The Vanishing Free Market: The Formation and Spread of the British and US Food Regimes

In this paper, I compare the formation of food regimes during British and US hegemony, which were mirror-images in terms of the degree of free trade and state regulation as well as the direction of trade flow of grains. Many scholars recognize that the foundation for each regime was laid by the national policy and dominant political coalition in the world-economic hegemon, but my analysis pays particular attention to the divisions and coalitions within agriculture as forces that drove the shape of each regime. Though important agricultural divisions existed in each case, the political power of the resulting agricultural coalitions – and those coalitions' relations to the nation's dominant coalition – are central to understanding the formation and spread of each food regime.     

Patterns of world wheat trade, 1945–2010: The long hangover from the second food regime

Food regime analysis is concerned with interpreting possibilities and conflicts inherent to the 21st‐century food system in historical terms. This paper summarizes the theoretical discussion of the food regime method, and of the identification of different “food regime periods” throughout modern history. While it is widely accepted that the so‐called “second food regime” has already ended, there is much discussion on whether or not it is possible to talk about a more recent third food regime. This paper traces the evolution of the “wheat complex” over the “second food regime” (1947–1973) and over the next 45 years, and offers an explanation for the evolution of world wheat trade distribution, based on food regime analysis. Certain authors have claimed that the collapse of the WTO Doha round of negotiations may be understood as a “hangover” from the second food regime. Similarly, this paper argues that the increasing wheat dependence of poor and insecure countries over the past 40 years may be considered as a path dependence outcome of a process initiated during the second food regime.     

The maize frontier in rural South India: Exploring the everyday dynamics of the contemporary food regime

This contribution explores how new regions and crops are integrated in the contemporary food regime through a fieldwork‐based approach to maize cultivation in rural Karnataka, South India. As an intrinsic part of the industrial grain–oilseed–livestock complex, maize is an important component of the contemporary food regime. I argue that the expansion of maize at the village level follows commodity frontier dynamics, located at the conjuncture of processes “from above” pushing the industrial grain–oilseed–complex forward and processes “from below” that integrate maize in everyday livelihoods. Focusing on how villagers make use of maize in ways that cross, but simultaneously are differentiated along, lines of class and caste, this article seeks to contribute to our understanding of the everyday dynamics of contemporary food regime.     

China's financialized soybeans: The fault lines of neomercantilism narratives in international food regime analyses

Neomercantilism is commonly portrayed as a central mechanism of China's global agribusiness engagement. It implies reordering the international food regime by moving away from financial and trade liberalization and securing stable import supplies and price controls under state support. However, this article raises an alternative interpretation through an empirical-rich investigation of the prominence of the state-owned China Oil and Foodstuffs Corporation (COFCO) in the soybean commodity chain. The article draws upon analyses of the Chinese state and international food regime to demonstrate that recent changes in state-capital relations during the Xi Jinping administration propelled forms of capital accumulation based on financial speculation and shareholder values. I conclude that state-driven internationalization has placed Chinese agribusiness in an advantageous position within global finance rather than challenging it through agrarian neomercantilist strategies.     

Poisoned,Dispossessed and Excluded: A Critique of the Neoliberal Soy Regime in Paraguay

This paper challenges the recent hailing of agricultural biotechnology as a panacea for food insecurity and rural poverty in countries of the global South. Based on an empirical investigation of the neoliberal soy regime in Paraguay, I document how the profound transformation of this country's agricultural mode of production over the past two decades, spurred by the neoliberal restructuring of agriculture and the biorevolution, has jeopardized rural livelihoods. In particular, I demonstrate how the transgenic soyization of Paraguay's agriculture has led to an increased concentration of landholdings, as well as the displacement and disempowerment of peasants and rural labourers who have been rendered surplus to the requirements of agribusiness capital. At the same time, the consolidation of this new agro‐industrial model has fostered a growing dependence on agrochemicals that compromise environmental quality and human health. Thus, I argue, a development policy based on industrial monocropping of genetically modified (GM) soy is inappropriate, unsustainable and unethical.     

