Food Regime dynamics

Abstract

The 'food regime' concept distinguishes successive periods of global world-economic hegemony through the lens of food provisioning on a world scale. The late-nineteenth century British-centered food empire, provisioning Europe with grains and meat from the New World, was followed by the US-centered system of provisioning newly emergent Third World countries with cheap food exports to subsidize their development of national industrial sectors. With the subsequent rise of multi-national corporations and global banking, the 'corporate' food regime reorganized the world-economy around global food supply chains embodying the principle of 'comparative advantage.' Each period built on previous world-economic developments to establish a fully global food system. The current moment is undergoing two significant developments: (1) the rise of China as a substantial participant in the world food system via its Food Silk Road Initiative, by which it has established its own system of state-owned enterprises and trade routes to become the world's largest food importer; and (2) the recent 'corporate capture' of the United Nations by the World Economic Forum (WEF) via the 2021 UN Food System Summit. This was organized around replacing intergovernmental (multilateral) dialogue in the UN's Committee on World Food Security with 'multi-stakeholder' governance, privileging private decisions in intensifying industrial (and now digitized) agriculture in a process of 'de-territorialization' of farming. The recent pandemic revealed the fragility of global supply chains, disclosing (and enhancing) the wisdom of agro-ecological farming methods -- in both replenishing natural processes to combat climate emergency, and securing territorial food sovereignty, embodied in the vitality of robust nested food markets.