# Local Food, Global Capital: The ‘Local Shift’ in the Financialization of Hawaii’s Foods Support of food production for local consumption has been a persistent interest in Hawaii’s agrofood system. The primary rationale for that interest has changed from pre-contact subsistence to a focus today on sustainability. Over the past century, shifting social and economic relations between the state, investment capital, markets, and civil society have helped to perpetuate local agriculture. State support in particular has been a key mechanism in the production and reproduction of agriculture for local consumption. In recent years, as civil society interest in local foods has grown, the government has responded with planning and establishing goals to double food production for local consumption. These discursive responses by the state have not been paired with the same kinds of material support that were common in previous decades [(Hayes, 1942; Mark & Lucas, 1983; Peters & Rasmussen, 1961; Wilcox, 1916)](https://www.zotero.org/google-docs/?78McST). Instead the state has taken a more neoliberal approach and focused on food enterprise market actors to provide material support in the form of financial investment. These investments by financial, corporate, and foreign capital interests operate at temporal and spatial scales that align well with political goals to double local food production, and represent a ‘local shift’ in the desired market of agrocaptial interests from export to Hawaii consumers. Though these investments may yield increases in productivity, the majority of surplus value from that production will accrue not in Hawaii’s rural economies and communities but in the global accounts of venture and corporate firms. The support by the state for these large scale investment projects eschews addressing the needs of existing farm operators in Hawaii and the potential they hold in increasing productivity. Furthermore, as the agrocapital operations are primarily financial investment projects they are more susceptible to the vagaries of global capital and market shifts (CITATION NEEDED) than the well documented stalwart nature of smallholder producers [(Chayanov, 1986)](https://www.zotero.org/google-docs/?OL6owo). That being said, the history of financialization in agriculture has demonstrated accumulation by dispossession and consolidation that push small and mid size operators out of the market [(Isakson, 2014)](https://www.zotero.org/google-docs/?oS258M). Though the agrocapital economic winds may be onshore at the moment, when they change again and offshore investors depart Hawaii the state will likely be left with far fewer local producers. By focusing on calories in production and not communities of producers the state loses out on an opportunity to build more durable local production-consumption networks. By coaxing investments to meet political goals the state participates in the shift of local foods from being community to commodity assets. It is at this conjuncture where the conflicting values and visions for local food held by the state, investors, and civil society are most apparent. The broader analytical frame of food regime analysis is utilized to contextualize these perspectives. ## The Global Corporate Food Regime in Hawaii Food regime analysis is ideal for articulating connections between state and global governance and identifying trajectories of accumulation in agrofood sectors [(Marsden, Munton, Ward, & Whatmore, 1996)](https://www.zotero.org/google-docs/?HkwJrq). Each food regime is a post hoc bounding of moments to aid in “the understanding of agriculture and food’s role in capital accumulation across time and space” [(McMichael, 2009)](https://www.zotero.org/google-docs/?UuLsvx). In the first global food regime, dominated by British colonialism from 1870-1930s, foreign capital reconfigured agriculture across Pacific Islands to produce bulk commodities for export to colonial centers [(Plahe, Hawkes, & Ponnamperuma, 2013)](https://www.zotero.org/google-docs/?hEBjVY). In the second food regime roughly from the late 1950s through the 1970s, United States ascension and global north productivity drove exports to postcolonial states, shifting the net flow of goods and creating food import dependence across much of the pacific [(Plahe et al., 2013)](https://www.zotero.org/google-docs/?8zsXlP). The third global food regime from the 1980s to today, framed by the politics of neoliberalism and evidenced in the “corporatization of agriculture and agro-exports” [(McMichael, 2005)](https://www.zotero.org/google-docs/?V9CIhB), has shifted the “locus of control for food security away from the nation-state to the world market” [(Plahe et al., 2013)](https://www.zotero.org/google-docs/?Jdjr4a). McMichael posits that “the food regime is not a political–economic order, as such, rather it is a vehicle of a contradictory conjuncture, governed by the ‘double movement’ of accumulation/legitimation” [(2005)](https://www.zotero.org/google-docs/?IsF50g). And indeed, in Hawaii today corporatized agrofood development is used as a means of state legitimation, clearly reflected in a recent newsletter from the Governor’s office stating that businesses “have heard about our commitment to doubling local food production and are interested in making significant investments here.” [(Office of the Governor, 2019)](https://www.zotero.org/google-docs/?ZcG0WQ). Accumulation by capital in this regime is accomplished through the “appropriation of agricultural resources for capitalist consumption relations … realized through an expanding foundation of human impoverishment and displacement, and the marginalization of agrarian/food cultures” [(McMichael, 2005)](https://www.zotero.org/google-docs/?mdKMVh). The recent spate of land grabs by financial and corporate interests, detailed below, are exemplary of this type of appropriation, while marginalization is evidenced by the lack of material support for existing agricultural producers that was present in previous decades. Articulation of the decline in material support for local agriculture from the state, while not the focus of this paper, can be understood in part through a review of current discursive support.  ## Support and Security on the road to Doubling Local Food Two goals best articulate the government approach to local agriculture. In 2014, the Aloha Plus Challenge, composed of six sustainability goals for 2030 “informed by stakeholder and community input”, was signed by then Governor Neil Abercrombie, each of the county Mayors, and the head of the Office of Hawaiian Affairs. The Aloha Plus Challenge was the outcome of and is tracked by the public-private partnership Hawaii Green Growth. The local food goal set to “at least double local food production – 20-30% of food consumed is grown locally” by 2030 [(Hawaii Green Growth, n.d.)](https://www.zotero.org/google-docs/?sP4tlV).  In late 2016, Governor David Ige announced, at the opening of the World Conservation Congress, his Sustainable Hawaii Initiative, stating “We need to provide food security through protection of lands and water and support for our local farmers. That’s why I’m committed to doubling Hawaiʻi’s food production by 2020”  [(Ige, 2016)](https://www.zotero.org/google-docs/?1o2vX3). While the ambition of the timeline is notable, so too is the invocation of food security and support for local farmers as the rationale. These are echoed in the initiative brochure stating that “To continue to provide food security and support our local farmers, we are committed to increasing agricultural loan programs, invasive species prevention and control, and purchasing and improving high-value agricultural lands.” [(Office of Governor David Ige, n.d.)](https://www.zotero.org/google-docs/?dRNcsx). A key distinction being that while the first quotation uses food security through support of local farmers as a rational, the second creates distinction between food security and support of local farmers rationales. Another promotional document outlining the plans for doubling local production, lists various supports for local farmers like increasing capital available to farmers, developing “Buy Local” campaigns, and increasing the availability of lands for “agriculturalists including for small family farms” [(Office of Governor David Ige, 2016)](https://www.zotero.org/google-docs/?FApcmB). However, the bullet point for ‘revitalizing the livestock industry’ includes that the state Department of Agriculture “working with private partners will increase local egg production with the introduction of a one million hen facility on Oahu” [(Office of Governor David Ige, 2016)](https://www.zotero.org/google-docs/?PgDEay). That facility, a “partnership between California’s Hidden Villa Ranch, one of the largest egg distributors in the US, and Indiana’s Rose Acre Farms, one of the nation’s biggest egg producers” had been in the works since at least 2015 [(Shimogawa, 2015)](https://www.zotero.org/google-docs/?oSZUtx). With plans for solar power, job and peripheral industry creation, and a starting flock of 300,000 birds, the project dubbed Villa Rose even curried the support of the impact investment firm Ulupono Initiative whose general partner expressed that the market has plenty of room for small and larger operations to co-exist [(Riker, 2015)](https://www.zotero.org/google-docs/?ERYyov). A sentiment not shared by a longtime local egg farmer who, while open to the idea of the operation restarting local grain production and feed mills, was wary of the potential of local farms closing due to market flooding and dropping egg prices [(Riker, 2015)](https://www.zotero.org/google-docs/?NT4HPm). Villa Rose, Ulupono Initiative, and a local farmers’ hopes for how the operation would support local farmers are mostly found in the distant potential of spurring local grain production. When reasonably the state doesn’t hold any other positions about how this project would meet the doubling goal rationale to support local farmers thus, presumably, this project is undergirded by the food security rationale. While hopes attached to spin off industries have potential benefit to local farmers, the impacts of nearly one egg per resident per day by hitting the marketplace don’t require hope to imagine. Implementations of the food security rationale are found then to be antagonistic to the intent of the support local farmers rationale. Alternatively this can viewed as preferencing productivity over producers. Far from an island in this approach, similar frames have been documented with financialization and land grabs in Australia [(Larder, Sippel, & Lawrence, 2015)](https://www.zotero.org/google-docs/?pRk5VP) and ocean grabs in Canada [(Knott & Neis, 2017)](https://www.zotero.org/google-docs/?m8yCgH), both yielding increased of vulnerability to local producers. With the state goals and rationales outlined, what other implementations of the food security