440 Localized Food Systems
Competition Commission report of the national government concluded that
where the big corporate retailers were practising this, it tended to operate against
the public interest. Customers tend to pay more at stores that do not face particu-
lar competitors than they would do if those competitors were present in the area.
In many of the marginalized working class areas of the urban and rural UK, these
monopoly retailing arrangements are now commonplace. Hence we see here that
there is a real need to link the particular corporate and institutional practices with
local empowerment and exclusionary conditions – in space. In many of the debates
so far – both academic and public policy – these linkages in space have been at best
blurred. Indeed, the spacing of exclusionary practices and their links to corporate
strategies has been neglected. It is not so much about the identification of ‘food
deserts’ as understanding the interfaces of corporate strategy and local consump-
tion in their varied spatial contexts. As this example shows, what we witness in
many areas are competition practices going in reverse. With major retailers being
able to create almost ‘monopoly consumption spaces’ in which they can raise
prices, beyond their relationships with ‘true’ costs. Keeping other retail competi-
tors out as well as harnessing loyal and recurrent consumers in to their stores
becomes a central mechanism in the territoriality of exclusive food consumption
in the British context.
A third arena of exclusion/empowerment concerns those at the other end of
the food supply chain – the primary producers. Despite all the government rheto-
ric about the need to abide by the laws of fair trading and European competition
policy, many farmers and many processors find themselves excluded from the often
more lucrative retailer-led food markets. For those that do gain entry, the degree of
informal control over their operations severely constrains their ‘room for manoeu-
vre’. In many ways these are the newly created forces of subsumption operating in
the retailer-led chains; whereby pricing and conditions can be placed upon pro-
ducers and processors in ways which are seen to be ‘consumer-led’, but really
emerge from the day-to-day management of these supply chains by the category
managers of the retailers. With exclusion or relative empowerment in this regard,
therefore, we see also the creative development of social and economic dependen-
cies operating between different sets of actors in the supply chain. Local rural and
agricultural spaces are, therefore, no longer controlled at a distance by the corpo-
rate input suppliers (i.e. associated with concepts of appropriation, substitution
and subsumption of production). Now it is more variably conditioned by the
downstream merchant (rather than industrial) retailer elites who engage groups of
consumers and governments in their powerful networks. Hence, primary produc-
tion becomes something of a backwater and ‘dirty’ activity which needs to be
‘cleaned up’ by the state and corporate retailers on behalf of the public.
We see here, then, through these examples how exclusion and empowerment
strands are a critical integrating mechanism for bringing together the social, eco-
nomic and institutional construction of power, both in and through rural (as well
as urban) spaces. This is cross-cutting both vertically through supply chains and
laterally through community/institutional interfaces.