You are viewing a free preview of this lesson.
Subscribe to unlock all 5 lessons in this course and every other course on LearningBro.
Spec mapping (AQA 7037): Paper 2 (Human Geography), §3.2.5 Resource Security — the global food system: its components, the relationship between production and consumption, the role of trade and TNCs, and the sustainability of contemporary food provision. This depth lesson treats food not as a list of farming types but as a globalised system with its own political economy: agricultural systems and the Green Revolution as context, then food regime theory (Friedmann & McMichael), agribusiness and the TNC-controlled commodity chain, trade and comparative advantage, virtual water (Allan) and the food-miles debate. It exercises AO1 (system components and named actors), AO2 (explaining how power and trade shape who eats) and AO3 (manipulating value-chain, virtual-water and trade data). Synoptic links run to §3.2.4 (population pressure on food demand — Malthus/Boserup), to Water security (virtual water, irrigation), to Global systems (TNCs, trade, governance) and to Carbon/water cycles (agriculture's emissions and water footprint).
A food system is the entire set of activities, actors and institutions involved in feeding a population: production, processing, distribution, retail, consumption and waste, plus the inputs (land, water, energy, seeds, labour) and outputs (food, but also pollution, emissions and inequality) at every stage. Treating it as a system — with flows, stores, feedbacks and players exercising unequal power — is the analytical frame the depth course rewards.
flowchart LR
IN["INPUTS<br/>land · water · seeds · energy · labour"] --> PR["PRODUCTION<br/>farming · fishing"]
PR --> PROC["PROCESSING<br/>milling · packing"]
PROC --> DIST["DISTRIBUTION<br/>transport · storage"]
DIST --> RET["RETAIL<br/>supermarkets · food service"]
RET --> CON["CONSUMPTION"]
CON --> W["WASTE<br/>~1/3 lost or wasted"]
PR -.externalities.-> EX["EMISSIONS · WATER USE · DEGRADATION"]
The central modern fact is that this system is globalised and corporately concentrated: a handful of trading houses, seed firms and retailers sit at the chokepoints between billions of farmers and billions of eaters, capturing most of the value and shaping what is grown, where, and by whom.
Production systems are classified along three axes, and precise vocabulary earns AO1 credit:
| Axis | Type | Defining feature | Located example |
|---|---|---|---|
| Market | Subsistence | For the household; low input | Shifting cultivation, Amazonia |
| Commercial | For sale/profit | Arable, East Anglia | |
| Intensity | Intensive | High input per hectare; high yield/ha | Dutch glasshouse horticulture |
| Extensive | Low input per hectare; large area | Australian sheep stations | |
| Output | Arable / Pastoral / Mixed | Crops / livestock / both | Paris Basin wheat / NZ dairy / English Midlands |
The system that dominates global trade, however, is none of these textbook types but industrial, capital-intensive, monocultural agribusiness — and understanding how it came to dominate requires the Green Revolution and food-regime theory.
The Green Revolution (1960s–80s) transformed Asian and Latin American agriculture through a package: high-yielding varieties (HYVs) of wheat, rice and maize; irrigation; synthetic fertiliser (N, P, K); pesticides; and mechanisation. The agronomist Norman Borlaug (Nobel Peace Prize, 1970) bred the semi-dwarf wheat that would not lodge under heavy grain; M.S. Swaminathan led India's adoption; and IRRI released IR8, the "miracle rice."
The output gains were extraordinary: India's wheat harvest rose from ~12 Mt (1965) to ~95+ Mt; Asian cereal output roughly doubled (1960–2000); India achieved grain self-sufficiency by the 1970s — the single strongest empirical refutation of Ehrlich's famine forecast and the clearest vindication of Boserup's induced-innovation thesis. But the costs were structural and recur throughout this unit: aquifer depletion (Punjab's water table fell metres per decade), soil and salinity degradation, chemical pollution and biodiversity loss, debt and input dependency that hit smallholders hardest, monoculture vulnerability, and a stark regional inequality — sub-Saharan Africa, with different crops, soils and weak infrastructure, was largely bypassed. The Green Revolution thus created the productive base for the global food system and its central tension between yield and sustainability.
The most powerful conceptual tool at depth level is food regime theory (Harriet Friedmann and Philip McMichael, 1989), which periodises the global food system according to who controls it and in whose interest. It reframes "global food trade" from a neutral exchange into a structured order of power:
| Regime | Period | Centre of power | Logic |
|---|---|---|---|
| First (colonial-diasporic) | ~1870–1930s | Britain / European empires | Colonies and settler states (wheat, beef) feed industrial Europe |
| Second (mercantile-industrial) | ~1950s–1970s | USA | Surplus grain exported as food aid (PL-480); agro-industrial model spread |
| Third (corporate) | ~1980s–present | Transnational corporations | Liberalised trade, financialisation, TNC-dominated value chains, "supermarket revolution" |
The theory's value is that it explains the features the rest of this lesson describes: why value concentrates in TNCs (the corporate regime), why poor countries export cash crops while importing staples (a colonial legacy), and why food has become a financial asset. A top-band answer uses food-regime theory to organise its account of agribusiness and trade, rather than listing them.
A commodity (value) chain traces a product from raw material to consumer, exposing where value is captured. The coffee chain is the classic illustration of how little reaches the grower:
| Stage | Actor | Share of retail price |
|---|---|---|
| Growing | Smallholder (e.g. Ethiopia) | 1–3% |
| Processing/export | Local processor | 5–10% |
| Trading | International trader | 10–15% |
| Roasting | Roaster (consumer country) | 20–30% |
| Retail | Supermarket / café | 40–60% |
The structural point is that value concentrates downstream, in the high-income consumer country, while risk concentrates upstream, on the low-income grower exposed to weather and price volatility. Fair Trade certification attempts to redistribute by guaranteeing a floor price and a social premium — but reaches only a few per cent of trade and is itself debated (it can exclude the poorest farmers who cannot afford certification). The chain is the AO3-friendly evidence base for inequality in the food system.
