We undertake a comparative investigation of how neoliberal restructuring characterizes the third food regime in the three North American countries. By contrasting the experience of the two developed countries of the United States and Canada with that of the developing country of Mexico, we shine some empirical light on the differential impact of neoliberal regulatory restructuring on the division of labor in agriculture within the North American Free Trade Agreement region. In particular, we investigate these countries' agricultural production markets, trade, and food vulnerability-with an emphasis on Mexico-as analytical points for comparing and contrasting their experience with this neoliberal restructuring. We start with a synthesis of food-regime theory and outline the key features of what we call the "neoliberal food regime." We then discuss our case-study countries in terms of food vulnerability and resistance in Mexico, their differential relationships to trade liberalization, and what these trends might mean for the evolution of the neoliberal food regime. We conclude that, while dominant trends are ominous, there is room for an alternative trajectory and consequent reshaping of the emerging regime: sufficient bottom-up social resistance, primarily at the level of the nation-state, may yet produce an alternative trajectory.

The agricultural sector is currently being shaped by two powerful dynamics as many nations reorganise their national agriculture according to free trade and other supranational agreements while new agricultural biotechnologies are increasingly adopted. This interrelationship between regulatory change and genetic engineering appears set to form the basis of a new food regime. In this article, we compare the role of national and international regulations relating to the technology, and the impact of local resistance to it, in the advanced capitalist countries of Canada and the USA and the developing country of Mexico. Similar to food regime perspectives, our study concludes that neoliberal regulatory reorganisation is an important component of the evolving food regime. Further, Mexico bore the brunt of the technology's negative social impacts, demonstrating how it exacerbates existing inequalities between developed and developing nations. Resistance movements in the country have been sufficient to call into question the inevitability of a homogenous reorganisation of agriculture, however. Evidence suggests that such resistance could modify, or even derail, this technology's role in individual nations, and consequently, in the unfolding food regime as a whole.O ne of the chief features of post World War II agriculture was its nationcentredness. Yet agriculture has a strong history in global trade, despite the counter appearances raised by its contentiousness in WTO negotiations at the turn of the twenty-first century. A more novel aspect of agriculture's position in international trade, however, is its thorough incorporation under supranational trade agreements and national neo-regulation initiatives, spurred by the ideology of neoliberal globalism. The resulting regulatory dynamic is accompanied by the implementation of new agricultural biotechnologies, which are being adopted at a dramatic rate. While it is still too early to be assured of the stability of the technology's growth, particularly given the setbacks that have already occurred, biotechnology has nonetheless provided significant empirical indications that it could be transformative for capitalised agriculture (Otero and Pechlaner 2005;Otero 2008). Facilitated by the evolving regulatory structures, agricultural biotechnology could, in fact, form the basis of a new food regime.As conceptualised by Harriet Friedmann and Phillip McMichael (Friedmann and McMichael 1989;Friedmann 1992Friedmann , 1993), a 'food regime' is a temporally specific

This article critiques the notion of food security through trade promoted by suprastate organizations like the United Nations Food and Agriculture Organization, the World Bank, and the World Trade Organization. We use and refine the food‐regime perspective to contest this unwritten rule of the neoliberal food regime. Rather than “mutual dependency” in food between “North” and “South,” as argued by Philip McMichael, however, we show that food dependency has been stronger on basic foods in developing countries, while advanced capitalist countries' dependency has been mostly on luxury foods. Also, the more that developing countries become dependent on food imports and exports, the more they will be importing the “world food price” for the relevant commodities. Food‐price inflation will more adversely affect their working classes, which spend larger shares of their household budgets on food. Our empirical focus is on food dependency in emerging nations—Brazil, China, India, Mexico, and Turkey—in comparison with long‐standing agricultural exporting powerhouses, the United States and Canada. Using longitudinal data from FAOSTAT, we show that food security in the neoliberal food regime can best be characterized as “uneven and combined dependency.”

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In reviewing the so-called obesity "epidemic", we critique the individual-focused explanations that also lead to interventions at this level. Instead, we suggest a different possibility: that food choices are structurally conditioned by income inequality, first; and, second, that we eat what huge oligopolistic food producers and distributors have on offer, which is in turn shaped or facilitated by neoliberal state intervention. To highlight the relevance of structural factors, we develop an index that measures the risk of exposure to what we call the "neoliberal diet" for low-to-middle-income working classes. Using this index, we compare the United States and Canada, advanced capitalist countries that are also agro-export powerhouses, with a group of countries including the BRICs (Brazil, Russia, India, and China) plus Indonesia, Mexico, South Africa, and Turkey.We conclude that state interventions need to refocus on reducing social inequality and the social determinants of food production and distribution. Transcending individualistic and consumption approaches will help us appreciate that the state, not the individual consumer, is best positioned to implement change when it comes to food "choices" and food production.