1580: Organic production in the Third Food regime

Kledal, Paul Rye (2003) Organic production in the Third Food regime . Paper presented at Northern consumption/ Southern production. A mini-conference on cross-continental food commodity chain systems, Institute of Geography, University of Copenhagen, Denmark, 10-11 October, 2003.

Summary

From a political economy perspective organic farming can be regarded as a social countermovement born out of the crisis between the second food regime (1945-1970s), and are part of the birth of a new and third food regime in the 1980’s. The rules and regulations of organic farming are alternative measures trying to combat the growing pressures for more capital accumulation received as:
1) Environmental and human health risks in relation to the use of pesticides, nitrate in the groundwater and escalating problems with animal welfare and food safety.
2) Expulsion and marginalization of farms, landscapes and rural production cultures.
The future development of organic farming, and its prospect of contributing in solving these problems, is therefore closely related to the development of the socio-economic frame of the third food regime. In the new food regime changing modes of food consumption will be important in the creation of new social and economic spaces for organic food production.
When it comes to the governance structures of the Global Commodity Chains (GCC), the producer-, buyer- and traderdriven chains are sociological descriptions without causual explanations. What is really at stake is, that a certain node in a given chain has a market control close to monopoly, and it is this position of market control and ability of exclusion along the GCC, that determines whether it becomes a producer-, buyer- or trader driven chain. Changing power relations along the nodes are key factors in relation to the global restructuring of Agro-foods.

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