Reimagining the Global Food Regimes for Relational Spaces

Area ◽  
2021 ◽  
Author(s):  
Kuan‐Chi Wang
Keyword(s):  
Author(s):  
Laura M. Pereira ◽  
Scott Drimie ◽  
Kristi Maciejewski ◽  
Patrick Bon Tonissen ◽  
Reinette (Oonsie) Biggs

Sustainably achieving the goal of global food security is one of the greatest challenges of the 21st century. The current food system is failing to meet the needs of people, and at the same time, is having far-reaching impacts on the environment and undermining human well-being in other important ways. It is increasingly apparent that a deep transformation in the way we produce and consume food is needed in order to ensure a more just and sustainable future. This paper uses the concept of regime shifts to understand key drivers and innovations underlying past disruptions in the food system and to explore how they may help us think about desirable future changes and how we might leverage them. We combine two perspectives on regime shifts—one derived from natural sciences and the other from social sciences—to propose an interpretation of food regimes that draws on innovation theory. We use this conceptualization to discuss three examples of innovations that we argue helped enable critical regime shifts in the global food system in the past: the Haber-Bosch process of nitrogen fixation, the rise of the supermarket, and the call for more transparency in the food system to reconnect consumers with their food. This paper concludes with an exploration of why this combination of conceptual understandings is important across the Global North/ Global South divide, and proposes a new sustainability regime where transformative change is spearheaded by a variety of social–ecological innovations.


2019 ◽  
Vol 19 (2) ◽  
pp. 261-276
Author(s):  
P Niederle ◽  
A A Kurakin ◽  
A M Nikulin ◽  
S Schneider

The ‘food regime’ approach was introduced as a historical method of “incorporated comparison” (P. McMichael). This comparison of the role of agriculture in the world-system made some scholars overemphasize an excessively unitary and coherent global food regime. The authors recognize this approach as a historical-comparative analytical tool to understand global trends, but argue that the Russian and Brazilian agrarian development question some ideas of the food regime approach. The contemporary positions of two countries in the global markets also prove the divergences in their positioning in the food regime genealogy. The paper focuses on the production and export of soy and wheat which do not represent the entire agrarian economy of Brazil and Russia but allow to compare two countries’ strategies of the international trade and in domestic markets. First, the authors briefly discuss the historical routes Russia and Brazil have taken in the agricultural development and global food markets; then they analyze the radical changes that followed the Russian perestroika and the Brazilian re-democratization in the late 1980s and led to the consolidation of neoliberal policies in the 1990s. After that the paper describes the turn of both countries to the ‘neo-developmental state’ that supported the export-oriented policies for the agribusiness but combined them with domestic food security and sovereignty policies. Finally, the authors conclude that despite differing trajectories both Russia and Brazil cannot be considered parts of the neoliberal food regime due to the fact that the contemporary period should be rather defined as a paradigmatic crisis and a co-existence of two or more food regimes.


2019 ◽  
Vol 103 (1) ◽  
pp. 6-8 ◽  
Author(s):  
Terry Roberts

Since its early rudimentary forms, phosphate fertilizer has developed in step with our understanding of successful food production systems. Recognized as essential to life, the responsible use P in agriculture remains key to food security.


2019 ◽  
Author(s):  
International Food Policy Research Institute (IFPRI)
Keyword(s):  

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
International Food Policy Research Institute (IFPRI)
Keyword(s):  

2012 ◽  
Author(s):  
International Food Policy Research Institute
Keyword(s):  

New Medit ◽  
2020 ◽  
Vol 19 (3) ◽  
Author(s):  
Ahmed EL GHIN ◽  
Mounir EL-KARIMI

This paper examines the world commodity prices pass-through to food inflation in Morocco, over the period 2004-2018, by using Structural Vector Autoregression (SVAR) model on monthly data. Several interesting results are found from this study. First, the impact of global food prices on domestic food inflation is shown significant, which reflects the large imported component in the domestic food consumption basket. Second, the transmission effect is found to vary across commodities. Consumer prices of cereals and oils significantly and positively respond to external price shocks, while those of dairy and beverages are weakly influenced. Third, there is evidence of asymmetries in the pass-through from world to domestic food prices, where external positive shocks generate a stronger local prices response than negative ones. This situation is indicative of policy and market distortions, namely the subsidies, price controls, and weak competitive market structures. Our findings suggest that food price movements should require much attention in monetary policymaking, especially that the country has taken preliminary steps towards the adoption of floating exchange rate regime.


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