ABSTRACT
This chapter argues that in New Zealand maintaining agricultural production emerged during the 19th century as a field of problematisation, and that the state progressively developed a distinctive regime of agricultural policing that came to encompass New Zealand's farmers and which was primarily concerned with maintaining and improving production rather than maintaining social order. The neoliberal transformation of New Zealand's state-society relationships was reflected in the 1998 corporatisation of the Ministry of Agriculture and Fisheries's (MAF) commercial activities, and the establishment of ASURE and AgriQuality as state owned enterprises (SOEs) out of the contestable elements of those commercial activities. The chapter traces the formation of two particular institutional arrangements the Department of Agriculture in the late years of the 19th century and the recasting of that arrangement in the late 20th century with the formation of SOEs in 1998 and 2007.