rationale are there? ## The Rise of the Food Enterprise The food enterprise discourse seeks to increase productivity by “increasing output through corporate-led technological innovation, and pushing peasant producers out of agriculture to make way for more efficient ‘entrepreneurial’ farmers” [(Holt Giménez & Shattuck, 2011)](https://www.zotero.org/google-docs/?GbbD5d). This productivist discourse is echoed in “finding game changers” by the state [(Office of Governor David Ige, 2018)](https://www.zotero.org/google-docs/?JTC1lU), impact investing focused on large-scale for-profit and non-profit investments by the Ulupono Initiative [(Ulupono Initiative, n.d.)](https://www.zotero.org/google-docs/?6ND73t), corporate investment by Villa Rose and Costco [(Office of Governor David Ige, 2018)](https://www.zotero.org/google-docs/?7f73Cf), a bevy of large scale venture and finance capital backed projects, and a suite of agrofood business accelerator programs. The scale and intent of each of these programs or projects vary widely, but are connected in their embrace of “move the needle” or food enterprise thinking and a desire to shape the future of agriculture in Hawaii. Off-shore agricultural investments are nothing new to the islands but once export oriented firms are being replaced by new forms of accumulation by dispossession by financialization efforts focused on producing food for local sale. ## The Local Shift The most recent major investment is that of Mahi Pono, a collaboration between Pomona Farming LLC and the Public Sector Pension Investment Board of Canada which purchased 41,000 acres of old sugar fields from Alexander & Baldwin. Prior investments on Maui include Hana Ranch a 3,600 acre acquisition by Biological Capital, which also manages Oprah Winfrey’s Maui estate operation’s OW Farms. Larry Ellison’s purchase of the island of Lanai was followed by an announcement of his Pulama Lanai company’s Lanai Farms. On Oahu, Villa Rose is setting up shop on lands purchased from the Dole company and Costco is now in discussion to establish 100 to 200 acres of greenhouse production to meet their local demand. This listing is not exhaustive but more to evidence the scale of recent actors and investments in Hawaii’s local food system. As many listed above have also found recognition by the state in documenting its work to reaching goals to double food production, it is apparent that scale is an especially important consideration in the state’s efforts. Collectively these projects demonstrate a ‘local shift’ in agrofood investment and development. Further, many of these projects, like the state, have taken up popular narratives of food security and localization, sustainability, and increased food self-sufficiency. This alignment of government and private finance visions for Hawaii’s local foods system calls into question the forms of local food system development being pursued and their potential to further marginalize the thousands of existing small and mid size farms across the islands. Akin to issues in the social aspects of energy transitions covered by [Miller, Iles, & Jones (2013)](https://www.zotero.org/google-docs/?NAtmPp), from the perspective of many consumers and small and mid-scale producers, the definitions of local food are not limited to just the geography of their production but also through ownership across the value chain (Loke & Leung, 2013). Yet, from the perspective of the state and investors, large-scale operations have clear advantages as they operate with economies of scale, are easier to integrate into state procurement systems, and generate revenues that flow to their shareholders. Conversely, diversified and locally owned operations are viewed to deliver various returns from local production through economic, environmental, and social impacts.  ## Contested Frames While the local shift in investments holds promise in delivering on state goals to increase agricultural productivity, the impacts to producers remains woefully under-examined in this approach. Further analysis is needed to assess the extent to which the notedly complex definition of local in Hawaii [(Hobart, 2016)](https://www.zotero.org/google-docs/?mkiKnE) will be appeased or ignored by this approach. The value delivered to consumers by large scale operations is presumably held by lower food prices, but the lack of dense competitive markets, demonstrated by monopolizing industry investments fueled by economic interests, raises concern over whether the wave of local shift actors will yield such a benefit or function as a rent seeking mechanism while thinning the diversity of local producers. Further study is required to understand the implications of the state’s contradictory pursuit of food security and local farmer support rationales. Embedded in this issue is the contested realm of localness, and the extent to which citizens and  consumers, if given choice, are seeking food security at the cost of existing. local producers. ## References [Chayanov, A. V. (1986). AV Chayanov on the theory of peasant economy. Manchester University Press.](https://www.zotero.org/google-docs/?pREPYP) [Hawaii Green Growth. (n.d.). Local Food – Aloha+ Challenge [Hawaii Green Growth]. Retrieved May 7, 2019, from https://aloha-challenge.hawaiigreengrowth.org/aloha-goals/local-food/](https://www.zotero.org/google-docs/?pREPYP) [Hayes, C. (1942). Food administration in Hawaii during wartime. 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