Description
This paper investigates the political economic implications of the current capitalist food regime through the lens of intensive animal production. The costs of large meat production complexes are externalised by the nature of the value chain, which operates in a structure that makes invisible the linkage of responsibility – thereby protecting corporate actors. The Danish ‘pig industrial complex’ is used as a case that illustrates contemporary clashes between what is now a corporatised agricultural value chain against a political climate leading towards radical sustainable transformation, enforcing a renegotiation of the agricultural sector’s license to operate. The Danish meat production sector continuously undergoes structural reconfigurations that places political and economic salience on farmers and large processing companies. The analytical approach combines a focus on the porosity of national borders that are both permissive to increased pig trading flows, but also serve the pig sector’s interests in limiting the potential risk of transferring disease between producing countries, thereby entangled with border politics. It also poses the question of the role of industrial relations politics to influence corporate strategy of European multinational meat corporations.
