Corporate Food Regime Research Articles

Resurgent diversity: upland agriculture, indigenous crops and foodways in Eastern Himalayas

ABSTRACT In this article, we are concerned with the cultivation of food crops – comparing trajectories of millets and buckwheat in Eastern Himalayas, and the circumstances under which farmers plant or forgo certain crops. Crop choices and how farmers cultivate their crops have far-reaching consequences for society, economy and the environment. With accelerating climate change, present global, corporate food regime based on a handful of genetically identical crops appears as a high-risk venture. For many Indigenous peoples alternatives to and negotiations with these regimes are commonly located in their traditions: the crops, foodways, and diversity-based agricultural systems of their ancestors even as a multitude of factors have conspired to their decline across the Eastern Himalayan Region. Yet, paradoxically, with climate change these crops, agriculture and knowledge systems seem to hold the future, especially for smallholder farmers.

Hunger in global war economies: understanding the decline and return of famines.

The resurgence of famines is a topic of concern. This paper explains the recent trajectory using the framework of contending 'global war economies'. It characterises the unipolar neoliberal world order era (1986-2015) as the 'Pax Americana' war economy, focusing on the United States dollar's roles. These were the decades of the liberal imperium, the corporate food regime, and counterinsurgent coalitions, which generated structural vulnerability to food crises and reduced the actual incidence and lethality of famine. The paper characterises the subsequent period (2016 onwards) as the challenge of the BRICS club, focusing on its efforts to rewrite the global political economy's rules, proactively hedging among diversifying currency regimes. This entails a scramble to secure strategic commodities and infrastructure in subaltern countries, which is intensifying conflict and food insecurity, and revising international norms in favour of reasserting sovereign rights. The global political-economic contestation and, especially, the associated normative regression are permissive of political and military triggers of famine.

Precarious foodscapes: life, caring, digitization, and labor in the face of deepening food crises

ABSTRACT In the face of deepening environmental and economic crises, the concept of precarity helps to draw out the grave problems that permeate contemporary foodscapes. In this special issue introduction, we lay the conceptual groundwork for connecting the concept of precarity with contemporary foodscapes by identifying four key sources of precarity within precarious foodscapes: life, caring, digitization, and labor. Life becomes a source of shared precarity with human and non-human life in the face of a destabilizing climactic and health ecologies. Caring becomes a source of precarity as food becomes intertwined with gendered food work and emotional labor. Digital information technologies become a source of precarity as discourses and ideas of food become destabilized and recreated by digital platforms, algorithms, and technologies. Labor becomes a source of precarity as the corporate food regime deepens its exploitation of compensated human labor, unpaid human labor, and non-human labor. This discussion contextualizes the articles that follow and aims to open up and invite further research on precarious foodscapes going forward.

Uneven decommodification geographies: Exploring variation across the centre and periphery

The Covid-19 pandemic has revealed significant variation in the scale and form of decommodification across the capitalist world economy. To explore these uneven decommodification geographies this article develops a new conceptual framework that combines a critical Polanyian reading of decommodification with Latin American insights into centre-periphery structures and relations. The decommodification of land and labour in Britain (centre) and Ecuador (periphery) are then analysed from this conceptual perspective. The comparative analysis reveals significant variation in the scale and form of decommodification between the two countries during the pandemic. However, some important similarities are also observed, especially in relation to the (de) commodification of land. Here, the article draws on the corporate food regime literature to better understand similarities and differences between Britain and Ecuador. By revealing the uneven and shifting terrain of decommodification, this article makes a novel contribution to wider debates about the capitalist conjuncture and the intensifying crises of neoliberal capitalism.

The corporate food regime and Lebanon: Machgara and adverse incorporation

ABSTRACT Despite low productivity in Lebanon’s agricultural economy, neglected for finance and service sectors, land and labor potential are very high. Literature on agrarian and food crises in Lebanon remains sparse in agrarian studies journals and retains a neoliberal developmentalist emphasis on food security rather than food sovereignty. Using the framework of food regime analysis, we analyze the historical developmental trajectory of the West-Beqaa village of Machgara, and how Lebanese family farmers are impacted by adverse incorporation into global capitalism. Placing farmer testimonies in the context of greater macro-historical chronologies, we see how reflections highlight patterns of commodification of land, labor and food.

