ABSTRACT

A reading of migration and agricultural change in the Mediterranean area – where the case studies in this volume are situated – should be placed in a broader historical frame that includes the socio-economic and political dynamics under which the conditions of mobility and the valorization of labour and capital are defined. The application of food regime theory serves this end. Since the publication of the seminal article by Harriet Friedmann and Philip McMichael at the end of the 1980s (Friedmann and McMichael, 1989), this theory has been developed to interpret changes in agri-food systems across space and time, by identifying different periods of capital accumulation and their corresponding transitions, interconnections and contradictions. What was once termed the ‘food system project’ has since been developed by scholars into a ‘political geography of the global food system’, which analyses changes in agri-food relations in different contexts (McMichael, 2013 a).