Commentary: Food regime analysis and agrarian questions: widening the conversation

The central disagreement between McMichael and Bernstein boils down to how each of them analyses food and agriculture in relation to capitalist dynamics. McMichael thinks the main contradictions of capitalism now stem from agriculture, and any positive future will be guided by farmers. Bernstein thinks capitalism has fully absorbed agriculture (including farmers not expelled from the land) into circuits of capital, turning agriculture into simply one of many sectors of accumulation and a major font of surplus labor. They have arrived by different paths to the same deeper question: Granted its illumination of the past, does the food regime approach remain useful for interpreting present contradictions, and if so, how? To invite a wider exploration of this very real and important question, I have tried to shift the debate towards a conversation about the complexity of the current transition. I start by widening the frame of the debate to include other writings by McMichael (his method of incorporated comparison) and Bernstein (his distinction between farming and agriculture). I conclude that food regimes and agrarian changes must be located in a wider set of analyses of agrarian and capitalist transitions, each of which misses something important. Older agrarian thought about urban society has much to offer but misses larger food regime dynamics; socio-technical transitions and new commons literatures offer critical analysis of technics, but lack appreciation of the centrality of food and farming; recent works recovering Marxist thought about human nature in a possible transition to a society of abundance and collaboration also ignore food and farming. Connecting with literatures outside the frame of food regimes and agrarian questions offers a way forward for those literatures and for ours.     

Social change and social conflict in nineteenth century England: A comment

This article addresses the potential for food movements to bring about substantive changes to the current global food system. After describing the current corporate food regime, we apply Karl Polanyi's ‘double-movement’ thesis on capitalism to explain the regime's trends of neoliberalism and reform. Using the global food crisis as a point of departure, we introduce a comparative analytical framework for different political and social trends within the corporate food regime and global food movements, characterizing them as ‘Neoliberal’, ‘Reformist’, ‘Progressive’, and ‘Radical’, respectively, and describe each trend based on its discourse, model, and key actors, approach to the food crisis, and key documents. After a discussion of class, political permeability, and tensions within the food movements, we suggest that the current food crisis offers opportunities for strategic alliances between Progressive and Radical trends within the food movement. We conclude that while the food crisis has brought a retrenchment of neoliberalization and weak calls for reform, the worldwide growth of food movements directly and indirectly challenge the legitimacy and hegemony of the corporate food regime. Regime change will require sustained pressure from a strong global food movement, built on durable alliances between Progressive and Radical trends.     

Commentary: Food regime for thought

This essay engages with Henry Bernstein's critical survey of food regime analysis, focusing on the claim that my interpretation of the food regime takes a misguided ‘peasant turn’. I argue Henry's representation loses sight of my reformulation of the ‘agrarian question’, as more than analysis of the uneven process by which capital subordinates landed property, and therefore of the class fate of the peasantry, as such. Rather it is about social and ecological fate on a global scale, involving questions of ecosystem survival, precarious labor circuits, urban slum proliferation, privatization of states, financialization, intellectual (property) rights, climate change mitigation and so on. Significantly, global recognition of these connections to processes of agro-industrialization and enclosure was informed by a ‘peasant’ mobilization that would be unthinkable within the terms of the classical agrarian question. Peasant organizations catalyzed challenge to the neoliberal food order institutionalized in the World Trade Organization (WTO) regime, in a time of massive dispossession. Politicizing neoliberal ‘food security’ as an agribusiness project, the ‘food sovereignty’ counter-movement used a politics of strategic essentialism to unmask the undemocratic and impoverishing architecture of the ‘free trade’ regime privileging corporate rights over state and citizen rights. In effect, this counter-movement performed a food regime analysis from within, importantly reaching beyond a peasant project. This essay revisits the comparative-historical method by which the food regime trajectory can be understood, as a contradictory set of interacting forces and relations that complicate and shape and reshape its politics, and yet allow identification of emergent possibilities.     

