Episode 12: Sophia Murphy on "Getting the global rules right"
[intro music]
Samara
Welcome to Feed, a food systems podcast presented by TABLE, I’m Matthew Kessler
Matthew
And I’m Samara Brock and today we’re speaking with food systems and international economy expert, Sophia Murphy
Sophia
My ambition around the trade piece, in particular, it's to bring this idea that I was developing in my thesis around consonants, the idea that you don't all need to have the same piece of music in front of you to make a symphony, you can play different things, and it can harmonize. And you know, it's, you know, it's a little bit ethereal, maybe. But I think the idea is really powerful that you don't need the same thing. You need to think about different scales, but this whole fascination with scaling up seems to me very misguided, because very often what works locally will not globally, and the good rule globally won't, won't apply in every situation
Samara
Sophia has 30 years of professional experience working with civil society organisations, as an independent consultant, as a policy analyst, and on the High Level Panel of Experts with the Committee on World Food Security. Sophia has worked across the globe as an agriculture, food and trade policy expert.
Matthew
At the end of 2020, Sophia was named as the Executive Director of IATP, the Institute for Agriculture and Trade Policy. IATP is a non-profit research and advocacy organization that works both locally and globally to promote fair and sustainable food, farm and trade systems. They have offices in Minneapolis, Minnesota, Washington DC and Berlin.
Samara
Today we speak with Sophia about the importance of trade at different scales across food systems. Sophia argues that ‘local’ systems have always been a part of extensive trading networks and that they’re essential to addressing the diverse needs of a globalized society. We also discuss the importance of adaptive governance and flexible decision making processes, and how multilateral institutions, like the World Trade Organization, would have to change to ensure a fairer system of food trade.
Matthew
Alongside Sophia’s work at IATP, she is also currently finishing up her PhD thesis, which asks how does the World Trade Organization contribute to resilient global food security. And we may have all heard of the World Trade Organization or the WTO, but what exactly is the WTO and what does it do.
Samara
The WTO is a global organization that helps establish the rules that govern trade between its 164 member nations. It offers a forum to negotiate agreements and it acts as an independent arbiter to mediate trade disputes. The WTO tends to draw criticism for creating a legitimate legal framework for practices such as agricultural dumping which Sophia has written extensively about. This is where global agricultural powerhouses like the US export their surplus products below market rate, often into low-income nations. Dumping these products tends to undermine domestic production in regions where agriculture plays an important role in local economies.
Matthew
And on the other hand, the WTO has been praised for a general reduction of global tariffs which cuts the cost of doing business internationally. Trade agreements negotiated under the WTO have in some cases stimulated economic growth, created jobs and increased living standards. It’s a very important organisation as its the only institution that has teeth to regulate agricultural export subsidies.
But before getting into how to get the global rules right to promote fair food systems, we first asked Sophia what were some of her early experiences that shaped her interest in agriculture and trade.
Sophia
I really came to agriculture and trade when I moved to Minneapolis in 1990, when I started to work with the Institute for Agriculture and Trade Policy. And I think I was already formed to some extent, because I had my first work experience was around the UN summit at the UN Conference on Environment and Development unset, the Rio Earth Summit, and all of the environmental treaties that gave rise to and I started an international development cooperation and un systems and those summit meetings in the 90s. When I arrived at ATP in 87, to the Institute for agriculture and trade policy, I met people who've been shaped in the 90s through debates on trade instead through the North American Free Trade Agreement, and NAFTA and the founding of the World Trade Organization. WTO, which is what I started to work on.
Matthew
Sophia was critical of some of WTO’s interventions in the 1990s such as the practice of agricultural dumping and its negative impact on rural livelihoods in the global South. We’ll link to a report in the show notes calledCounting the Costs of Agricultural Dumping that also discusses the negative impacts to US farmers.
Samara
In her early career, Sophia was connecting the dots between domestic agricultural policy and some of the uneven environmental and economic impacts across the globe. For Sophia, this criticism didn’t come from a place of ‘trade is inherently bad or unjust’, but rather how do we get the conditions right.
