Global Capital and Big Poultry in South Asia
Venue
Violet Laidlaw Room, CMBDescription
Next week’s CSAS seminar will host Dr Mehroosh Tak, Senior Lecturer in Agribusiness, Royal Veterinary College, London. Dr Tak will be speaking on the topic ‘Global Capital and Big Poultry in South Asia’ The session will be chaired by Prof. Geraldine McNeill, Visiting Professor of Global Nutrition and Health, UoE
This is an in-person lunchtime seminar, so colleagues are invited to bring your lunches. DIY hot drinks will also be available.
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Abstract:
The flow of global capital administered by corporate regimes and international financial institutions has created asymmetries of power and increased corporate concentration, shifting the way animal-sourced foods are produced and consumed, giving rise to “meatification of diets”. This paper takes the example of poultry as a livestock commodity to show case how global capital flows have transformed the poultry industry globally, followed by the case of India and Bangladesh. The paper aims to answer the question, “Is there any thread leading from financial markets and/or neoliberal policies to the stomach?”. We do so by exploring (1) the role of international finance and liberalisation in the rise of industrial poultry production, and (2) how the global poultry industry facilitates corporatisation of the Indian and Bangladeshi poultry sector. We theoretically and empirically articulate the power laden financial linkages and disjuncture between global capital and South Asian rise in chicken production as being enabled by a set of variegated and incoherent neoliberalising processes of state absence and policy restructuring, co-constituted between national and state governments and corporate poultry agribusiness giants. We argue that industrial chicken production systems are justified and propagated by both private and public sector stakeholders around what we call two key “do good” narratives, first of solving malnutrition and second of improving rural livelihoods. We find that the gains from increasing productivity per unit through industrial chicken production practices are insufficient in addressing the stated “do good” objectives as externalised costs of labour exploitation, disease risk and food insecurity created from the industrialised production process, in turn disproportionately impacts the very populations facing malnutrition and livelihood insecurity.