East Asian food regimes: agrarian warriors,edamame beans and spatial topologies of food regimes in East Asia

Recent years have witnessed a burgeoning body of work thinking differently about food regimes. Drawing on the concepts of a corporate food regime and a corporate-environmental food regime, this paper highlights the constituent parts of East Asian food regimes, addressing the food regime transition that has taken place in the region. The first part of the paper addresses the role played by agrarian-scientific institutions in this transition; specifically, it investigates the spatial topologies, political economy, histories and socio-cultural contexts of agrarian knowledge production and practices that have conditioned East Asia’s transition to a corporate-environmental food regime. The second part offers an analysis of a specific food commodity – edamame beans – to illustrate how East Asian food regimes have changed as they have been incorporated into a corporate-environmental food regime. In investigating the evolution of edamame production and trade, I analyze how edamame production and trade has been reorganized under this new regime. My study argues that broadening the conversation about the food regimes approach requires a regional-geographic perspective in order to understand the spatial topologies, uneven development and socio-cultural-ecological differentiation characteristic of food regimes.     

Chinese state capitalism and neomercantilism in the contemporary food regime: contradictions,continuity and change

ABSTRACT

A significant proportion of critical agri-food literature has, to date, focused on the uneven relations of power between the Global North and the Global South, and the neoliberal characteristics of the corporate food regime. This literature has often overlooked the nuances in varieties of capitalism, particularly in East Asia. China is re-emerging as a powerful state actor in an increasingly multipolar global food system. It is also an important hub of capital, facilitating agribusiness mergers and acquisitions, as well as new East–South and South–South flows of agri-food trade, technology and capital. This paper aims to contribute to understanding state-led capitalism in China and neomercantilist strategies in the agri-food sector. The paper provides a critical analysis of a case study of China's state owned agri-food and chemical companies ‘going global’. It contends that the current food regime is in a period of transition or interregnum – a period of fluidity separating the continuity of successive regimes. Arguably, the analytical contours of a contemporary food regime in transition cannot be adequately comprehended without recognising the incipient importance of state-led capitalism and neomercantilism, and how contemporary socio-political and economic dynamics are reshaping relations of power in the global political economy of food.     

Food riots and the politics of provisions from early modern Europe and China to the food crisis of 2008

The food riots of 2007–2008 jolted authoritarian regimes and international agencies into action. The riots also began to crack neoliberal hegemony over the global food system. Food riots have often driven a politics of provisions, sometimes winning relief, sometimes merely bloody repression, depending on a particular country’s political economy. Such bargaining in the politics of provisions is made possible by existing networks – of solidarity among the common people and reciprocity between them and their rulers – that extend elements of ‘normal’ politics into crises. This paper explores how riotous extensions of such sociopolitical networks shaped food politics in early modern England and China, Famine Ireland, the ‘IMF (International Monetary Fund) austerity riots’ of the 1980s and 1990s, and the food riots of 2007–2008.     

The land grab and corporate food regime restructuring

Land grab appears to be a phenomenal expression of deepening contradictions in the corporate food regime. In particular, the end of cheap food (signaled in the 2008 ‘food crisis’) has generated renewed interest in agriculture for development on the part of the development industry, matched by a rising interest in offshore land investments, driven by governments securing food and fuel exports and financiers speculating on commodity futures and land price inflation. This paper interprets these developments as illusory solutions to a fundamental accumulation crisis of the neoliberal project. While this new (and final?) enclosure registers a restructuring of the food regime, as its geopolitical relations and productive content re-centers on Southern land and an emergent bioeconomic imperative, it is likely to only buy time (and space) in the short run for political and economic elites and a global consuming class. In the longer run, the attempt to resolve food regime contradictions by a spatial fix may well be catastrophic.     