Sophia
I carried with me into this world of agriculture and trade, a really profound admiration for what the United Nations could achieve, and for the possibilities of multilateralism. And I came into a world where people were very skeptical about multilateral or international negotiation, because they felt the power dynamics were so unequal, and they saw the trade agreements as having been used to further commerce over other interests, and specific interests within commercial activity. So that whole suspicion and that feeling that someone else was taking your space, the whole, the whole sort of food sovereignty movement, was a response to trade agreements, and was founded in that sense of having been left out of national policymaking because some global policy had taken precedence. And from the get go, I think I was shaped by having had a much more positive experience of what you could do at the multilateral level, and carried that with me.
Matthew
Sophia’s optimism towards the benefits of international trade was also shaped by her background.
Sophia
I did come perhaps, I came with British prejudices about trade, which I would say is in Britain that's associated with a more progressive perspective, trade is considered if you like, liberal left. It was in that time, at least, because of not trade meant more power for vested interests, like land owners, those who had controlled rents and an economy didn't want the trade competition. So the sort of basic idea as well that “Oh, it's a good thing to exchange goods with one's neighbors”, which I don't think was shared so much in North America, or it's certainly not in the United States. It is true in Canada, there's an instinct that says trade is basically a good idea. How do we get it right? I think in the US it’s a much more suspicious starting point.
Samara
So it’s interesting to think about the starting points and points of view that people bring to food debates. What is IATP’s starting point?
Sophia
So IATP was founded by Mark Ritchie and Mark started in foreign policy in the Midwest in the 1980s, looking at the farm crisis, and the devastation of agriculture there and looked around and said, “Well, we need to sort this out” and goes to the federal government. And the federal government is saying, oh, we're going to start out by trading, we're just going to open export markets, we're going to expand, we're going to grow as much as you can grow and take it elsewhere. And Mark was saying if we grow “as much as we can grow, we're crashing the prices”. And you know, not yet then that quickly coming to say we're crashing the environment too. But the US government was bent on this, I didn't know we'll just find new markets for what we grow, we're not going to control prices. And that's suited as Mark was quick to see that the corporations that were buying and processing the commodities thereby got cheap commodity, and they got to expand their markets overseas. So that was the analysis. And then the first thing Mark did was to go to Europe. And he spent time understanding the reforms, the Common Agricultural Policy, the MacSharry reforms in ‘92 and he made contact with groups there who were also saying, “What on earth are you doing to our ag policy”, and they were all saying, “oh, we're going to trade our way through”.
Matthew
The promotion of increasing farm production and farm exports led to both farmers spending more on agricultural inputs, and also the overproduction of some agricultural products. This overproduction then led to a decrease farm prices which meant less income for the farmers. The 1992 MacSharry reforms were the first major reform to the European Common Agricultural Policy, and marked a shift in how farmers were supported by the government. Before, the government adjusted prices to ensure farmers received a fair price for their products, and afterward, farmers were being subsidised through direct payments. IATP has consistently been interested in this relationship between EU or United Nations policy and their impacts on local production. IATP focuses on these issues across many scales.
Sophia
So the organization still is grounded in Minnesota and works on state policy around environmental quality institutional procurement. We do work on sort of Farm to School procurements and how to diversify the sourcing. And we have an interest in the federal and an office in Washington, but it's never been this central focus, we do most of our federal work – we do all of our work in coalition, but especially that federal work. The IATP has always had people looking at – we’re small - but looking at pieces of the international system, and coming in as the new Executive Director, I'm committed to keep that. We now have an office in Berlin. And I see a very similar possibility, a lot of European policy, which has been a little bit re nationalized, as the politics there shift. So the importance of being part of a conversation in Germany, the importance of the European Union as a shaper and maker of policy. Ultimately, though, wanting the global rules to be right.
Matthew
What do you mean by this getting the global rules right? And what are your criticisms of them currently?
Sophia
So getting the global rules, obviously, easy to say harder to do. But part of getting the rules right would be to be more responsive to what's going on in the world. So one of the things that WTO, in particular has failed to do is to be responsive to what's happening. And you saw that really clearly with the food price crisis in 2007-2008. The governments were not able to say, “Hey, we have a trade system, the trade system is creating a problem. How can the rules help us?” They didn't respond and use the rules as they might have. I think the simplest, few things would be: the trade rules right now are concerned with whether or not food measure is trade distorting or not. And I think it's a very unhelpful - it basically decides whether something spending or subsidy is allowed or not allowed. And It's not very helpful. Almost everything is trade distorting in an open economy, it will affect supply and demand. And on the other hand, a country that puts in a food security measures is precisely saying, even though this will hurt my trade interest, I have another more important obligation, for example, to protect food at an affordable price. So it's sort of both too wide ranging, and also not relevant in the circumstances.
