Food scares, the global food crisis, as well as environmentally and socially sustainable food movements have led to a proliferation of work addressing questions such as Where does our food come?, Why from there?, and Under what conditions? Referred to as "agri-food" studies, a principal focus of this literature explores the interrelated processes of production, circulation, and consumption of food and its implications for human and environmental health.
In contrast to the agri-food studies literature, which is characterized by a capital-centric and global-North focus, Ph.D. student Betsy Beymer, under the supervision of Dr. Thomas Bassett at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign will study the influence of actors and environments at multiple scales to the production and consumption of black tiger prawns. The study takes a regional political ecology approach to make these connections. The proposed study seeks to understand how states, citizens, social and environmental movements, biophysical processes, and various political and economic institutions in the North and South, interact around proposed food production sites as well as sites that are already established. The case study will use quantitative and qualitative data through a mixed methods approach to examine the quests of two transnational corporations to establish black tiger prawn farms in coastal Tanzania between 1996 and 2009, the home of the largest contiguous mangrove forest along the east African seaboard. This research will investigate the shifting political ecological conditions in which industrial prawn farming was initially put on hold in Tanzania in 1996 after substantial opposition, but subsequently approved in 2003.
The broader impacts of this study are to show how relations of production and consumption of food are deeply rooted in the regional political ecologies of the global South. This study will enrich the understanding of the geographies of economic globalization by examining the shifting sites of food production at the intersection of political-ecological processes. This study will illuminate the dynamics and consequences of food globalization by providing more knowledge about how economic processes, such as global shifts in the prawn farming industry, are driven by the interactive effects of biophysical and social processes. This study will show how actors (both human and non-human) in the global North and South, influence where industrial food is produced, why there, and not elsewhere. It will also address the general public's concerns about where and under what conditions 'global food' such as 'certified sustainable' prawns are produced.
