Chapter 16 - The Political Ecology of Food and Hunger, 1950–Present

Summary

This chapter attends to issues shaping Ireland’s food sovereignty today by paying attention to the “materialities of food production, its distribution, and changing consumption patterns, which reveal the intersections between the environmental and political in food policy.” Miriam Mara detects these issues as important themes in Irish literature from the 1950s to the present. While there are historical continuities to consider, Mara notes that that “the environmental and political situation around food in Ireland shifts over time – from wartime rationing during and after the Emergency 1939–48 – to the unsteady balance between environmental health and food production under European Union Common Agricultural Policy.”The global agroeconomy, an industrialized monster of late capitalism, is at the forefront of climate-change mitigation discourses. The Irish agricultural sector’s reliance on livestock production has meant that the main source of methane emissions in the country are its cattle and sheep.