Also, I think, the rules we have the WTO’s sort of orthodoxy is that it's about commerce, and you shouldn't really trouble the system with other bigger demands. It's too complicated. It's not really the business of the WTO to solve hunger. And that’s also disingenuous, because of course, nobody's asking the WTO to solve hunger, but it cannot say, “Oh, well, we have to protect commercial interests and nothing else matters” because none of the government's deciding those rules are only held to the trade standard. They all have obligations around climate change and biodiversity and human rights. And they are therefore either forced to act hypocritically to say, “oh well this obligation to the right to food actually doesn't matter. Because I’m at the World Trade Organization, it doesn't hold,” which is not legally true, but also not ethically valid. And I think it just confuses the thinking. So it's not that there's a set of rules that would be great. And that particular set of rules that are bad, it's more that going into it. The rules are looking for distortion on the state behavior, but not looking for distortion in the private markets. And that they're defining their remit too narrowly for a global institution that wishes to have multilateral power.
Samara
Getting these global rules right is not such an easy thing to do. How would you approach advancing equitable systems of food trade?
Sophia
My ambition around the trade piece, in particular, it's to bring this idea that I was developing in my thesis around consonants, the idea that you don't all need to have the same piece of music in front of you to make a symphony, you can play different things, and it can harmonize. And you know, it's, you know, it's a little bit ethereal, maybe. But I think the idea is really powerful that you don't need the same thing. You need to think about different scales. This whole fascination with scaling up seems to me very misguided, because very often what works locally will not globally, and the good rule globally won't, won't apply in every situation. And you can't imagine the global rules that will always apply for the rigidity of the World Trade Organization with its enforcement system, is antithetical to what we understand about how systems work, and to what we ought to understand, not just about like economics, but also politics. This need for the trade policy to have greater political, smart, it's almost like sort of stupid to think that you could impose these things, these rules from on top and assume everyone's going to conform. And you see where governments have less commerce pushing them, maybe more values, but less, less hard interest. They're more willing to allow national adaptation and national strategies. And I think that’s smarter multilateral policy, then saying, here's the law. And if you break the law, we're going to come after you with sanctions.
Samara
That's interesting. A question I have in follow up to that is that there's often perceived sort of tension between the ability to have sort of democratic involvement and have the ability to be adaptive, like to quickly sort of turn policy around. So how would you solve for those tensions?
Sophia
I think it's just a tension where the WTO goes too far. Trade law goes too far in in its rigidity, and, and hasn't built in sufficient adaptive capacity. One of the examples that that I drew on was Andrew Lang and they had looked at the ability of the WTO, to cope with these invasive species issues. And the WTO had this adaptive ability at the committee level dealing with technical issues, they've been very adaptive, they, they've been able to take on new understanding of risk and hazards, and to allow their standards to evolve accordingly. And, and I think that's informed by, you know, real science, it's informed by national jurisdictions having national processes that do their bit. And then by having informed experts come and negotiate a final outcome that can work for them, that is informed by commercial interest. And it's not that it's a technocrat owned all the way through, but they're handling that international piece as a more now “we just need to adapt the rules”, because now my government's no longer going to accept this standard as good enough and this is how we can adapt it to everybody's satisfaction.
Samara
Sophia argues that despite having the capacity to be adaptive, the WTO has failed to do so. Especially when there are conflicts between regional environmental standards and transnational commercial interests.
Sophia
And so you see in spaces at the WTO, even that that happens, but you don't see it on Agreement on Agriculture, for example, in the question of grain reserves, there wasn't even really a trade fight there. It was a huge political fight with India dealing with its domestic constituencies and the US dealing with its domestic constituencies, and nobody all that interested in food security outcomes, and no mandate really, for serious food security discussion.
