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The market-oriented focus of the global food regime, as it functioned from the late 1940s to the early 1970s, has proved inadequate. Preoccupation with perfecting markets led food policy makers to underemphasize the need for increased production in the Third World. It also led them to exaggerated attention to short-term surplus disposal and too little concern about scarcity. The regime emerged from a context in which unilateral actions and domestic considerations prevailed. This resulted in regime pathologies in which mutually beneficial international food solutions were not reached and multilateral coordination to analyze and solve food problems was discouraged. Such regime inadequacies cumulated over time; while they did not cause the food "crisis" of 1973–74, they blunted international responses to it. Reform of the global food regime is needed to (1) raise priorities accorded to rural modernization in Third World countries, (2) increase attention to malnutrition and chronic hunger, (3) provide resources for development, and (4) structure and stabilize the market so as to provide security of supply and income. The legitimacy of multilateral forums and processes also must be enhanced.

The paper explores the impact of finance's penetration into agriculture and the global food system. The authors analyse the causes of the recent global food crises, unveiling the key role played by financial speculation and explaining why this phenomenon is likely to affect food security much more than the problems related to the supply and demand dynamics taking place in the "real economy". Financial markets, it is argued, are engendering pricing mechanisms and dynamics of wealth distribution that have consequences on agrarian structures, but also on our daily life. While creating new profit opportunities for speculators and the agribusiness, the penetration of finance into food systems increase uncertainty and imply new risks for local actors, to the point of compromising their capability to respond to exogenous shocks, such as the COVID-19 pandemic. To make sense of these phenomena, they must be linked to the broader transformation of our global system and to the long-term trajectories of capitalist development. This operation is here made with the support of the analytical tools provided by some approaches inspired by the world-system analysis, bringing to light the roots of what can be defined as a "financialized food regime" and discussing some of its important ecological and socio-economic contradictions.

Nations are stuck in a double level game: maintaining their ties to the global food regime while responding to grassroots food movements from below. By tracing the impact of agricultural policies and food movements in Mexico, this paper explores how the global food regime recuperates agendas from the food sovereignty discourse. Do not play with your food. Do not cite without expressed permission from the author.

This article examines the formation and collapse of the first global food regime of capital, focusing on the impact of tropical colonies like India. It also explores the role of anti-imperialist movements in this transition. While the literature on food regimes has shed light on the evolution of a worldwide food system, it has overlooked the contribution of South Asia to the first food regime or its struggles against colonialism. This study analyses the Ghadar Party in Punjab, British India, in the context of changes in the global wheat market. By incorporating a Gramscian conjunctural analysis, this article offers a refined understanding of transitional moments. It investigates why Punjab shifted from being a significant wheat exporter to Britain in the 1870s to primarily producing for the Indian domestic market by the 1920s. The article concludes that the colonial state implemented targeted policies to mitigate resistance from anti-imperialist movements, such as the Ghadar Party. These policies aimed to delink domestic wheat production from the global market due to subsistence crises related to the global food system. Lastly, the article outlines a method to analyse the link between place-based struggles and structural crises in a global food regime.

Using food regime analysis, this paper explores how neoliberal agricultural policies are affecting food sovereignty in Pacific Island countries ( pic s). The principles of food sovereignty are strongly rooted in Pacific Islands agricultural practices. However, under the corporate food regime, the locus of control for food security is shifting away from communities and the nation-state to the world market. It is argued that food sovereignty in the Pacific Islands is being undermined through membership in the World Trade Organization ( wto ), wto accession agreements, and regional free-trade agreements. These agreements seek to reduce tariffs, curtail government support to local agriculture, and oblige pic s to extend private property protection to plants and seeds. Driven by commercial interests, trade agreements are also facilitating control of communal lands by the private sector, which has serious implications for food sovereignty.

"Contents" -- "1: Introduction" -- "References" -- "Part 1: Political Ecology, Food Regimes, and Food Sovereignty" -- "2: Political Ecology and Social Systems: An Integrated, but Differentiated, Theory of Socio-natural Dynamics" -- " Developing a Political Ecology: An Integrated, but Differentiated, Theory of Socio-natural Dynamics" -- " Political Ecology and the Capitalist Mode of Production" -- "References" -- "3: Political Ecology, Capitalism, and Food Regimes" -- " The Origins of Agrarian Capitalism" -- " 'Combined and Uneven Development', the State-Capital Nexus as Prime Mover, and Imperialism" -- " The 'First' Agricultural Revolution: The First National Capitalist Food Regime?" -- "References" -- "4: The 'First' or British 'Liberal' Food Regime 1840–1870: The 'Second' or 'Imperial' Food Regime 1870–1930" -- " The 'First' or British 'Liberal' Food Regime 1840–1870" -- " The 'Second' or 'Imperial' Food Regime 1870–1930" -- "References" -- "5: The Rise and Demise of the 'Third' or 'Political Productivist' Food Regime (1930s–1980s)" -- "References" -- "6: The Neoliberal Food Regime, the New Imperialism, and the Emergence of Food Sovereignty" -- " The Rise of Neoliberalism in Europe" -- " Neoliberalism in Latin America" -- "References" -- "Part 2: Crisis and Resistance" -- "7: The Neoliberal Food Regime in Crisis?" -- " Contradictions for Neoliberalism in General" -- " Contradictions for the Neoliberal Food Regime" -- "References" -- "8: Crisis and Resistance: Reform or Revolution?" -- " Neo-productivism and Neo-developmentalism" -- " Alternative Food Networks" -- " Agro-ecology and Food Sovereignty" -- "References" -- "Part 3: Country Case Studies" -- "9: Prelude to the Case Studies: The Agrarian Question and Food Sovereignty Movements

This book asks how we are to understand the relationship between capitalism and the environment, capitalism and food, and capitalism and social resistance. These questions come together to form a study of food regimes and the means by which capitalism organises both the environment and people to provision its distinctive system of ever-expanding consumption with food. Political Ecology, Food Regimes, and Food Sovereignty explores whether there are environmental limits to capitalism and its economic growth by addressing the ongoing and inter-linked crises of food, fossil fuels, and finance. It also considers its political limits, as the globally burgeoning 'precariat', peasants and indigenous people resist the further commodification of their livelihoods. This book draws from the field of Political Ecology to approach new ways of analysing capitalism, the environment and resistance, and also to propose new solutions to the current agro-ecological-economic crisis. It will be of particular interest to students and academics of Environmental Sociology, Human Geography, and Environmental Geography.