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

Hugh Campbell 0 1 Jane Dixon 0 1 0 J. Dixon National Centre for Epidemiology and Population Health, Australian National University , Building 62, Mills Road, Acton, ACT 0200, Australia 1 H. Campbell (&) Centre for the Study of Agriculture , Food and Environment, University of Otago , PO Box 56, Dunedin, New Zealand Background to the symposium Twenty years ago, Harriet Friedmann and Philip McMichael published a highly original, influential andsubsequentlycontroversial article: 'Agriculture and the state system: the rise and fall of national agricultures, 1870 to the present' (Friedmann and McMichael 1989). Over the following years, both Friedmann and McMichael, along with other collaborators, further developed their insights, challenging agri-food scholars with a new way of framing agri-food power relations as well as providing an approach for agricultural research and policy analysis that moved food from the periphery to the centre of wider theories about society and interpretations of the history of capitalism. Through the early 1990s, their argument and its significancedescribed more fully belowgave rise to numerous attempts to both validate and extend their theory and position before a strong critique of the food regimes approach in the mid-90s dented the ambitions of foodregime scholars to some degree (Goodman and Watts 1994). Until the mid-2000s, the food regimes approach was a typically muted current of thought in agricultural political economy, before a resurgence of interest in its value coalesced around a set of panels at the 2007 joint meetings of the AFHVS and the ASFS in Victoria, Canada. - One of the editors of this Symposium proposed that the food regimes progenitors join a panel of other agri-food scholars to debate the contemporary relevance and productivity of the food regimes perspective. Back-to-back panels on Updating Food Regime Analysis for the 21st Century drew a large and engaged audience. Presentations were provided by Farshad Araghi and Philip McMichael from the US; David Burch, Geoffrey Lawrence, and Jane Dixon from Australia; Hugh Campbell from NZ; and Harriet Friedmann from Canada. (In this issue, Le Heron and Lewiss commentary explores the preponderance of contributors from the Antipodes and/or settler states.) The papers included critical reflections on the original contributions of food regime analysis combined with new formulations that included questions concerning value and ecological relations, cultural politics, nutritional knowledge and dimensions, and the transformation of corporate and institutional power relationships in an era of neo-liberal globalization and financialization. On the strength of the response to these panels, which indicated renewed interest in food regimes analysis, the presenters decided to develop a symposium for Agriculture and Human Values to mark the 20th anniversary of the key Friedmann and McMichael (1989) article. The purpose of this Symposium is to rework the papers from the Victoria sessions (along with a contribution by Bill Pritchard and commentary by Richard Le Heron and Nick Lewis) with the following goals in mind: (1) to situate food regime analysis as a significant contribution to understanding capitalist modernityincluding its changing forms of accumulation, power relationships, value relations and institutional organization on a world scale; (2) to emphasize therefore the centrality of food relations (such as global divisions of labor, nutritional and dietary regimens, and differentiated consumption patterns) to understanding the ordering and cultural politics of the modern world; (3) to open up an engagement with ecological dynamics as a perspective on both the distribution of unsustainable practices and on the recent politicization of ecology (ethical consumption, sustainable development, multi-functionality, and green capitalism); (4) to examine new dynamics of financialisation and corporate reorganization as a significant influence on the transformation of the transnational food industry (equity companies and retailers, corporate integration and/or conglomeration, new investment frontiers in biotechnology and agrofuels); (5) to analyse the nexus between the emerging field of global public health nutrition and food relations; and (6) to assess the role and impact of the green, food sovereignty, slow food, public health and food safety movements on the institutional and ideological dimensions of corporate food strategies. All of these new dynamics represent new sites of engagement and elaboration of the food regimes approach. Such new approaches are enabled partly through a significant loosening of the theoretical context within which agriculture political economy is theorized. It is only possible, therefore, to understand the significance of these new perspectives by understanding food regimes as a key historical and theoretical pivot that moved debates in rural sociology from a rather narrow, structural and orthodox political economy of agriculture to a more contingent, historically contextual understanding of the many configurations (geographical and historical) of agri-food capitalisms. To understand this pivotal moment, and the degree to which it both conditions new food regime approaches and is, inevitably, superseded by them, it is necessary first to review some key debates in rural sociology in the late1970s and 1980s. The intellectual context: the new rural sociology In the 1970s, rural sociology became energised by the rediscovery of classic Kautskian Marxism (Buttel et al. 1990). The resulting upsurge of critical Marxist-inspired thinking in the ensuing decade became termed the New Rural Sociology, a critique that engaged powerfully with rural society as a production space characterised by the capitalist transformation of agriculture. The key debate (delineated by key texts such as Buttel and Newby 1980; Buttel et al. 1990) questioned whether family farms would eventually be subsumed into capitalist production forms or, alternatively, if they could survive into the long term due to a flexible production structurethereby representing an alternative to industrial relations of production. The sense of a crisis in Western agriculture lent weight to this debate, indicating the potential persistence, or restructured form, of rural society. However, 10 years of rediscovering capitalism in agriculture provoked such a raft of critics that Marsden could pointedly describe the new field as suffering from a hangover from an overdose of classical agrarian theory (Marsden 1989, p. 313). While the New Rural Sociology effectively created analytical power around the dissection of capitalist relations in agriculture, two dynamics were observed to be particularly problematic for the continued theoretical elaboration of this approach. First, there was awareness that a point of production focus generated its own limitations by excluding wider realms of food dynamics such as supply chains and (...truncated)