Samara
Sophia also mentioned the importance of food reserves as insurance for both a poor seasonal harvest and the instability of agricultural markets. She criticized the WTO for approaching this important issue of grain reserves with inadequate funding, poor oversight and accountability, and incoherent or conflicting objectives. To address this, she recommends centering the universal human right to food, protecting domestic producers from drops in commodity prices, and understanding that in low-income nations where the private sector is weaker, they’ll need to think about differently about innovative ways to finance food reserves. We’ll link to a report she’s written in the show notes if you’d like to learn more about this topics.
Matthew
So on one hand, multilateralism is a concept used to ensure that all nations have a voice at the table to build a fair food system, but this lofty ideal can also erase the history of economic and political power imbalances. Do you see a tension between these two notions and are these differences reconcilable?
Sophia
There's all kinds of tension. That's for sure. And there lots of things that worry me and others about the north-south politics and the power and who would decide and, you know, countries with Amazon Rainforest are a bit sick of being told by everyone else in the world what to do. On the other hand, I think it's really important that Europe had that debate. It's really important that consumers know that there are differences, it's really important to we know that our money, like our pensions are in banks that go invest in the destruction of the Amazon, you know that it's why I think fair trade is really important, even though free trade is a small fraction of the total market. And even though there were problems with fair trade, living up to its ideals, it forces the conversation around who the actors are, it makes a lot of things visible, that are otherwise invisible.
Samara
Sophia continued on to say that domestic and cross-border trade will inevitably occur, both within and outside of formalized trading protocols. And it’s important to think about what governs and incentivizes these processes.
Sophia
Formalization, that policy process, is very dominated by a very specific part of our governemt that is one of the less unaccountable ministries and by a very specific set of interest that are either
very protective, you know, it's the fiercely organized and protective industry or the looking for the opportunities overseas and trying to push what they can for that.
Matthew
Sophia points out that this doesn’t line up with most producers and consumers lived reality.
Sophia
And the vast majority of people are not there. Those are the extremes most countries both buy and sell across borders most people like to buy at the farmers market but are grateful to eat bananas, you know, living in Vancouver, and they don't really have the same extreme view that we see reflected. Either by the sectors that will have no competition from outside, regardless of anything or from the sectors that are only interested in, in the export potential and don't have any regard for sovereignty of the trading partner?
Samara
So your Phd research was titled “Resilient global food security and the WTO: an assessment of adaptive governance”. I’m curious what principles around trade do you think are important in advancing a ‘good’ food system that accounts for both local and global needs?
Sophia
A food system should be giving people confidence that their food system will continue to deliver. And I think there's a lot in that idea that's very powerful. My thesis was looking at international trade and its role in food security and food systems. But what I took from my thinking about what you would need to round out and make the system work was this idea of consonants, this idea that you needed to, to have scale appropriate policy, which was a little bit different than subsidiarity, because it didn't inherently privilege the local. I think in an era of climate change, we can't assume that local is the only, the necessarily the best place to start. It just has to be there and it has to be granted integrity. And most of our food systems do not give local integrity.
Matthew
Can you give an example of this first principle of consonance, or harmonizing priorities across scales?
Sophia
As I was thinking about it, and as I was writing my thesis which was explicitly looking for consonance. I mostly write about the dissonance in the system, which is a pity to have the negative. But the examples of dissonance are clear where the policies are contradicting one another. An example of that would be the requirement that countries must import. So countries that maintain high levels of tariffs on products that are politically sensitive or in some way have a special place in the national food economy, they often are required to import at below the tariff level, at least a certain quantity of food. But there's no kind of corresponding obligation on countries to export. So although formerly countries aren't meant to impose export bans - they do, regularly. And so when there is a shortage of food in international markets, the exporters continue to hold all the cards, if you like. Because the import dependent countries have been discouraged from diversifying their food sources but the exporters haven't been obliged to continue to provide. So it would be consonant with a trade dependent system, that countries have a recourse for when the international market is challenged in some way. And so a consonant policy in that context would be a grain reserve, or some kind of import reserve. You wouldn't have to necessarily grow your own food to create the reserve, but you would have what are called ‘buffer stocks.’ And that would allow you to deal with a ship that runs aground in the Suez Canal, for example. Or to deal with a drought, as we've had across most of the Americas, in fact. A significant drought in Brazil, significant droughts in over half the continental United States, that are severely affecting growing conditions this year. So you'd have a reserve in place. There's plenty of food produced in the system that we have, and the need of the market to keep the prices all the time responding to daily stimulus would be offset by the need for the market to provide something more reliable from a food security point of view. You are interested in a longer term perspective.
