ABSTRACT
The capitalist world food system is shaped by the corporate food regime, through which global capital seeks to accelerate resolutions to specific agrarian questions by intensifying the establishment of ever larger-scale farms organised under increasingly capitalist relations of production. However, the terms and conditions by which capital transforms farming systems is subject to highly uneven and contingent variation. As a consequence, the corporate food regime during the 21st century demonstrates profound contradictions. In a world of historically unprecedented food supplies there is little change in the numbers of the hungry, obesity is a global epidemic, and the epicentre of world poverty lies in the countryside. Global inequalities are reflected in the countryside through the lack of access to land. They are manifested in rural populations being impacted by climate change more than any other group. They are witnessed in the emergence of new zoonotics out of the capitalist world food system. An alternative needs to be constructed that confronts the power of capital in the food system and fosters alternative modes of organising production and consumption in ways that contain elements of de-commodification and the re-regulation of markets on the basis of public need.
