A food regime genealogy

Abstract

Food regime analysis emerged to explain the strategic role of agriculture and food in the construction of the world capitalist economy. It identifies stable periods of capital accumulation associated with particular configurations of geopolitical power, conditioned by forms of agricultural production and consumption relations within and across national spaces. Contradictory relations within food regimes produce crisis, transformation, and transition to successor regimes. This 'genealogy' traces the development of food regime analysis in relation to historical and intellectual trends over the past two decades, arguing that food regime analysis underlines agriculture's foundational role in political economy/ecology.

A Transnational Agri-Food System for Whom? The Struggle for Hegemony at Rio+20

“…Thus, addressing this complexity is vital if we are to ensure sustainability and equity (McMichael, 2009), particularly over time. Conversely, failing to account for the complexity of social-ecological systems, and simplifying them inappropriately can lead to sub-optimal or perverse outcomes (Holling & Meffe, 1996).…”

“…On the one hand, the UN's Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO, 2012) as well as other inter-governmental agencies and some NGOs claim that corporate involvement in the food system is essential to meeting current and future challenges to the food system. On the other hand, others are dismayed by the role played by large, multinational agri-food corporations in rural displacement and in the dismantling of small-scale, nonindustrialized agriculture (McMichael, 2009). In response to this negative aspect, some civil society actors have advocated reduced corporate control over the food system, claiming that this will lead to more democratic and equitable outcomes (Bauer & Mesquita, 2008).…”

Toward thick legitimacy: Creating a web of legitimacy for agroecology

“…The food regimes literature (e.g., Friedmann and McMichael, 1989;McMichael, 2009) underscores the power of international trade and world markets in legitimating industrial food in many regions since the 1940s. Governments and firms first used trade rules to 'modernize' agricultural production in countries of the global South (the 'development project'), and later greased the rise of transnational companies, new international divisions of labor, export-led development, and relatively standardized conditions of production and consumption (the 'globalization project').…”

Getting to know your food: the insights of indigenous thinking in food provenance

“…Our focus on provenance can be seen as related to Food Regime Theory and the Food Sovereignty Movement; provenance is, after all, an outcome of the dialectical tension between the globalized food industry and an increasing demand for localization, sustainable production, and ethical operation (Friedmann and McMichael, 1989;Le Heron, 2002;Campbell, 2009;McMichael, 2009). However, from an indigenous perspective, we consider it unlikely that attempts at food provenancing will address Western anxiety and alienation.…”

“…Through connecting consumers to place, provenancing addresses an anxiety experienced by many Western consumers to the growing physical and psychological abstraction from nature and each other and the resulting ethical and environmental crises that this abstraction has facilitated (Taylor, 1991;Campbell, 2009) Further, it is a mechanism for revealing to those consumers the relationships underlying the formation of commodities that are usually obscured, in what Marx would refer to as commodity fetishism (Marx, 1990;Hornborg, 2014). In short, provenance is means of revealing and restoring relationships with the wider world for those alienated by modernity as it helps turn 'food from nowhere' into 'food from somewhere ' (McMichael, 2005;McMichael, 2009). …”