Matthew
So the first principle is consonance.
Sophia
The second principle was democratic accountability, and that our notion of food sovereignty hadn't paid sufficient attention to the responsibilities we have to one another across borders. And it wasn't enough to say a national or local government would decide because our policy is consequent even not trading is consequent for others elsewhere. And again, I think climate change shows us that we need a way. And it's not going to be a replica. The consonant ideas is not that we need a world parliament, we just need to understand what will accountability look like at a multilateral level. And it doesn't look like secret trade agreements, it doesn't look like nobody having any insight or conversation about trade except in a very small room.
Matthew
The second is how are decision makers accountable to the near and far communities that they impact.
Sophia
And the third principle is this idea of adaptive governance. So coming out of systems thinking the notion that we don't have a singular endpoint for the sort of the ideal food system on a hill, that we're talking about experiment, we're talking about sort of multiple points of possible equilibrium. And so allowing experiment and learning and this idea of reflexive governance. And so this is all sounding very theoretical. But if you think about reflexivity, it's about making sure the right people are in the room to be heard from. So if you're going to learn from what happened and adapt as a system, the tree or the you know, whatever plant is evolving, is taking in, it's taking in all the input from the available environment. And because our food systems have been handled in in, you know, siloed ways with different ministries, there is a health piece and an agriculture piece in this all these different places that touch into food system, we rarely have all the people we need around the table. And then we layer on top of that racism, structural exclusions of different kinds. Different kinds of power come into play. And so the idea of reflexive learning is to try and be conscious about and deliberate about sharing the power. And that's where I think food sovereignty has been so powerful. I just I just think it's under evolved, under thought through what that might mean globally.
Samara
So in terms of adaptive governance and democratic accountability, do you have specific places where you see that happening in international ways better than others?
Sophia
And in terms of, of where it happens better, again, if I were looking, I suspect things like the handling of the Ebola crisis or UN Aids’ organizations. Perhaps it's easier, they have a smaller mandate, no doubt, but these places where you've got a number of constituents formally incorporated into your governance. We’re hearing from affected communities like HIV AIDS, the UN AIDS has built that in. And you have a clear purpose. And so you can agree that you might need to change your theory of change or your actions because you've agreed what your outcome is going to be.
My, dream, my ever optimistic hope would be that the Sustainable Development Goals really, really do create a space for a very different understanding of what all this policy might be. Because you need a portfolio to go in there, you cannot possibly just say, “Well, if I end hunger, I'm done. Or if I cut my emissions in half, I'm done”. Because all these other goals are coming at you with other things. Yeah, but what about women and you know, what's happened to the global distribution of wealth in the process? And I think it'll be that type of setting ourselves that kind of ambition is going to help us to work and think in a different way about what we're doing. Because we'll have to be more explicit about trade-offs.
Matthew
Early, we were speaking about how policy is formed by or policies shaped by who was at the table and you spoke about different interests that are involved in these conversations, and that there's perhaps a need to diversify the different stakeholders that are at the table. And there's been calls for that for quite some time. Have you over the last few decades seen a shift in who is at the current policy tables? And if you have, how have those shifted the conversation?
Sophia
So one thing that just happened this year is the Canadian government announced its national food policy Advisory Council. So that's a new institution, and that six government ministries coordinating they don't have an international dimension yet. That will come I hope that's a huge part of Canada's food profile. But it's an explicit recognition that the traditional constituencies that talk to agriculture are not sufficient to deal with the complexity of the food system. I think one other thing, when I think about change that happened, which has been really important for food security is since the food price crisis of 2009-2010 most countries in the world to put social protection measures in place that provides some kind of basic access to food that wasn't so clearly there before. So when you see the COVID pandemic hit. UNICEF and World Bank were tracking it, but I think by within a month or two 160 or more countries had social protection measures put out and a lot of that was protecting people's access to food. the dots and then acceptance of responsibility about what the what the government what the state can do, that had been lacking. And then I think is sort of proven itself as an important dimension of resilience in a crisis. One last thing to say about that, around COVID, maybe a little bit off the topic that a lot of those social protection initiatives were paying attention to gender as well. And although when you want evidence on women and differentiated impact, it's still really hard to find there's still very little money that's really explicitly going to women in their interests. A lot of governments responded, for example, by giving women more money than men, because they were presumed to be more responsible for household food security, and so on. And a lot of groups were tracking immediately what's happening to women, how is this affecting them? And then machinery to do that wasn't there before even so that's one of those really slow but positive moving changes in terms of who's at the table, and what's understood to be important.