Global Capitalism and the Nation State in the Struggles over GM Crops in Brazil

The introduction of biotechnology is part of a global process of structural change in agriculture characterized by an increased integration of world agriculture with high corporate control. However, as the legal competence to allow the planting and trade of genetically modified (GM) crops commonly lies at the level of the nation state, this remains strategic in the politics of GM crops, both for actors promoting the technology and for social movements struggling against it. This paper illustrates this argument with an analysis of the struggles over GM crops in Brazil. It shows how the implementation of a food regime based on biotechnology, corporate control and neoliberal globalism depended on the state and was a contested process.     

The food regime in late colonial Philippines: Pathways of appropriation and unpaid work

I argue that food regimes need to take into account the production relations of paid and unpaid work. As an angle of vision, I use the historical geography of late colonial Philippines (1901–1941) to show how paid and unpaid work in food production was not discrete and separated processes but rather conjoined moments of capital accumulation. The colonial regime—in this context, American colonial government, U.S. agribusinesses, and Filipino landed elites—utilized state power, customary land relations, and commodity‐specific characteristics to appropriate vast amounts of unpaid work from agrarian classes of Philippine labour and draft animals towards the exploitation of commodified labour power. These processes not only produced considerable quantities of coconut and sugar products that were exported to the American consumer market, sold at cheaper prices, and contributed to the profitability of U.S. agribusiness elites but also allowed the colonial regime to efficiently expand commodity production across the islands. The more the American capitalists and Philippine elites invested in Philippine agriculture, the more they appropriated unpaid work from the agrarian classes of labour.     

The winding paths of peripheral proletarianization: Local labour,world hegemonies,and crisis in rural Colombia

This paper analyses the spatial and temporal patterning of Colombia's rural coffee, banana, and coca‐producing labour regimes. The violent labour repression and endemic crises of labour control characterizing these regimes challenge the market despotism paradigm that predominates in scholarly analysis of 21st century labour and agrarian struggles. Instead, I draw from early and later writings of Giovanni Arrighi and his collaborators to develop a new labour regime framework that is sensitive to the experiences of capitalist development in “hostile environments” (i.e., peripheral market conditions) and “hostile times” (periods of world hegemonic decline). In doing so, I highlight the deep social contradictions—crises, violence, and labour militancy—that result from processes of peripheral proletarianization and the ways that these contradictions were mitigated and/or exacerbated by the rise of U.S. global hegemony, Colombian developmental policy, and local agrarian struggle.     

Food Regime Analysis in a Post‐Neoliberal Era: Argentina and the Expansion of Transgenic Soybeans

This paper uses the food regime literature to analyse the political and economic relations promoting the expansion of soybeans in Argentina following the post‐neoliberal turn in the early 2000s. Continuities of the agrarian expansion from the neoliberal to post‐neoliberal model highlight the state's role in supporting a neoliberal food regime. Neoregulation in the post‐neoliberal agenda continues to favour increased production of transgenic food over ecological and human‐health considerations. Moreover, the emergence of new corporate and transnational actors has contributed to a new form of corporate‐agrarian governance premised on biotechnology. First, a food regime lens is used to describe the expansion of transgenic soybeans in Argentina, followed by an analysis of planning documents to show the state's position in reproducing neoliberal discourses and policies favouring the expansion of agriculture. The conclusion discusses the utility of food regime analysis for explaining the new forms of agricultural governance in Argentina.     

The transition to conservation agriculture: an insularization process towards sustainability

Part of the Sustainability Transition Studies, this work addresses the question of the relationship between niches and regimes by examining the transition to conservation agriculture. It seeks to understand how farmers’ transition to conservation agriculture can contribute to a better understanding of the transition of agro-food systems towards sustainability. Based on an analysis of farmers’ trajectories in the Walloon region in Belgium, the paper develops the notion of insularization in order to characterize the emergence of conservation agriculture as a niche that is a dynamic process, growing from within and progressively detaching itself from the conventional agricultural regime. The analysis of farmers’ transition shows how, after an initial phase of destabilization of the conventional ploughing regime, learning and experiencing processes can lead to a transformation in soil and soil quality management perceptions. Our hypothesis is that this cognitive transformation constitutes a tipping point in the insularization process because of its effects on agricultural practices, which increase the detachment of conservation agriculture from the regime and thus embed the irreversibility and sustainability of the transition. Insularization describes an ecologizational pathway of agricultural practices endogenous to the regime that can not only lead to adaptive changes on the periphery of the system, but might also induce a deep and systemic transformation of conventional agricultural practices.     

