Navigating futures: Anticipation and food supply chain mapping

Abstract

This paper examines the use of supply chain mapping by actors in the UK food system to anticipate problematic futures. Supply chain mapping as an anticipatory practice is a response to a recent food scare that has reinforced concerns about the safety, quality, and authenticity of foodstuffs circulating within supply chains. Our analysis of this novel set of mapping practices is based around the visibility of the supply chain that they offer and the ways in which this is generated or made to relate to future problems as both objects and processes. Supply chain maps as objects can induce surprise and uncertainty over the future, but they can also demonstrate responsibility for risk or be a means of allocating and assuring accountability for future problems. Looking at mapping as a process highlights both the difficulty of mapping supply chains and what is actually involved in using supply chain maps to give form to potential future problems. We characterise both of these processes as navigational, based on creating and reading “signposts” that allow risky food futures to be plotted as trajectories in space and time. Supply chain maps describe a process as well as a set of spatial relations, and navigating futures with these maps is a skilled task involving accumulated knowledge about food risks and learning to recognise supply chain maps as encompassing time and space. Our analysis highlights how things not made visible by the map, but present through those involved in the mapping, are as important in its anticipatory use as the things made visible. Maps are part of a wider process of making sense of risky food chain futures that is filled with uncertainty and power relations.

Pathways, targets and temporalities: Analysing English agriculture's net zero futures

“…Notably, Nimmo (2021) and Jönsson (2020) have also taken inspiration from the work of Adam and Groves to look critically at the exploration of futures suggested and invoked by technological developments in the food system, looking at robotic pollination in the case of the former and cellular agriculture in the latter. Donaldson et al (2020) consider the ways in which supply chain mapping in turn becomes an anticipatory technique for ‘risky food futures’. Other work by Goulet (2020) on family farming in Argentina, Cardon (2020) and Tétart (2020) regarding knowledge practices that foresee food systems futures and Eriksson et al (2020), addressing the relationship between planning food and defence futures, draws on theory derived from Science and Technology Studies.…”

COVID‐19 and the shifting industrial landscape

“…Existing work on biosecurity and industrial landscapes has mainly focused on sites of agricultural production as generating bio‐ in security (Blanchette, 2015; Hinchliffe & Bingham, 2008). Geographers have explored how supply chain mapping is used within food systems to anticipate problematic futures (Donaldson et al, 2019), but less has been said concerning the biosecuring of logistical sites of circulation through which materials pass. And yet, history demonstrates that ports have long been key sites of biopolitics.…”

Charting COVID-19 futures: Mapping, anticipation, and navigation

“…Having suggested above that FTC charts afford a biopolitical mode of anticipatory wayfinding, to which COVID-19 trajectory charts impart a distinctively geopolitical flavour, I will conclude by considering how a navigational analysis might draw out what is political across these contrasting mappings. Navigational analyses address maps as devices which configure the plotting of an itinerary (Donaldson et al, 2019; November et al, 2010). They thus situate COVID-19 charts within processes of deliberation, decision, and intervention through which individuals and organisations traverse potentially hazardous futures, and which thus precipitate anticipatory actions that bring particular geographies of disease into being.…”

“…It also draws future geographies scholarship into dialogue with navigational accounts of mapping, which situate charts as constituents of wayfinding practices through which actors attempt to plot a safe course through turbulent spatial and temporal terrains (November et al, 2010). Navigational approaches to the charting of COVID-19 futures thus decentre such graphics as representations, investigating instead what work they might do within processes of anticipating, traversing, and intervening in pandemic futures (Donaldson et al, 2019). The commentary illustrates this navigational approach by comparing the anticipatory affordances of two charts of possible COVID-19 futures, arguing respectively that they facilitate distinctively biopolitical and geopolitical modes of traversal.…”