Creating Rupture through Policy

Some scholars have suggested that the current agri-food system is operating under a third food regime, which is characterized by increasing integration of transnational agri-food capital, global sourcing, and challenges to national regulation of agriculture by corporate-economic strategies (Pechlaner and Otero, 2010, p. 183). ¹ As a result, some scholars assert that the hegemonic power of transnational corporations stymies the efforts of subordinate groups to improve social, ecological, and community well-being due in part to the lack of economic and political power of subordinate groups and their inability to mount a systematic critique of corporate agriculture and alter the distribution of costs and benefits in the neoliberal food regime (Magdoff et al., 2000, as quoted in Hassanein, 2003). ² Others, however, argue that individuals, collectivities, and nation-states can create fissure in the neoliberal food regime, “mediating or perhaps even reshaping the globalization and global-value dynamic” and “temper[ing] its implementation” (Pechlaner and Otero, 2010, p. 181). Take, for example, the work of Wright and Middendorf (2008), who assert the importance of subordinate groups in challenging the global agri-food system. The potential power of subordinate groups is also noted by McMichael (2005, 2009), who identifies how the corporate food regime has engendered social movements, such as Vía Campesina, who promote small-scale agriculture as a way to improve social and environmental justice (La Vía Campesina, 2011).