Food regimes and periods of accumulation: recovering the role of policy regulation

Abstract

This paper is a historical-theoretical reflection that links the evolution of the different international food regimes with the historical periods of capital accumulation, emphasizing the historical and political conditions under which these sectoral modes of agri-food regulation took place. Through an exhaustive theoretical review, we analyse the geographical expansion of capitalism in the first international food regimes; the exceptionally reformist period that characterized the second international food regimes; and, finally, neoliberalism in the third international food regimes. In the conclusions we highlight that food production and trade have played an important role in underpinning the massive industrializations that accompanied each of the periods of accumulation. These successive periods of accumulation were based on the expansion of the frontiers of capitalist world ecology, which involved a major expansion of the market, huge processes of proletarianization of peasants and the accelerated extraction of ecological surplus value.