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Plenary Speakers
Professor Lawrence Busch
Michigan State University, USA
The Changing Food System: From Markets to Networks
The last several decades has been marked by profound changes in the nature of the global food system. Changes include (1) a massive increase in the volume of food moved across national borders, (2) the rapid rise of supermarkets globally, (3) economic concentration in the supermarket sector, (4) a decline in importance of spot markets and traditional food brokers, (5) the creation of a multiplicity of private standards, often built on top of public standards, (6) the rise of third party certification of food production and entire supply chains, (7) the development of new technologies designed to keep fresh products on the shelf twelve months a year, and to monitor products from farm to fork, (8) a shift toward non-price competition among supermarket chains, (9) greater differentiation of food products by class, and (10) the development of new forms of (contractual) relationships between supplies and buyers. These changes have occurred with amazing rapidity and have shifted power downstream to supermarket chains. They are part and parcel of the liberalization of the world economy and the blurring of the distinction between public and private that was taken for granted in much of the world for the last 300 years. There will clearly be winners and losers in this revamped food system, but who will win and who will lose remain highly contested. Indeed, the mammoth size of the major players simultaneously increase their power while making them vulnerable to new forms of consumer and perhaps citizen contestation.
Biographical Note
Dr. Lawrence Busch is University Distinguished Professor of Sociology and Director of the Institute for Food and Agricultural Standards at Michigan State University. He is coauthor or coeditor of a number of books including Plants, Power, and Profit: Social, Economic, and Ethical Consequences of the New Biotechnologies (Blackwell, 1991); From Columbus to Conagra: The Globalization of Agriculture (Kansas, 1994); and Making Nature, Shaping Culture: Plant Biodiversity in Global Context (Nebraska, 1995) and most recently, The Eclipse of Morality: Science, State, and Market (Aldine deGruyter, 2000) as well as more than 100 other publications. He is past president of the Rural Sociological Society, past president of the Agriculture, Food, and Human Values Society and a fellow of the American Association for the Advancement of Science. He recently was named Chevalier de l'Ordre du Mérite Agricole by the French government. Dr. Busch has worked in France, Norway, Kenya, Brazil, India, and a number of other nations on issues related to food and agriculture. He has been long been a consultant to the International Service for National Agricultural Research and the Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations. He has written and spoken on a variety of social, political, and economic issues associated with food standards, both here and abroad. Dr. Busch's interests include food and agricultural standards food safety policy, biotechnology policy, agricultural science and technology policy, higher education in agriculture, and public participation in the policy process. |
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XI World Congress of Rural Sociology