Food Regimes

Food regime analysis focuses on the role of food and agriculture in the trajectory of global capitalism. First introduced in the late 1980s, food regime analysis distinguishes itself from other approaches to the global food system by integrating the production, distribution, and consumption of food within a broad, relational perspective. Food regime analysis relates changes in world agriculture to the evolution of the state system, the international division of labor, trade patterns, the powerful institutions that regulate and govern these flows of food commodities, and how this interacts with social movements and contestation regarding the global food regime’s dialectical relationship with extant farm cultures, and Indigenous territories, in so far as it threatens their autonomy, practices, and knowledges, as a broadening threat to world-ecological stability and sustainability. The food regime literature portrays a sequence of global food regimes from the late nineteenth century onwards, most commonly understood as a first (1870s–1914), a second (1945–1973) and a third (1980s–present) food regime. In recent years, debate has surged surrounding the characteristics of the contemporary food regime, variously termed the “corporate”, “neoliberal,” or “third” food regime. A recent wave of food regime scholarship critically engages with the terms of the approach writ large. Significant strands of ongoing debate concern central conceptual issues such as the nature of the state, scale, neoliberalism, and shifting multipolar dynamics in the world economy.