A critical agrarian approach to food crises: Social distance as a specific food crisis arising from the COVID-19 pandemic in Japan

Covid-19 precipitated a food crisis that reconfigured food systems in unprecedented directions. While much research on Covid-19 and food crises focuses on food insecurity, we argue for a critical agrarian approach to food crises that extends beyond food insecurity. We emphasize how food crises enact disruptions that can lead to the reconfiguration of food systems. Further, we distinguish between specific crises that disrupt food systems from the general Crisis of the corporate food regime. This article draws on interviews with key actors to explore how changes to social distance in response to Covid-19 rippled through Japanese food systems as segments of Japanese food economies expanded, adjusted, and contracted. Although Japan avoided the harshest consequences of food insecurity arising from Covid-19, the pandemic reconfigured Japanese food systems in novel directions. This reconfiguration does not neatly correspond to the general Crisis of the corporate food regime because of the prominence of the hybrid zone and scalar politics of local food within Japanese food systems. We urge critical agrarian scholarship to closely examine the situated dynamics enacted by specific food crises, because such crises introduce key inflection points for reshaping food system trajectories.

The Rise of Asia-Pacific Agribusiness in the Global South—The Corporate Food Regime Under the Third Regionalism

Food regime theory asserts that the Global North has controlled food production chains since the 1800s, establishing a corporate food regime in the late 1980s. Through liberalization, Northern food corporations became powerful, leading the contemporary food regime and even replacing states. However, Global South corporations in the Asia-Pacific have grown to become important players in corporate food regimes. Through a literature review, content analysis, and interviews, this study leverages Third Regionalism as the theoretical approach to supplement the food regime theory, and explains how Third Regionalism featured free trade agreements established by Asia-Pacific countries, and how it supported the rapid rise of Southern food corporations. Regionalism helped Asia-Pacific Southern corporations become important figures in the contemporary corporate food regime, reinforcing the Global South’s food security and the livelihood sovereignty aspect of food sovereignty. The stances of Global South food sovereignty groups toward genetically modified crops are shifting and worthy of continued consideration.

Co-producing uncomfortable, transdisciplinary, actionable knowledges against the corporate food regime through critical science approaches.

The current corporate food regime generates some of the most challenging ecological, social, and ethical problems for humanity in its quest for sustainability and ecological justice. Different scientific disciplines have analyzed these problems in-depth, but usually from their comfort zone, i.e., without engagement with other disciplines and epistemologies. The predominance of disciplinary visions seriously limits, however, understanding the complexities of the corporate food regime, including the impacts it generates. Further, most research concerned with this food regime confronts epistemological, methodological, and political limitations to engage with the type of solutions that could lead to transitions to just sustainabilities. Here we review and integrate the findings from scientific literature focused on the ecological, social, or ethical impacts of the corporate food regime, with an emphasis on impacts that operate on a global scale. In addition, we analyze the need for critical science approaches to trigger generative processes for the co-production of uncomfortable, transdisciplinary, actionable knowledges that are fit for designing just and sustainable food regimes. Much of the evidence presented in our analysis is in tension with the interests of the corporate food regime, which fosters decision-making processes based on selective ignorance of the impacts caused by this regime. Our work provides arguments that justify the need to promote transitions to just sustainabilities in agricultural systems from multiple domains (e.g., research and development, public policies, grassroots innovations). We posit that strategies to co-design and build such transitions can emerge from the co-production of uncomfortable, transdisciplinary, actionable knowledges through critical science approaches.

Feed the futureland: an actor-based approach to studying food security projects

Critical development and food studies scholars argue that the current food security paradigm is emblematic of a ‘New Green Revolution’, characterized by agricultural intensification, increasing reliance on biotechnology, deepening global markets, and depeasantization. High-profile examples of this model are not hard to find. Less examined, however, are food-security programs that appear to work at cross-purposes with this model. Drawing on the case of Feed the Future in Guatemala, I show how USAID engages in activities that valorize ancestral crops, subsistence production, and agroecological practices. Rather than the result of macro-level planning—of either the New Green Revolution or a greener reform regime—I argue that nonconforming food security projects can be traced to individual actors and their interactions on the ground. I draw on an ‘interface approach’ (Long 1990), focusing on the lifeworlds of development workers, their interfaces with each other, and with the to-be-developed. Doing so reveals how food security projects are significantly shaped by the relationships and interests of development actors enmeshed in particular organizational and national settings. This research contributes a fresh perspective on the food security paradigm and its role within the ‘corporate food regime’.

