Introduction to the special symposium: reflecting on twenty years of the food regimes approach in agri-food studies

Abstract

Background to the symposiumTwenty years ago, Harriet Friedmann and PhilipMcMichael published a highly original, influential and—subsequently—controversial article: ‘Agriculture and thestate system: the rise and fall of national agricultures, 1870to the present’ (Friedmann and McMichael 1989). Over thefollowing years, both Friedmann and McMichael, alongwith other collaborators, further developed their insights,challenging agri-food scholars with a new way of framingagri-food power relations as well as providing an approachfor agricultural research and policy analysis that movedfood from the periphery to the centre of wider theoriesabout society and interpretations of the history ofcapitalism.Through the early 1990s, their argument and its signif-icance—described more fully below—gave rise to numer-ous attempts to both validate and extend their theory andposition before a strong critique of the food regimesapproach in the mid-90s dented the ambitions of food-regime scholars to some degree (Goodman and Watts1994). Until the mid-2000s, the food regimes approach wasa typically muted current of thought in agricultural politicaleconomy, before a resurgence of interest in its value coa-lesced around a set of panels at the 2007 joint meetings ofthe AFHVS and the ASFS in Victoria, Canada.One of the editors of this Symposium proposed that thefood regimes progenitors join a panel of other agri-foodscholars to debate the contemporary relevance and pro-ductivity of the food regimes perspective. Back-to-backpanels on ‘Updating Food Regime Analysis for the 21stCentury’ drew a large and engaged audience. Presentationswere provided by Farshad Araghi and Philip McMichaelfrom the US; David Burch, Geoffrey Lawrence, and JaneDixon from Australia; Hugh Campbell from NZ; andHarriet Friedmann from Canada. (In this issue, Le Heronand Lewis’s commentary explores the preponderance ofcontributors from the Antipodes and/or ‘settler states’.) Thepapers included critical reflections on the original contri-butions of food regime analysis combined with new for-mulations that included questions concerning value andecological relations, cultural politics, nutritional knowl-edge and dimensions, and the transformation of corporateand institutional power relationships in an era of neo-lib-eral globalization and financialization.On the strength of the response to these panels, whichindicated renewed interest in food regimes analysis, thepresenters decided to develop a symposium for Agricultureand Human Values to mark the 20th anniversary of the keyFriedmann and McMichael (1989) article. The purpose ofthis Symposium is to rework the papers from the Victoriasessions (along with a contribution by Bill Pritchard andcommentary by Richard Le Heron and Nick Lewis) with thefollowing goals in mind: (1) to situate food regime analysisas a significant contribution to understanding capitalistmodernity—including its changing forms of accumulation,power relationships, value relations and institutional orga-nization on a world scale; (2) to emphasize therefore thecentrality of food relations (such as global divisions oflabor, nutritional and dietary regimens, and differentiatedconsumption patterns) to understanding the ordering and