‘Finprint’ technopolitics and the corporatisation of global food governance

Abstract

Our concern in this paper is the environmental ‘footprinting’ of food and its role as a source of technopolitical power in global food governance. Our case is the highly industrialised farmed salmon sector which currently generates metrics and carefully curated visualisations to promote this fish as a more sustainable and ‘climate friendly’ protein relative to animal protein produced on land. We show how these metrics and visualisations depend on an industrial production and measurement infrastructure. Significantly, this infrastructure and the metrics that it generates is being promoted as a ‘climate smart’ solution to small‐scale and extensive aquaculture in the Global South. Salmon aquaculture industry proposals for the transfer of technology from salmon farming to global aquaculture are explicitly articulated in global food governance and other institutional spaces. While there may be frictions in the transfer of salmon aquaculture's infrastructure of measurement to aquaculture in the Global South, our analysis suggests that environmental footprinting of food—and its associated measurement infrastructure—may be an emerging source of technopolitical power in increasingly corporatised global food governance systems.