Feeding lines: Standing up in the neoliberal charitable food regime

This review explores the production and management of hunger under capitalism through the work of four scholars’ embeddedness with expanding feeding lines in rich but unequal countries of the Global North. We engage with their methodologies, placing the material and discursive infrastructures undergirding the explosion of charitable food networks within the rich literature on food and hunger in geography. Bringing Food Bank Nations, Feeding the Crisis, Feeding the Other, and A Mass Conspiracy to Feed People in conversation reveals the critical function that charitable food assistance plays in revaluing food waste on behalf of the corporate food regime and disciplining people navigating precarious life in urban spaces. We also highlight the possibilities that the fraught politics of the feeding line afford to scholar activists and activist scholars advancing movements for food justice, food sovereignty, and the right to food.

Explaining the development policy implementation gap: A case of a failed food sovereignty policy in Bolivia

The food sovereignty concept has gained prominence in public policy discourses in the global South during the last decades. However, food sovereignty has contested definitions and is interpreted differently by conflicting societal interests. Consequentially, the translation of food sovereignty concepts into concrete policies and practices is often characterized by conflicts and controversies rooted in different institutional logics guiding the involved actors. In this article, we analyse how the logics of the corporatized agro-food system affected the local implementation of top-down state-induced public food sovereignty-based policies in Bolivia. We conducted a multiple-case study of public food procurement markets for school feeding programs involving three rural municipalities and small-scale producers in the Altiplano region. The data consists of 53 interviews conducted during 2011–2015. We found that corporate food regime logics influence the local policy implementation process in three ways. First, by framing the chosen policy design as neoliberal individualistic and transaction-based market-orientated. Second, by envisioning for the Aymara subsistence peasants a socially and culturally undesirable identity and class transformation; and thirdly, indirectly through the dependency of the school feed program on adjacent field-level institutions shaped by the corporate food regime logics. We conclude that the corporate food regime logics shaped the notion of what was considered legitimate practices and processes required for smallholders to access the public food procurement market, whereas their own conceptions aligned with food sovereignty principles were disregarded.

Sites, stakes, and scales: radical relationalism and the shifting nature of food sovereignty mobilization

ABSTRACT Food sovereignty movements emerged in the 1990s as a global constellation of struggles against the corporate food regime. Here, we propose a radically relational ‘sites, stakes, and scales' framework for analyzing food sovereignty mobilization, adopting a flat ontology that considers both actual and potential relations. ‘Sites' refer to the actually existing relations between actors engaged in a social struggle; ‘stakes' are dynamic interests that change as relations in the site change, and ‘scales’ capture how potential relations, such as relative social locations, can become actual relations, reconfiguring the site and stakes involved over space and time. We apply the framework to the work of CEPAGRO, a Brazilian agroecology NGO, tracing mobilizations from rural agroecological transitions, to urban agroecology, to building settler-Indigenous relations of solidarity. The ‘sites, stakes and scales’ framework provides a relatively simple set of concepts to explore how social movement mobilizations change over time and across contexts.

Fossil food: landed property as a hidden abode of global warming

This article analyzes the relation between climate change and the globalization of food systems. Although the corporate food regime made possible by the logistics revolution has been deemed highly intensive in its use of fossil fuels, the political economy of its energy foundations is yet to be deciphered. Based on EDGAR-FOOD, a global database that measures carbon emissions in the food system, we built a sample of nine South American economies to assess the extent to which capital mobility triggers emissions across different sectors. Findings from our study reveal that although food distribution was the most dynamic sector during the period in assessment, land-based emissions remained overwhelmingly larger in absolute terms. This, the paper concludes, highlights the definitive role that landed property – and the structural heterogeneity of agrarian capitalism more broadly – performs in the politics of carbon emissions. Accordingly, our findings lay bare a hidden abode of heterogeneous relations of production – chief of which are unpaid work, petty commodity production, and rent – that lies at the basis of a polarizing, hierarchically-structured international division of labor.

