
prevail over capital accumulation, while still allowing for enough income for farmers and farm-
workers — this is not an easy balance as recent research on CSA shows (Galt in press). With
market integration, structures must be created to avoid surplus extraction and to facilitate a land
ethic praxis not just among farmers who already have a strong environmental ethic.

THE INVISIBLE MIDDLE AND THE IGNORED OTHER “END”

Production and consumption have received scholarly attention from the political economy of
agriculture, food studies, and political ecology. In contrast, the food industry, including food
processing, distribution, and retail (Figure 1), has received little empirical attention from polit-
ical ecologists and food scholars generally (but see Fischer and Benson 2006; Morgan et al. 2006;

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Striffler 2007). Although attention to the global food system, global food industry firms, and
commodity chain analysis are common, analysis rarely focuses on produce buyers, food
processors, retailers or distributors as social units for which explaining inner workings, leverage
points, and variation are the core analytical task. Doing so requires focusing on these often
secretive firms and can be enhanced by coupling political economy with (1) biophysical science
techniques to understand ecological impacts at all sections of the food system and (2) more
culturally oriented approaches that allow us to understand managers, workers, and agency
throughout the food system.
What happens after consumption — that is, excrement (Jewitt 2011) — also remains
underexamined. The flow of materials and energy is not a linear chain (contra Figure 1),
and the human body is not a final destination. Humans are enmeshed in ecological food
webs; one organism’s waste is the food of another. Political ecologies of human waste
regulations, composting toilets, night soil, and sewage sludge beg for attention. With coming
scarcities of synthetic nitrogen with peak oil and peak phosphorous from depleted rock
mining supplies (Cordell et al. 2009), these nutrient loops must be closed within a matter
of decades — a major feat, but one not yet on the popular radar. Thus, political ecology must
draw attention to this metabolic rift (Foster 1999) and help mend it.

ENGAGEMENT

Walker (2006, 393) notes that despite professed interest, “the actual engagement of
political ecology with fields of research and public debate outside the academy has been
limited.” Although many political ecologists are quite engaged, many of us look primarily
inward to the academy. Walker implores us to become better storytellers, but we also
need to overcome our propensity in the academy to only call for more and novel research,
when we commonly have practically adequate understandings of causal relationships that
show the need for structural changes in line with commonly held values. For example,
Sen (1983) and Lappé et al. (1998) are still correct about entitlements, economic rights,
and civil society and that what stands in the way of feeding everyone is largely an
ideology of the undeserving poor and assumed absolute (rather than constructed) scarcity.
Scholarly praxis — through policy and/or advocacy (e.g., Iles and Marsh 2012), work
with communities, social movements, and/or popular education (e.g., Heyman 2010), and
so on — in this and other realms can remake political ecology into a field that examines
and makes very public the power struggles around the socio-ecological conditions of human
existence, including food.
The food price spikes witnessed in 2008 and the riots resulting from vast structural
inequalities (Holt-Giménez 2011) are a glimpse into one possible future. We will see more
food shocks in the near future unless we seriously confront the functioning of food markets
(including financial sector speculation) and simultaneously reduce the agrifood systems’ fossil
fuel dependence, address climate change, reduce social inequalities, and make market society
more just and ecological by subsuming "the economy" to social values (Patel 2010). Unless
the coming crisis is severe with radical revolutions overthrowing established structures of
power and ownership, privileged consumers will still be eating, including most of the readers
of this journal. We cannot say the same for hundreds of millions of the world’s other citizens
who have lost access to land and the means of production in our “planet of slums” (Davis
2006). As engaged scholars, political ecologists can and should work to remake the agrifood
system to align it with shared human values. While we do it, we need to learn with and from
each other and from those on the front lines of food system and social change.

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Acknowledgement
I thank Colleen Hiner for her research assistance, Jennifer Blesh, Jessica Beckett, and Katie
Bradley for their helpful comments on previous versions, Trina Filan and other (former)
graduate students who asked questions that provoked this analysis, and Alex Tarr, Alice
Kelly, Adam Romero, Jesse Williamson, Patrick Baur, Alastair Iles, Ingrid Behrsin, and the
other participants in my talk at the Berkeley Workshop on Environmental Politics who
discussed and added to the ideas herein. I take responsibility for the papers’ shortcomings.

Short Biography
Ryan Galt’s work explores agrifood system governance. Using a political ecology approach that
combines qualitative and quantitative methods, his work has compared market relations in
export, national, and local agrifood systems, and their shaping by geographically uneven pro-
cesses of regulation and social change, unequal access to resources, and environmental processes.
In addition to a topical focus on Community Supported Agriculture (CSA) and the transnational
political ecology of pesticides, his general interests involve local knowledge, agrarian political
economy, and comparative assessments of agrifood systems. He is currently working on a social
and environmental analysis of production and consumption in CSA. He has published in Annals
of the Association of American Geographers, Transactions of the Institute of British Geographers, Global
Environmental Change, Antipode, and California Agriculture. One of his papers exploring
production–consumption linkages vis-à-vis pesticide residues on food won the Eric Wolf Prize
and appears in the Journal of Political Ecology. His teaching focuses on food systems, political
ecology, rural geography, and geographical theory, and he recently received a 2012 ASUCD
Excellence in Education Award for the College of Agricultural and Environmental Sciences
and a 2011 Outstanding Mentor Award from the UC Davis Consortium for Women and
Research. He received a PhD in geography from the University of Wisconsin–Madison.

Notes
* Correspondence address: Ryan E. Galt, Associate Professor, Department of Human Ecology and Agricultural Sustainability
Institute, University of California, 1309 Hart Hall, One Shields Ave., Davis, CA 95616, USA. E-mail: regalt@ucdavis.edu.
1
Google Scholar searches reveal the scarcity. In mid-2012, the phrase “political ecology of agriculture” appeared in two
titles related to first world agriculture (Messer 1987a; Zimmerer 2007). “Political ecology of food” appeared more fre-
quently in relation to global and first world contexts (Atkins and Bowler 2001; Friedmann 1999; Hayes-Conroy and
Hayes-Conroy 2013; Ishii-Eiteman 2009; Jarosz 2004; Jarvenpa 2008; McMichael 2009; Pimbert et al. 2001).
“Political ecology of agrifood” and its three other spellings appeared once (Pimbert et al. 2001).
2
Buttel places other recent developments — the “Wageningen School” and rural studies’ “cultural turn” (e.g., Long 2008) —
outside of agrarian political economy.
3
FitzSimmons (1989) and Kloppenburg (1988) provide more nuanced political economy accounts of nature in agriculture.

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