The Rise and Demise of the ‘Third’ or ‘Political Productivist’ Food Regime (1930s–1980s)

Abstract

Following the First World War, the USA began to emerge as the hegemonic capitalist power globally, a position which it was to attain unambiguously by the end of the Second World War. In this latter post-war period, the dynamics of US domestic agricultural class fractional politics came to exert a dominant influence on food policy worldwide, just as British capitalist class fractions had exerted an overwhelming influence on the parameters of the ‘Liberal’ food regime of the previous century. The majority of US agricultural commodity producers developed, from the 1930s, a concern to protect their enterprises from falling prices and began, therefore, to call for active intervention by the state. Agricultural producers in the USA were, however, competitive in the world economy, and in contrast to their counterparts in early nineteenth-century Britain did not, therefore, seek protection from overseas competition. Rather, these agricultural class fractions, especially those engaged in the corn, wheat, and cotton sectors, sought protection from the ‘free play’ of ‘market forces’, in this case, the tendency for capitalism to encounter (another) crisis of over-production (over-accumulation). Over-production and the resumption of freer trade regimes following the First World War began to depress agricultural prices in the 1920s, a trend which continued into the 1930s (Winders, J Agrar Chang 9(3):315–344, 2009). Class fractions of US agriculture, by contrast to their British forebears in the pre-Liberal era of the nineteenth century, were sufficiently powerful and competitive to influence national policy and, consequently, to mould the form of the post–Second World War food regime, particularly, to conform to their interests. These class fractions strove for the national regulation and support of agriculture, and subsequently, for the creation of international food aid as a means of alleviating over-supply. Nonetheless, this was not necessarily unitary class fractional advocacy; divisions as much as alliances existed within the agriculture sector, shaping US agricultural policy and the international food regime that was to arise from this (Tilzey, Int J Sociol Agric Food 14(1):1–28, 2006). There was, then, no single capitalist interest position that then translated automatically into US policy, as Friedmann and McMichael (Sociol Rural 29(2):93–117, 1989) seem to suggest. Rather, this was an agential process of negotiation, contestation, and co-optation.