A pluralist and pragmatist critique of food regime’s genealogy: varieties of social orders in Brazilian agriculture

ABSTRACT

The food regime approach occupies a privileged place in the sociology of agriculture and food. However, it is criticized for its structural, universalist and homogenizing bias. From a dialogue between institutionalism and pragmatism, this contribution discusses an alternative framework constructed from the ‘social order’ concept, which defines the existence of different arrangements of practices related to socio-technical and institutional apparatuses. Both the critique of the ‘regime’ narrative and the new proposition are associated to a reinterpretation of Brazil’s agricultural trajectory. Contrasting with the overemphasized export-oriented plantation/agribusiness image that prevails in the majority of analysis about Brazilian insertion in globalized agri-food regime, this paper explores the heterogeneity of production and consumption practices, arguing for the coexistence of multiple and contradictory ordering processes.     

Reformulation,fortification and functionalization: Big Food corporations’ nutritional engineering and marketing strategies

In response to health concerns arising from the consumption of highly processed foods, the world's largest food and beverage manufacturing corporations (i.e. ‘Big Food’) have responded by modifying their existing products and introducing new products with ‘improved’ nutrient profiles. Three distinct strategies used by food corporations to nutritionally engineer and market their products will be identified: the reformulation of foods to reduce levels of harmful food components, the micronutrient fortification of products to address micronutrient deficiencies, and the functionalization of products that claim to provide optimal nutrition and health benefits. These nutritional strategies gain scientific legitimacy by drawing upon the dominant nutritional ideology of ‘nutritionism’, which is characterized by a reductive focus on nutrients as a way of understanding a food's effects on dietary health. Food and beverage corporations promote these nutritional strategies as an important part of their corporate social responsibility agendas, and as evidence that they are addressing the health issues associated with both over-nutrition and under-nutrition. However, these corporations are also using these nutritional strategies to legitimize and grow the markets for their products in the global North and South.     

‘Civilizing’ the pastoral frontier: land grabbing,dispossession and coercive agrarian development in Ethiopia

ABSTRACT

This paper analyzes frontier dynamics of land dispossessions in Ethiopia’s pastoral lowland regions. Through a case study of two sedentarization schemes in South Omo Valley, we illustrate how politics of coercive sedentarization are legitimated in the ‘civilizing’ impetus of ‘improvement schemes’ for ‘backward’ pastoralists. We study sedentarization schemes that are implemented to evict pastoralist communities from grazing land to be appropriated by corporate investors. It is argued that frontier imaginations of pastoral lowlands legitimate coercive practices of ‘emptying’ the lowlands for investments. ‘Improvement schemes’ enroll private investors and enterprises affiliated with Ethiopia’s ruling party in the politics of ‘thickening’ state presence in the pastoral frontier. Agricultural extension packages serve to expand state control over sedentarized pastoralists and make lowland resources more extractable, for investors and for the ruling regime.     

From famine to food crisis: what history can teach us about local and global subsistence crises

The number of famine prone regions in the world has been shrinking for centuries. It is currently mainly limited to sub-Saharan Africa. Yet the impact of endemic hunger has not declined and the early twenty-first century seems to be faced with a new threat: global subsistence crises. In this essay I question the concepts of famine and food crisis from different analytical angles: historical and contemporary famine research, food regime theory, and peasant studies. I will argue that only a more integrated historical framework of analysis can surpass dualistic interpretations grounded in Eurocentric modernization paradigms. This article successively debates historical and contemporary famine research, the contemporary food regime and the new global food crisis, the lessons from Europe's ‘grand escape’ from hunger, and the peasantry and ‘depeasantization’ as central analytical concepts. Dualistic histories of food and famine have been dominating developmentalist stories for too long. This essay shows how a blending of historical and contemporary famine research, food regime theory and new peasant studies can foster a more integrated perspective.     