Adaptations and innovations: Analyzing food system organizations' responses to the ongoing COVID-19 pandemic

During the global COVID-19 pandemic, food systems have been affected by supply-chain disruptions, shifting employment trends, and increasing prices that change organization and business operations, increase food insecurity, and influence the broader economy. Much of the early scholarship regarding pandemic trends pointed to root causes in the corporate food regime and called for seeing the crisis as an opportunity for transformational change. Relying on surveys and in-depth interviews with food system stakeholders, this paper describes the impact of the COVID-19 pandemic on food businesses and organizations in Charlotte, North Carolina, USA. We examined the challenges created during the pandemic and related responses by stakeholders. Our research found that the pandemic’s impacts have been mixed. Most stakeholders identified both barriers and opportunities, reporting great upheaval and disruption but also new opportunities for innovation and collaboration. We argue that, while many positive innovations and quick responses were generated, ongoing challenges are indicative of widespread food system vulnerabilities created by a corporate food regime that produces thin margins while limiting the ability of stakeholders to pursue transformational change. Much of the existing literature considers the pandemic’s effects on individual producers and eaters, as well as large-scale structural shifts, yet less attention has been paid to the responses of food system organizations and businesses. This research contributes to food systems literature through its focus on food system actors to better understand how the food system is changing during the pandemic.

China’s Food Security Governance from a Hydraulic Society to a Corporate Food Regime and COVID-19

Although the main purpose of food security governance in China is to increase grain yield, the traditional and contemporary methods employed to achieve food security governance differ in polemic terms. The traditional method relies on organizations such as peasant collectives to properly manage water and other natural resources on farmlands. The food security governance of traditional China can best be described as a “hydraulic society”. Shifting from a pre-capitalist to a capitalist model, the contemporary method is centered on several large-scale agricultural and food (A&F) corporations and involves the capitalization of grain production resources, genetic modifications of grain seedlings through science and technology, and intensive scales of grain production. A “corporate food regime” is, therefore, what best defines the governance mechanisms of food security in contemporary China. This paper aims to examine how the governance of food security has been reshaped by this emerging corporate food regime. Findings indicate that China’s food security governance has transformed into a corporate food regime to increase grain yield. In this regime, the Chinese government supports the establishment of a few large-scale A&F corporations, allowing them to have an oligopoly over the domestic grain market. Internationally, China has become a major investor through its transnational agricultural land grabbing. The formation of this new food security governance has not only affected the traditional Chinese culture of peasant collectives, but also challenged the global A&F market system. However, COVID-19 and the promulgation of the Biosecurity Law are likely to alter the development of China’s A&F corporations and its food security governance.

A role for grassroots innovation toward agroecological transitions in the Global South? Evidence from Mexico

Recent research suggests that there is an urgent need to create transitions to agroecology to address the many ecological, social, and ethical problems caused by the hegemonic Corporate Food Regime. In the Global South, however, there are already numerous and diverse agroecological initiatives driven by peasant communities, indigenous peoples, and grassroots organizations. Although many agroecological innovations developed by such grassroots groups have been identified, they have seldom been analyzed under a specific theoretical framework of innovation (e.g., grassroots innovation). To contribute to this gap, in this paper we review the existing literature on agroecology that is concerned with innovation. Further, we analyze three case studies in Michoacán (Mexico) using two theoretical frameworks: grassroots innovation and transitions to sustainability. The cases illustrate different visions and ways of practicing agroecology, as well as the development of several agroecological innovations. Our study provides empirical evidence about the potential of grassroots groups in the Global South for creating innovations that can be useful in the transition to a more just and sustainable food regime based on agroecology. This evidence has important implications for policy making in agriculture, climate change and biocultural conservation.

