• DOI:10.1111/J.1549-0831.2009.00006.X
• Corpus ID: 53697238

The Neoliberal Food Regime: Neoregulation and the New Division of Labor in North America.

@article{Pechlaner2010TheNF,
  title={The Neoliberal Food Regime: Neoregulation and the New Division of Labor in North America.},
  author={Gabriela Pechlaner and Gerardo Otero},
  journal={Rural Sociology},
  year={2010},
  volume={75},
  pages={179-208}
}

• G. Pechlaner, G. Otero
• Published 1 June 2010
• Economics
• Rural Sociology

We undertake a comparative investigation of how neoliberal restructuring characterizes the third food regime in the three North American countries. By contrasting the experience of the two developed countries of the United States and Canada with that of the developing country of Mexico, we shine some empirical light on the differential impact of neoliberal regulatory restructuring on the division of labor in agriculture within the North American Free Trade Agreement region. In particular, we investigate these countries' agricultural production markets, trade, and food vulnerability—with an emphasis on Mexico—as analytical points for comparing and contrasting their experience with this neoliberal restructuring. We start with a synthesis of food-regime theory and outline the key features of what we call the "neoliberal food regime." We then discuss our case-study countries in terms of food vulnerability and resistance in Mexico, their differential relationships to trade liberalization, and what these trends might mean for the evolution of the neoliberal food regime. We conclude that, while dominant trends are ominous, there is room for an alternative trajectory and consequent reshaping of the emerging regime: sufficient bottom-up social resistance, primarily at the level of the nation-state, may yet produce an alternative trajectory. In a synthetic article about agrarian studies at the end of the twentieth century, Frederick Buttel (2001) observed that, with the rise of global- ization, the fields of sociology of agriculture and food and the sociology of development were converging. Yet he lamented that individual soci- ologists of agriculture remained specialists in developed-country or southern agrifood systems: "Little groundwork has been laid for a soci- ology of agriculture that addresses simultaneously the agrarian change issues of both North and South" (Buttel 2001:177). In this article, we attempt to contribute to bridging this gap, at least for the region cover- ing the three countries of the North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA): Canada, the United States, and Mexico. Given agriculture and food's special importance for subsistence and its importance for international trade, a key factor in its globalization is regulation, most specifically, national and international regulation for trade liberalization. It is a contentious issue given that food cannot be separated from important social considerations, such as food vulnerabi- lity, especially in developing countries, where subsistence farming still