‘i pray for the factory to continue earning money’: the familial factory regime of the ‘Sun’ food factory in Turkey

This paper explores the factory regime in the ‘Sun’ food processing factory in Turkey, drawing on participant observation in the factory, informal interviews with women workers and in-depth interviews with the managers of the factory’s ‘gherkin department’ in which I worked. This paper argues that the ‘Sun’ bottling and canning factory is best understood through my concept of the ‘familial factory regime’. By ‘familial factory regime’ I mean a factory regime in which the features of the extended patriarchal family are used to manage the labour force by obtaining women workers’ consent. Indeed, the paper suggests that there is a tendency for patriarchy to be reconstituted in the workplace through the presence of a familial factory regime.     

The debate on food sovereignty theory: agrarian capitalism,dispossession and agroecology

This contribution reviews recent critiques of the food sovereignty framework. In particular it engages with the debate between Henry Bernstein and Philip McMichael and analyzes their different conceptualizations of agrarian capitalism. It critically identifies tendencies in food sovereignty approaches to assume a food regime crisis, to one-sidedly emphasize accumulation by dispossession and enclosure and thereby to overlook the importance of expanded reproduction, and to espouse a romantic optimism about farmer-driven agroecological knowledge which is devoid of modern science. Alternatives to current modernization trajectories cannot simply return to the peasant past and to the local. Instead, they need to recognize the desires of farmers to be incorporated into larger commodity networks, the importance of industrialization and complex chains for feeding the world population, and the support of state and science, as well as social movements, for realizing a food sovereign alternative.     

Fuel,feed and the corporate restructuring of the food regime

The agrofuel boom has brought about some of the most significant transformations in the world food system in recent decades. A rich and diverse body of agrarian political economy research has emerged that elucidates the conflicts and redistributional shifts engendered by these transformations. However, less attention has been given to differences within agri-food capital. This paper contributes to the existing literature on agrofuels, by showing how one cluster of agri-food corporations and farmers within the US has benefited from soaring ethanol production at the expense of another cluster. More specifically, I delineate and chart the pecuniary trajectories of two corporate-led distributional coalitions that have vied over the course taken by the US ethanol sector: the ‘Agro-Trader nexus’ and the ‘Animal Processor nexus’. My main finding is that the US ethanol boom has been a vector of redistribution: increasing the earnings of the Agro-Trader nexus and corn growers while reducing the earnings of the Animal Processor nexus and livestock farmers. This finding points to the limits and contradictions of agrofuels capitalism and the acute tensions that exist at the heart of the corporate food regime.     

The problem of property in industrial fisheries

Fisheries systems are widely considered to be ‘in crisis’ in both economic and ecological terms, a considerable concern given their global significance to food security, international trade and employment. The most common explanation for the crisis suggests that it is caused by weak and illiberal property regimes. It follows that correcting the crisis involves the creation of private property rights that will restore equilibrium between the profitable, productive function of fishing firms and fish stocks in order to maximize ‘rent’. In this approach, coastal states are seen as passive, weak, failed and/or corrupted observers and facilitators of the fisheries crisis, unless they institute private property relations. This paper offers an alternative analysis by using the perspective of historical materialism to re-examine longstanding debates over the problem of property and its relation to ground-rent in industrial fisheries. It identifies coastal states as modern landed property, enabling an exploration of the existence of and struggles over surplus value, and drawing attention to the role of the state and the significance of the environmental conditions of production in understanding political-ecological conditions in fisheries. As on land, property in the sea is a site of social struggle and will always remain so under capitalism, no matter which juridical interest holds the property rights.     

Book Reviews

Food sovereignty, as a counter-movement to the food regime, includes a range of struggles, and is evidently quite elastic as a discourse and practice. Because the food regime itself is evolving and restructuring, food sovereignty embodies movement. In its ‘second generation’ phase it operates on both rural and urban fronts, separately and together, connecting producers, workers, consumers and various activist organizations. Nevertheless, it is important to recognize food sovereignty's origins in the global agrarian crisis of the last three decades. Small producers (peasants, farmers, pastoralists, fishers, forest-dwellers) continue to experience massive displacement by World Trade Organization (WTO)-style ‘free trade’, overlaid with new displacements by fiat, force and finance as land grabbing in various forms proceeds apace. This is a key theme in a response to Henry Bernstein's questions about the character of the food sovereignty movement.     

