The Global Political Economy of Food Crimes: A Green Radical Criminological Approach

• In Event: GREEN Panel 1, Environmental Crimes of the Powerful: Corporate Harm and Regulatory Failure across Industries

Abstract

In the modern capitalist model of production, food is produced not for its use value, but for its exchange value. It is precisely this parameter that has completely shaped the scope of today’s global food system, and, more specifically, the invisible aspects of the neoliberal food system. In order to shed light on precisely this dark side of the conventional food system, food crimes are examined in this work. From a green radical criminological perspective, food crimes concern harms that are located throughout the food system, from production to consumption, and that are directed against non-human life and the environment as well as against humanity. In order to understand in depth the structural framework that enables and facilitates these harms, the global political economy of the food system is examined, and within this framework the role of both the dominant subject of modern economic life, namely multinational food corporations, and the state. In this way, at a criminological level, food crimes are analyzed within the framework of state-facilitated corporate crimes, where in combination with a green tort approach it becomes clear that states and multinational corporations act symbiotically, prioritizing profit over harm to humans, non-human lives and the environment, reflecting the broader ethics of an economic system, that systematically legitimizes such harmful practices. After all, food is part of nature and nature determines life. Whoever controls food has the power to control life. In the neoliberal food system, this power is concentrated in the hands of a few multinational food companies, which in the pursuit of immense profit abuse billions of non-human lives, destroy entire ecosystems and impose the impoverishment of entire peoples. In this system of exploitation, states come as guarantors of its normalization.

Author

• George Dimitriou, Panteion University of Social and Political Sciences