Matthew
Do you see a role for multilateral institutions or agricultural trade policy to play in on working on some of these power imbalances? Or will that come from other food system actors?
Sophia
I think it'll mostly probably come from national government, maybe from some local governments. That's what IATP is working on. There are state level regulations that can help and there are federal that are necessary. But I think that at the multilateral level, there's issues that have been neglected, that need more attention. So one would be on investment. And the other would be on competition, which are two issues that most of civil society has not wanted to discuss multilaterally because of the lack of confidence in the World Bank and the World Trade Organization, and the IMF, the International Monetary Fund. But that now, with a whole other awareness of climate change and climate risk, and with an understanding of what's happened with concentrated markets and agriculture and what do we do about that? Because we know that all of our trade models and our theories about what the benefits of trade should bring, don't apply if an oligopoly is present. And we have oligopolies all across the food system. And they're very strong internationally. It's not as if we can go international and find competition. We actually find less competition in many ways. So I don't know exactly what that looks like, you know, what is the answer? What are the regulations? How would that be? But at least stop the myth that that pretends that is somehow you know, competitive for Cargill, but they have two competitors. It's not competitive in the sense that brings all of the benefits.
Samara
Sophia argues that competition in marketplaces falls flat when there is too much consolidation in this sector. And similar to getting the ‘rules right’ regarding trade policy and legislation, she also acknowledges that a market, like a democracy, can’t function the way it should if competition isn’t both present and fair.
Sophia
One of the analogies that I started to think about is that democracy only works if everyone has a vote. And if we have some institutions and ways to manage that, and the marketplace we've been building with our trade and investment agreements have excluded important voices. And that means the outcome is distorted. The market works on the basis that that everyone has access, and everyone has the information. So anything that is distorting that or breaking with that is just undermining what the market could do. And it's delivering if you like, a more authoritarian, or a less democratic outcome, a less desirable outcome than it should. The justification for the World Trade Organization is that you're increasing people's voice and access. And so the practice failing to do that I think is something that's a pretty profound challenge to the system. But I think it's, it's a way to reconcile some of the fight over whether or not trade is a good idea. Like, you know, let's, let's get to the business of how it's actually working, let's get to the business of how in the market you need purchasing power to express your voice, and we don't have we have increasing inequality there. It’s a bit like, it's a bit like these laws passing in the us right now, where they're trying to curtail voting on Sundays voting at this hour of voting – It’s like targeted measures to take your voice away. And that can happen in the market too.
Samara
So we’re exploring this scalar issue of local and global in this podcast series. As you know these debates can end up in very polarized perspectives, but your article, written with Kim Burnett, “What place for international trade in food sovereignty?” was pretty nuanced in finding middle ground between the two. So what important ways of thinking are obscured when we only focus on the extremes in this debate?
Sophia
I guess I feel that you can see a lot of a lot of power imbalances and injustice in the local as well as in the global so you know, speaking as a woman, in my life, we're all contained in my village, the chances of me benefiting from an emancipation movement is very much less than if I'm able to meet with other people. And, and so I'm inspired by stories like women's empowerment, or, or the abolition of slavery, which is stories of like-minded people finding each other by moving around, and then creating organizations and then traveling across the sea. And writing letters like this, this contact part. And I, I do think that the local has been so kind of abused by the dominant economics and politics of our time, that the reason for that assertion of local importance is very real, and it really matters. It's just that I think, I just think human society, you know, forever has flourished also, through exchange, you know, Aboriginal culture in Australia, they have been meeting and trading for 1000s of years, just as I think, you know, many peoples in much of the world have engaged in these kinds of exchanges of goods and ideas with each other. And so I guess I feel it's a kind of curtailment of who we are, this is the values part, isn't it? But I feel like who we are, as humans is curious about what's over the hill, and what's beyond, you know, what's on the other side of this body of water? And so, I say that respecting that I am not in fear of my life, because someone wants a piece of land I'm on and they're coming in to take it. And I'm not in fear of my children's future. Because if I don't do this job, there's no other job coming for me. And I think the debate, you know, just needs all of those perspectives. But from where I am, I think that it's true that that we need those exchanges, and that we have an effect on what's possible. We don't live in the same locale. And you know, sitting here on the Pacific Northwest, we could be very happy with the rest of the world gone. We have, we have abundant food and a kind climate and not that many people and you know, but I don't want to live my life that way. I feel connected to something else. And a lot of people don't have that. We benefit enormously from what the rest of the world is doing. And so I feel we have a responsibility as well for the welfare.
