Over at Diplomatic Courier in Washington is a new edition looking at various aspects of global food issues.

Including my piece on Food and Diplomacy:

Where better to start pondering the global politics of food than in China, some 2500 years ago? The adviser to Duke Wen of Wei noted that the vagaries of farming caused paradoxical problems:

If grain is very expensive, consumers suffer and their families are scattered and emigrate. If grain is very cheap the producers suffer and the state is impoverished. Whether the price is very high or very low, the prosperity of the states suffers

Fast forward to eighteenth century France. Philosophers were still grappling with the way grain production was affected by the weather’s annoying inconsistency. Leading French Physiocrat Francois Quesnay in 1757 described how a strong harvest created such a superabundance of grain that prices collapsed and farmers faced ruin, and proposed all sorts of ingenious state-led schemes to manage the problem.

And so to today, where supermarket chains around the world manage to bring to our tables all round the year food from around the planet. Fresh raspberries from Kenya and lamb’s lettuce from Morocco with one’s Christmas dinner in icy Edinburgh? Yum!

More than that. Millions of people in Western societies scarcely cook food at all, preferring to heat up something pre-prepared bought on the way home from work. What goes on in the countryside and how food is produced is now a complete mystery to many modern city-dwellers. For great sections of humanity in the better-off parts of the planet, the earlier tight if not existential links between food, climate, seasons and painful work have been broken by technology and human ingenuity.

But what does this mean for fairness and inequality?

One of the noisiest supposedly progressive demands these days is for ‘Fair Trade’. It’s obviously unfair (the claim goes) that farmers in developing countries get so little of the money that their products eventually sell for in Western shops.

But is that really unfair?

What are you in fact buying when you choose a smart box of chocolates in a Western shop? Those chocolates indeed contain a good dose of cocoa products. But you’re also paying something towards the costs of processing the cocoa and shipping it round the world; the groovy teams in London designing the box; the Swiss experts who invent enticing new chocolate flavours; the Belarusian software that makes all this work smoothly; the wages of the people who have driven the box to the shop; the electricity bill of the shop, and the wages of the person behind the till, and so on. The actual cost of the original food ingredients is only a fraction of the value and integrated cleverness that the box of chocolates represents.

In fact the box of chocolates exists at all only because the genius of the Invisible Hand of market forces brings all these factors together and costs them as compared with each other with incredible precision. There is no a priori reason to think that the farmers who grow the cocoa beans are any more ‘unfairly’ treated than the Belarusian software engineers who help everyone in the production chain get the cocoa into a form that consumers want to buy. Each gets a tiny slice of the money paid for each chocolate box sold. Yes, the farmers who grow the cocoa are not well off. But that’s because their societies have not yet moved strongly into the more creative and rewarding parts of the global value-chain.

Anyone drafting a keynote speech on world food problems now might start by noting that the politics and economics of food do not sit easily with traditional Western categories of Left and Right.

It’s bad to subsidise rich farmers! Localism is good!

It’s madness to carry food (and mineral water?!) round the world in aircraft. It’s madness not to let farmers in developing countries compete freely!

In a word?

Three words in fact. Time for lunch.