Red meat lets professor gauge globalization in Southern Africa
While most people were at the beach this summer, Dr. Elizabeth Ransom was touring slaughterhouses in the southern African nation of Botswana. Ransom, who is a sociologist, is interested in how globalization effects groups of people in the commodity chain: the consumers, but also the butchers, processors, farmers and key industry stakeholders who ultimately are all responsible for putting food on the table.
Ransom went to graduate school in sociology wtih an emphasis on rural studies and international development; eventually her focus shifted specifically to science studies and then detoured into food. In 1998, she traveled to South Africa to study the export wine industry. Along the way, she bumped into people involved in the red meat industry, and they kept telling her how her research was most relevant to the red meat industry.
“They kept urging me to tour the slaughterhouses and one day, I accepted the invitation. I was dressed in the sterile white uniform, touring one of the elite slaughterhouses that shipped to the EU when out of nowhere, a cow’s hoof drops from the ceiling, bounces off the floor and splatters blood on me from head to toe. That’s when I knew my research had really taken a dramatic turn,” Ransom said.
And the rest, as they say, is history. All countries who want to compete in the global food export business must increasingly comply with Hazard Analysis and Critical Control Points (HACCP), a systematic preventative approach to food safety that requires producers and processors to address physical, chemical and biological hazards, during and after food production. The system may make the end product safer, but it makes it much more difficult for small and mid-sized meat producers and processors to compete in the global market since abiding by HACCP requires a big investment.
Ransom is focused on the benefits and drawbacks of international policies like HACCP, policies that stifle smaller countries from competing. It’s a concept Eric Schlosser introduces in his book Fast Food Nation, only on an international rather than national scale. Increased regulation means increased costs which can lead to fewer players owning a larger portion of the food system.
“I’m interested in looking at the winners and losers in this system. There’s a paradox because people often think they’re safer when several large corporations oversee meat production with increased safety regulations; however, eating a burger made from a 1,000 cows versus a burger made from just one introduces an entirely new set of food safety issues,” Ransom said.
Over the course of two months, in which she traveled to South Africa, Namibia and Botswana, Ransom asked the same questions to everyone in the commodity chain: Are there policies we can change to help even the playing field, allowing the people of Southern Africa to compete globally in the red meat export industry?
“We have to recognize that everyone starts from a different position,” Ransom said. “Is there such a thing as one scientific standard that the entire world can follow? That’s a difficult thing to pin down.”