Review of Eat local, taste global: how ethnocultural food reaches our tables

Eat Local, Taste Global: How Ethnocultural Food Reaches our Tables, by Glen C. Filson and Bamidele Adekunle, addresses the demand, availability, and production of ethnocultural vegetables in the Greater Toronto and Hamilton Area (GTHA). The book is centered around the three largest ethnic groups in the GTHA (Chinese, South Asian, Afro-Caribbean) and considers histories of immigration, acculturation, and the availability of ethnocultural food. Taken as a whole, this book provides an overview and justification for the local production of ethnocultural vegetables. While this book is primarily based in the Southern Ontario context, there is some discussion of ethnocultural vegetable value chains in other parts of Canada and the USA. Further, Filson and Adekunle distinguish between the corporate food regime, characterized by longer value chains, and local and community level food sovereignty which are primarily discussed through farmers’ markets, community shared agriculture, and gardening. The authors cite numerous benefits of producing ethnocultural vegetables in Southern Ontario, including economic, health, social, and environmental benefits. Ethnocultural vegetables are not only fresher and more nutritious when produced locally, but there is also increased opportunity for producer-consumer contact and less food miles associated with local production.

Agroecology in the North: Centering Indigenous food sovereignty and land stewardship in agriculture “frontiers”

Warming temperatures in the circumpolar north have led to new discussions around climate-driven frontiers for agriculture. In this paper, we situate northern food systems in Canada within the corporate food regime and settler colonialism, and contend that an expansion of the conventional, industrial agriculture paradigm into the Canadian North would have significant socio-cultural and ecological consequences. We propose agroecology as an alternative framework uniquely accordant with northern contexts. In particular, we suggest that there are elements of agroecology that are already being practiced in northern Indigenous communities as part of traditional hunter-gatherer food systems. We present a framework for agroecology in the North and discuss its components of environmental stewardship, economies, knowledge, social dimensions and governance using examples from the Dehcho region, Northwest Territories, Canada. Finally, we discuss several challenges and cautions in creating policy around agroecology in the North and encourage community-based research in developing and testing this framework moving forward.

Restoring the State Back to Food Regime Theory: China’s Agribusiness and the Global Soybean Commodity Chain

Food regime theory identifies three distinct food regimes on a world scale: the British (1870–1930s), American (1945–1970s), and corporate food regimes (since the 1980s). In the first two regimes, political economic orders were dominated by two separate nation states, whereas the current third regime is dominated by a few mega-corporations. Consequently, traditional super nation states are finding it challenging to use food trade measures to ensure favourable world orders. However, China’s state-owned agribusiness enterprises are quickly joining hands with the corporate food regime. This study aims to answer the following questions: Where is the state in the contemporary corporate food regime? How are these rising Chinese state-owned agribusiness enterprises changing the current food regime context? Applying the food regime theory, this paper aims to analyse the expansion of China’s influence in the global soybean commodity chain, which is driven by four forces from the corporate food regime: liberalisation, technologicalisation, securitisation, and accumulation. These forces lead the Chinese state apparatus to address China’s domestic food needs and then to establish agricultural free trade projects, biotechnology projects, soybean commodity-chain nationalisation projects, and transnational land-grabbing investments. Furthermore, such a dynamic Chinese food security context is gradually moving towards a “state-owned enterprise corporate food regime.”

Localization of the corporate food regime and the food sovereignty movement: taiwan’s food sovereignty movement under “third regionalism”

ABSTRACT Third regionalism explains the liberalization of trade centered around the Asia-Pacific region in the 21st century. Under regionalism, domestic agricultural markets that formerly enjoyed national food-security policies have loosened. This caused traditional domestic farmers’ organizations to become more regionally interconnected, forming a food sovereignty movement under the auspices of La Via Campesina. Localized food-production chains are promoted to mitigate the impact of regionalism on the Asia-Pacific agricultural sector. The Taiwan Rural Front (TRF) joined La Via Campesina and the food sovereignty movement in the 2010s. During the process of adopting regionalism, Taiwanese agricultural trade and technologies were protected by public agencies and state-owned enterprises. This context differs from that of Southeast Asia, where the food sovereignty movement has thrived. Therefore, the following question is raised: Why was it possible for the food sovereignty movement to originate in Taiwan? This paper describes the developmental characteristics of Taiwan’s food-security governance mechanism as a state-guided corporate food regime amid third regionalism. Further, the TRF does not advocate for localized food-production chains. Due to the formation of a state-guided corporate food regime, the food sovereignty movement has become connected with farmland protection movements that set the Taiwanese sovereignty movement apart.