Samara
That actually moves very nicely into one of the questions that we like to ask all of our guests, which you touched on. Everyone comes to food systems discussions and debates with their own experiences, their values, their perspectives, their normative assumptions that shaped their understandings of what a food system should and could look like. Can you reflect on what some of yours might be?
Sophia
Well, I think some of it is - having been nomadic, having worked in many countries, even as a child, we moved a lot. And so this sort of sense of curiosity about the rest of the world, this idea that your identity was complex. This all sounds maybe too obscure, but you know, I was born in Britain and raised Catholic and the Catholics in Britain consider themselves, a noble and oppressed minority because of the history of that particular country. (laughs) And then we move to the continent. And, oh, the Catholic Church is the establishment and really the force to be reckoned with. And it was a very different view of what it meant to be Catholic. And this shaped my interest in other cultures, that there's more than one way to say something, you know, that different languages give you a different sense, this idea that your identity can be complex. And so I think that makes me maybe very open to the idea of exchange. And it wasn't for me a threatening experience, we weren't forced out of my home. The way that so many people migrate, because they have no choice. And we weren't, I was always at liberty to go back to keep a home in more than one place. And I think that was formative for me. I think the fact that my family enjoys food and that we ate both breakfast and supper together most days of my childhood with, I didn't know at the time, but it was probably unusual. And what went into the food matter, the ingredients were important where were the potatoes bought today who what was fresh what was in season. So this idea that food did have a place and a time was something that I was raised with.
Matthew
Sophia mentioned she always had a small garden, a vegetable plot, but there was something else that consistently motivated her to continue with food systems work.
Sophia
I came to food and stayed in food systems because it really brings people together I found it to be a very - it's both a wonderful way to go around the world and to be meeting people involved in food production and food. And it's a very easy way to engage with people and what they do. And I like it perhaps because they think that is a really deep value for most cultures that you don't let someone go hungry. And even though I think there's lots wrong with our food banks, for example, or some of the solutions we have for hunger, that basic notion is very powerful. And it counters a lot of despair at other things happening politically in terms of people's unwillingness to engage in you know, interracial dialogue or the stubborn persistence of male chauvinism or there are things that are really hard to change but people sit around a table and share food and it's something you don't even need language to be able to appreciate. And that it does seem really hardwired in us that if nothing else, you know that the you don't give the poor money maybe even but you don't turn someone away hungry. And it makes it a place where there's a lot of renewal for oneself for one's commitment because you feel like yeah, there's no question that this matters, there's no question that we need to get it right. There's no question other people care.
Samara
So what visions of future food systems inspire you, and which alarm you?
Sophia
I don't like to admit this, maybe I shouldn't put it in a podcast, I'm really not inspired at the idea of my future food coming out of a petri dish. I worry. I see climate change in the bigger sense not just in fitness as a huge threat, not only in the obvious way, but in the anything will be justified in order to stop the crisis people see unfolding. And I fear for what that what kinds of technology might be proposed as a in response to that that will trample over all of the things I care about in terms of democracy and voice. I fear for who will pay a price for that. I do think though, of course, the experiments and you know, there's lots of possibilities, it's not technology, all technology, it's more the driving imperatives around it, and whether there'll be a chance to debate what those should be. But I'm very excited. And this is also technology by, for example, the sort of the greenhouse technologies going to the north of Canada and creating the possibility of fresh products in a very harsh climate with people who are settled there and want to stay for people whose traditional diet has largely been erased, in part by climate change. And things they're on a scale that would allow what we know to be healthy food to be controlled by them instead of flown in, in these absurd, expensive, and really not functional food systems that are trying to hub and spoke. T here's no spoke that goes to those remote regions. So that would be a flip side for me food systems that people can control that allow them to adapt to where they are, and an acknowledgement that we can’t all live the way we used to live, because there's many more of us and our climate and planet has changed. One of the things that has really inspired me a Food Policy Councils and I would love to think about how we take that question. concept which revolutionized really food distribution food thinking in cities and then see how that would grow. And how you would maintain what would have to change? And what could you keep from that idea, but I think they really I think that's why we now have a National Food Policy Advisory Council. Because we were able to experiment with that locally and see its potential.
