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.

https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/pdf/10.1080/03066150902820354

A food regime genealogy.

The contributions to this collection use the tools of agrarian political economy to explore the rapid growth and complex dynamics of large-scale land deals in recent years, with a special focus on the implications of big land deals for property and labour regimes, labour processes and structures of accumulation. The first part of this introductory essay examines the implications of this agrarian political economy perspective. First we explore the continuities and contrasts between historical and contemporary land grabs, before examining the core underlying debate around large- versus small-scale farming futures. Next, we unpack the diverse contexts and causes of land grabbing today, highlighting six overlapping mechanisms. The following section turns to assessing the crisis narratives that frame the justifications for land deals, and the flaws in the argument around there being excess, empty or idle land available. Next the paper turns to an examination of the impacts of land deals, and the processes of inclusion and exclusion at play, before looking at patterns of resistance and constructions of alternatives. The final section introduces the papers in the collection.

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The new enclosures: critical perspectives on corporate land deals

This essay, in two parts, argues for the centrality of historical thinking in coming to grips with capitalism’s planetary crises of the twenty-first century. Against the Anthropocene’s shallow hist...

The Capitalocene, Part I: on the nature and origins of our ecological crisis

‘Land grab’ has become a catch-all phrase to refer to the current explosion of (trans)national commercial land transactions mainly revolving around the production and export of food, animal feed, biofuels, timber and minerals. Two key dimensions of the current land grab – namely, the politics of changes in land use and property relations change (and the links between them) – are not sufficiently explored in the current literature.We attempt to address this gap by offering a preliminary analysis through an analytical approach that suggests some typologies as a step towards a fuller and better understanding of the politics of global land grabbing.

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Global Land Grabbing and Trajectories of Agrarian Change: A Preliminary Analysis

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.

Food crises, food regimes and food movements: rumblings of reform or tides of transformation?

This paper explores the role of agriculture in the development of the capitalist world economy, and in the trajectory of the state system. At present, when food security and foreign debt command policy attention, it is useful to examine the assumptions behind attempts to build up national agricultures in Third World countries. We maintain that these assumptions, when considered from a world-historical perspective, have certain shortcomings in theory and real obstacles in practice. Our argument is that contrary to the prevailing development model of the ideal national economy in which agriculture and industry complement one another dynamically (Rostow 1960; Johnston & Kilby 1975; Senghaas 1988), the historical relations between 'agriculture' and 'industry' have been rather more fluid and global in scope. The very distinction between advanced capitalist and underdeveloped or peripheral economies assumes that the former, in contrast to the latter, are articulated, that is, the main growth dynamic derives from intersectoral exchanges within the national economy (Amin 1974; de Janvry 1981). We argue, however, that this unexamined assumption applies possibly to one nation-state only, and then only for a brief historical period in a context of growing transnational capital movement that has increasingly precluded the model's extension to other countries. This case is the United States, in which agriculture was a source of demand for domestic industry during the period of protectionism accompanying late nineteenth century British hegemony and its decline through to the end of the Second World War. Yet even then US agriculture was principally export-oriented. The ideal of national inter-sectoral balance nevertheless stems from this historical conjuncture, and gained currency with the rise of American hegemony and the proliferation of modernization and dependency theories that generalized the American model. Our goal, then, is to reconstruct a preliminary history of agriculture to shed light on its impact on the state system, and thereby to offer a critique

Harriet Friedma

Papers

AGRICULTURE AND THE STATE SYSTEM: The rise and decline of national agricultures, 1870 to the present