Agribusiness is the integration of farming with input supply, processing, trading and retail into large, often transnational, corporations. Two forms of integration concentrate power:
| Firm | HQ | Role |
|---|---|---|
| Cargill | USA | Grain trading, feed, processing (one of the "ABCD" traders) |
| ADM | USA | Oilseeds, grain trading, biofuels |
| Bunge / Louis Dreyfus | USA / Netherlands | The other two "ABCD" grain traders |
| Bayer (ex-Monsanto) | Germany | Seeds, agrochemicals, biotech |
| Corteva / Syngenta (ChemChina) | USA / Switzerland | Seeds, crop protection |
| JBS | Brazil | World's largest meat processor |
| Nestlé | Switzerland | Food and beverage manufacturing |
The "ABCD" traders (ADM, Bunge, Cargill, Louis Dreyfus) are estimated to handle a large share — commonly cited as around 70% — of the global grain trade, a chokepoint that gives a few private firms enormous influence over food prices and flows.
Evaluation. Agribusiness does deliver: efficiency and scale lower consumer prices, R&D produces higher-yielding and more resilient varieties, logistics reduce some waste, and traceability can improve safety. But the criticisms are serious — extreme power concentration at the chokepoints; displacement of smallholders who cannot compete; monoculture and biodiversity loss; environmental externalities (deforestation for soy and palm, agrochemical pollution); labour exploitation in low-income producers; and a structural tendency to prioritise profit and shareholder value over food security and sustainability. The balanced verdict is that agribusiness has made food cheaper and more abundant on average while concentrating the gains and exporting the costs — exactly the corporate-regime logic food-regime theory predicts.
Global food trade rests on comparative advantage — the theory that each region should specialise in what it produces most efficiently and trade for the rest, maximising total output. This explains year-round availability and lets water-scarce or cold countries import what they cannot grow. But specialisation creates dependency and vulnerability: countries reliant on food imports are exposed to price shocks and export bans (the 2007–08 and 2022 spikes), and countries reliant on cash-crop exports (coffee, cocoa) ride volatile commodity prices — a colonial-regime legacy. The 2022 disruption to Ukrainian and Russian wheat and fertiliser exports, which together supply a large share of the world market, drove a food-price spike felt most acutely in import-dependent North African and Middle Eastern states — a vivid demonstration that trade efficiency and food security can pull in opposite directions.
Virtual water (John Anthony Allan, who won the 2008 Stockholm Water Prize for the concept) is the water embedded in producing a good. When a country imports food, it imports the water used to grow it — so food trade is also a hidden water trade, and water-scarce nations can effectively "import water" by importing food rather than growing it.
| Product | Virtual water (litres/kg) |
|---|---|
| Beef | ~15,400 |
| Cheese | ~3,200 |
| Rice | ~2,500 |
| Wheat | ~1,800 |
| Maize | ~900 |
| 1 cup coffee | ~140 (per cup) |
The concept reframes both food and water policy: the Middle East and North Africa, the most water-scarce region, is the world's largest net virtual-water importer — importing grain is how it survives its physical water deficit. The danger is that virtual-water trade can mask unsustainable water use in exporting countries (e.g. aquifer-depleting irrigation) and exposes importers to the water risks of distant suppliers. Virtual water is the conceptual bridge between this lesson and water security.
Food miles measure how far food travels from production to consumption. The intuitive case against high food miles — transport emissions, lost freshness, weakened local food economies — is widely held but analytically shaky. The counter-case is strong:
The rigorous tool is a life-cycle assessment (LCA) that counts production method, energy, packaging, waste and transport — not distance alone. Food miles is therefore a misleading single metric, a superb example for an essay on why simple environmental indicators can mislead.
Value-chain share. If a jar of coffee retails at £4.00 and the grower receives 2%, the farmer gets 0.02×£4.00=£0.08 — eight pence. If Fair Trade lifts the grower's share to 6%, they receive 0.06×£4.00=£0.24 — triple the income, yet still only a quarter of what the retailer captures. Quantifying the redistribution and its limit is the evaluative AO3 move.
Virtual water of a diet shift. Replacing 1 kg of beef (~15,400 L) with 1 kg of wheat (~1,800 L) saves 15,400−1,800=13,600 litres of embedded water — a 15,40013,600×100=88% reduction. This single calculation quantifies why dietary change is among the most powerful water- and land-saving interventions, linking food and water security.
Self-sufficiency ratio. A country's food self-sufficiency =domestic consumptiondomestic production×100. The UK produces ~60% of the food it consumes, so its self-sufficiency ratio ≈ 60%, leaving ~40% reliant on imports — and therefore on the stability of distant suppliers and trade routes. Evaluate: a low ratio is not automatically bad (comparative advantage, diversity of supply), but it becomes a security risk if imports are concentrated on few suppliers or vulnerable chokepoints — the nuance the top band must add rather than treating self-sufficiency as straightforwardly good.
"Assess the view that the globalisation of the food system has done more harm than good." (20 marks: AO1 10 / AO2 10)
Mid-band response (extract). "Globalisation of food means we can buy food from all over the world, like out-of-season strawberries. This is good because we have lots of choice and developing countries can export crops. But it is bad because TNCs like Cargill have too much power and farmers only get 2% of the coffee price. Also food miles cause pollution. So globalisation has done both good and harm, but probably more harm because of inequality." (Relevant points both ways, but undifferentiated and the food-miles claim is left unexamined; verdict asserted.)
Subscribe to continue reading
Get full access to this lesson and all 5 lessons in this course.