ABSTRACT
Globalization has been identified as one of the principal formative processes in the contemporary development of the capitalist world order. The globalization generally refers to the world-wide integration of economic process and of space, including a shift of power from communities and nation-states to international institutions such as transnational corporations (TNCs) and multilateral agencies. TNCs form a stage in the continuing reorganization of capital within the agro-food system. Agribusiness first emerged as a feature of the food regime that is vertically integrated businesses involved in the supply of agri-inputs, the processing of agri-outputs and the distribution of food products. Conventional political economy analyses of globalization tend to explain national and regional outcomes in terms of contingent processes. The structuralist interpretation of food networks does not admit the possibility of essentially local processes acting independently of globalization.