Disappearing nature? Agribusiness,biotechnology and distance in Argentine soybean production

A recent trend identified in the agro-food literature is that financialization in the global food system is further increasing the distance between farm and plate as well as abstracting physical commodities into market derivatives. How does food, a basic material need, become a commodity, a financial asset divorced from its physical form? This contribution explores the growing distance and abstraction of food from farm using Argentina's soy model as a case study. I explore the various drivers of distancing across the soy value chain in Argentina, including industrialization, globalization, corporatization and finance. I argue that the push for technological innovation by large-scale agribusinesses, in articulation with financial sector involvement, are both an example of and are instrumental in the process of distancing and abstraction identified in the agro-food literature. This paper also highlights how, despite agribusiness efforts to ‘displace’ and ‘disappear’ nature, these processes are never fully accomplished. I thus reflect on the socio-ecological contradictions that arise from the processes of distancing and abstraction which accompany the financialization of the corporate food system under neoliberal globalization.     

Power and dispossession in the neoliberal food regime: oil palm expansion in Guatemala

ABSTRACT

Guatemala’s palm oil production has surged in line with the global demand for biodiesel and vegetable oil production. While corporate land grabs have been a popular concept in agrarian studies, we emphasize the integral roles of the state and racially-charged political power relations, enhanced by the neoliberal food regime. These power relations, with racism at their core, foster land control grabs occurring alongside the rise of the palm oil industry. Their effects extend beyond merely the dispossession of land. The oil palm expansion and related dispossessions mostly benefit the international markets and the wealthy ruling class comprised of creole descendants and affluent ladinos. The soaring industry has given rise to human rights violations and a lack of access to or control of various resources, such as food and water. Based on fieldwork, we show that dispossessed Guatemalans, especially the indigenous, experience rising poverty, domestic food shortages and an influx of foreign foodstuffs as the meagrely paid work in the oil palm sector is only available for the few.     

Land grabbing and the making of an authoritarian populist regime in Hungary

ABSTRACT

How do authoritarian populist regimes emerge within the European Union in the twenty-first century? In Hungary, land grabbing by oligarchs have been one of the pillars maintaining Prime Minister Orbán’s regime. The phenomenon remains out of the public purview and meets little resistance as the regime-controlled media keeps Hungarians ‘distracted’ with ‘dangers’ inflicted by the ‘enemies of the Hungarian people’ such as refugees and the European Union. The Hungarian case calls for scholarly-activist attention to how authoritarian populism is maintained by, and affects rural areas, as well as how emancipation can be envisaged in such a context.     

Stealing into the wild: conservation science,plant breeding and the makings of new seed enclosures

Faced with pressing climatic changes, scientific and industrial interests are vying to develop crops that can survive drought, floods and shifting pest regimes. Increasingly, they look for solutions in an unlikely place: the gene pools of wild plants. Crop wild relatives (CWR) – species closely related to crops, including their ancestors – offer breeders the allure of retracing the domestication bottleneck, infusing genomes of modern crops with ‘lost’ genetic variety. Yet wild relatives also confront threats from climate change, urbanization and expansion of industrial agri-food. Thus, CWR, seen as both salvational and threatened, have become an international conservation and food-security priority. It is my contention that, in their common project to harness wild-relative potential, conservation and breeding science are co-evolving to extend seed commodity relations into new spheres. I examine enclosures along two fronts: first within ‘systematic CWR conservation’, where ‘in situ’ approaches, typically regarded as empowering and sustainable alternatives to ‘ex situ’, instead may support a complementary system of value extraction; second, in breeding and biotechnology research, which produces new value for CWR while profoundly shaping upstream conservation priorities. An important finding is that although today’s ‘ex situ-centric’ complementarity favors dispossession, an ‘in situ-centric’ approach could foster democratic renewal of biocultural diversity.