The hidden edifice of (food) sovereignty: Rights,territory, and the struggle for agrarian reform in Venezuela

This article seeks to make a critical contribution to the “sovereignty problem” in food sovereignty (FS) studies. Contemporary scholarship has largely struggled to answer the question of who or what is sovereign within the realm of FS politics—underpinned by the relocalisation of agrarian production, sustainable nature–society relations, and a radical democratisation of food systems. Although the most recent scholarship has made significant progress on this issue, I offer an alternative historical materialist account of sovereignty understood as the combination of rights and territory. From a critical Marxian perspective, I deconstruct the basis of sovereign power as the intersection between social property rights (exploitation) and territorial governance (political technology) congealed within both capital and the state. This approach thus provides some clarity as to the necessary breaks required to establish an FS regime (self‐directed labour and cooperative territorial governance). The framework is then applied to the case of Bolivarian Venezuela. While witnessing some important achievements, Venezuela's FS experiment has encountered a number of contradictions. As this case study shows, peasant struggles aiming to retake control over production and establish cooperative forms of governance must traverse the entire terrain of the state and thus affect a broader socialisation of society's sociopolitical infrastructures.     

Linking the defence of territory to food sovereignty: Peasant environmentalisms and extractive neoliberalism in Guatemala

Food sovereignty and the defence of territory are increasingly influential environmental paradigms for rural social movements in opposition to free market hegemony in the global south. These paradigms propose radical alternatives to growth based economies, unequal property regimes, and the absolute territorial sovereignty of nation states. Drawing on fieldwork in rural Guatemala with progressive NGOs and social movements, this essay describes these tendencies' origins and characteristic discourses and demands, examines their links to traditional peasant politics and indigenous rights movements, and assesses their divergences, limitations, and possibilities for synergy. Building on Joan Martínez‐Alier' conception of the “environmentalism of the poor”, I show how these “peasant environmentalisms” converge and reinforce one another while responding to different aspects of neoliberalism's threat to lives, livelihoods, and territories during Guatemala's conflict‐ridden transition to neoliberal democracy. I also discuss how their convergence has expanded thinking about territorial alternatives and suggest that holding these paradigms in tension is vital to build broad coalitions among a fragmented peasantry. I propose food sovereignty as the economic model of the plurinational state.     

Chemical fertilizer in transformations in world agriculture and the state system, 1870 to interwar period

The role of fertilizer in spreading commercial agriculture during the first food regime (ca 1870 to the First World War) is well established. What is less understood is the role of fertilizer in industry at this time. This paper details superphosphate fertilizer, part of a class of chemical fertilizers that emerged in the metropoles from the 1870s, and its role in the transformations in world agriculture as well as in industry. Superphosphate fertilizer was not just for the soil. The manufacture of superphosphates also provided a base for the growth of chemical industries. This growth was constitutive of industrial transformations in imperial states—the second industrial revolution—in which mass production units became integrated through a handful of chemicals. One of these chemicals is sulphuric acid, of which superphosphates require large amounts in their manufacture. As the main market for sulphuric acid through the interwar period, superphosphate manufacturing created synergies with other industries and thus made sulphuric acid cheaper. By connecting the manufacturing centres of fertilizer to the multiple farming regions undergoing accelerated commodity production, this study shows that the first food regime and the second industrial revolution were mutually constitutive moments to explain transformations in agriculture and the state system in the long 19th century.     

The Food Stamp Program and Food Insufficiency

Food stamp participants have higher food insufficiency rates than eligible nonparticipants, even after controlling for other factors. Given the Food Stamp Program's prominent role in the alleviation of hunger, this is a counterintuitive result. We conjecture that these higher rates are due to adverse selection insofar as households more likely to be food insufficient are also more likely to receive food stamps. We establish a theoretical framework to address this adverse selection. Using a simultaneous equation model with two probits, we show that once one controls for this adverse selection, food stamp recipients have the same probability of food insufficiency as nonrecipients.     

