ABSTRACT
Narratives of international beef sector restructuring hold influential sway within recent research on agri-food globalization. In the mid-1980s, Steven Sanderson persuasively coined the phrase ‘the world steer’ to describe a trajectory of restructuring in which large-scale Fordist-style meat production systems were developed in Third World destinations to service affluent Northern markets (Sanderson 1986). In Sanderson’s vision, ‘the world steer’ paralleled the much vaunted ‘world car’. He proposed that international restructuring of the beef sector had entered ‘a new phase, qualitatively different from previous modes of external influence’ in which: ‘The international economic integration of the nineteenth century, which relied primarily on commodity circulation, has been supplanted by a holistic integration of the cattle sector in production’ (Sanderson 1986: 124).