Matthew
And we already touched on this a little bit. But if you have anything else to add, here's the here's a chance. So it's something you also ask our guests at the end. So in debates about global food, trade, global food, trade and climate, what do you what do you see is receiving too much attention? And what is getting too little?
Sophia
I feel, maybe it's where I am, from where I'm sitting, I feel like the importance of hearing from the global South has been lost somewhat. Maybe partly because of the emergence of China and some larger, you know India with so many problems, but a bigger geographical geopolitical presence, I feel that the necessity of allowing other perspectives and the whole of the rest of the world, the majority world, has been silenced in a way. I felt it was more present 10, 20 years ago. But I also think the area that's crying out for more attention, again, from where I'm sitting, is this what can we do with trade? How are we going to work with trade? Let's start arguing about trade and not trade. And let's get on with this model and rules has failed us. So what could we do better with it? And look for leadership elsewhere. It's not going to come from China. I don't think although we can see a little bit it's certainly not going to come from the United States. It may come from some aspects of Europe, if we can get Europe to be less inward looking somehow, maybe from the African continental Free Trade Agreement. I think that there's a lot of scope for us to learn there from a continent that's trying to find its way past political borders that don't make sense and into more effective economies locally.
Matthew
What evidence and knowledge base do you draw from in your own research and work?
Sophia
I draw a lot on economics, and especially kind of challenging, mainstream neoliberal economics I draw a lot on law, it turned out because I was looking at trade rules. And I found the legal scholars, the ideas of justice, people like Nancy Fraser, as well as other philosophers looking at who's included and how is justice defined? It was new to me, and but I now drawn on the ecosystem kind of thinking, especially those who are looking at ecosystem intersection with human systems.
I do think that you have to understand ecology, just to understand systems, you know, and not engineering, or, obviously, engineering is part of it, but really understanding that resilience work. And all of that is very interesting, but it's I like people like Jennifer Clapp, because they come in as political economists and say, where's the agency here? And so I think you do need to match that. For me, I've been drawing on those two streams. And then people like John Ruggie, talking about his conversation on sovereignty was influential for me where he was saying, historically, it's very weird to only have a national sovereignty identity. Because people do have religions across borders. People often have people you know, you could be Tamil in Malaysia, you might have these other identities that you would carry, and some would be more local. It could be Cornish, or some would be globally, potentially, especially as you were, if you were part of a diaspora, like a Jew, Chinese across much of Asia. And so, so I found that very interesting to relativize a bit our sense that “Oh, it all culminates in the national democracy”. Well, no, historically, it's a moment in time. It's maybe not the only moment, not the most lasting moment.
Matthew
And that wraps another episode of the Feed podcast, presented by Table. A food systems collaboration between University of Oxford, Swedish University of Agricultural Sciences and Wageningen University. Please let us know how we’re doing and leave us a review in Apple podcasts or wherever you’ve listened to the episode. More information and resourced linked the episode can be found on TABLE’s website: tabledebates.org/
We’re going to be wrapping up our theme of Scale in the food system in a few more episodes. We’re trying something new and would love to hear from you to help shape our final episode. Did you learn anything new, something surprising, that challenged your preconceived notions of scale? Did you agree or disagree with something one of our guests said? You can either send us an email or you can record yourself in a quiet room and send your message to podcast@tabledebates.org .
This episode was edited and mixed by Matthew Kessler, with help from Samara Brock and the extended Table community. Music by blue dot sessions. We’ll be back in a few weeks.