The Food Crisis,Industrialized Farming and the Imperial Regime

This paper argues that the food crisis cannot solely be equated with abrupt food price increases or seen as merely market induced. The unprecedented price increases of the first half of 2008, and the extremely low prices that followed, are expressions of a far wider and far more persistent underlying crisis, which has been germinating for more than a decade. It is the complex outcome of several combined processes, including the industrialization of agriculture, the liberalization of food and agricultural markets and the rise of food empires. The interaction of these processes has created a global agrarian crisis that has provoked the multifaceted food crisis. Both these crises are being accelerated through their interactions with the wider economic and financial crisis.     

What socioenvironmental impacts did 35 years of export agriculture have in Mexico? (1980–2014): A transnational agri‐food field analysis

In this article, I propose to study environmental degradation and the deterioration of the health of workers and other inhabitants in regions of Mexico where intensive fruit and vegetable production for export has been developed. My proposition is that to understand the unsustainability of such agricultural practices in all their complexity, it is necessary to analyse historically the total agri‐food field of relations established by producers, distributors, and consumers in codependency with the natural environment. This analysis of the agri‐food field allows a multidimensional and multiscale study to be conducted of the hierarchical distribution of power and of economic benefits among the different social actors of the food system. This analysis also allowed us to study the development of the capitalist regime without going into the dichotomy of centre and periphery and to propose that it is a decentralized process with a multiplicity of locations that operates on the basis of mutual associations and influences between human and non‐human elements, with the active participation of a great variety of independent, collective, and institutional actors who have differentiated motivations, ranges of power and scales of value. The case study of Mexican export agriculture was the result of long‐term research based on a wide review of regional studies, field work statistics, and archives in Mexico and the United States. This cross‐border study makes it possible to identify asymmetrical transnational relations in a context in which the Mexican government has renounced its territorial and agri‐food sovereignty and Mexican consumers face greater vulnerability.     

Reforms,globalization, and endogenous agricultural structures

In this article, I draw lessons from two quasi‐natural experiments (the transition process in former Communist countries and the rapid globalization of food chains) on the optimality of farms and agricultural structures more generally. I argue that (a) the farm structures that have emerged from the transition process are much more diverse than expected ex ante; (b) this diversity is to an important extent determined by economic mechanisms which are influenced by initial conditions and reform policies; (c) non‐traditional farm structures have played an important role during transition because they were optimal to address the specific institutional and structural constraints imposed by the transition process; (d) there is more diversity than often argued in the farms that are integrated in global food chains; (e) endogenous institutional (contracting) innovations in food chains may lock existing farm structures in a long‐run institutional framework; and (f) indicators based on farm structures are not a good measure of welfare effects of the globalization of food chains.     

Moral Hazard, Inspection Policy, and Food Safety

Buyers have imperfect information about the food safety efforts exerted by suppliers. To gather information about safety, buyers often employ sampling inspection. Sampling inspection exhibits sampling error so some unsafe product passes inspection and some safe product does not. This uncertainty influences buyer and supplier behavior. In this article, I use a principal–agent model to examine how sampling inspection policies influence food safety. I use the model to examine the sampling inspection policies in the 1996 Pathogen Reduction/Hazard Analysis Critical Control Point Act. I conclude that the regulation of sampling inspection procedures is an effective tool for policy makers who wish to improve food safety.     

Regime switching and oligopsony power: the case of U.S. beef processing

In this article, we estimate a model of oligopsony behavior under imperfect monitoring of rival actions to analyze weekly marketing margin data for the U.S. beef packing industry. Oligopsonists are hypothesized to follow a discontinuous pricing strategy in equilibrium, and we focus on shocks in the normal throughput of supply as a potential catalyst for regime switching between cooperative and noncooperative phases. We adopt an algorithm developed by Bellone (2005) that relies on Hamilton’s (1989) multivariate first‐order Markov process to test for the cooperative/noncooperative switching behavior. We find strong evidence that links switching conduct by packers to disruptions in coordinating the derived demands for processed beef with the supply of live cattle. Once switched, cooperative regimes lasted an average of 21 weeks, while noncooperative regimes averaged 33 weeks. The average marketing margin for processed beef was 68% lower in the noncooperative regimes compared to the cooperative regimes. This led to an annual average increase in profits of 408 million dollars to the beef packing industry and about an 8–9% reduction in live cattle prices.