Abstract
A benchmark question in contemporary food regimes scholarship is how to theorize agriculture’s incorporation into the WTO. For the most part, it has been theorized as an institutional mechanism that facilitates the ushering in of a new, so-called ‘third food regime’, in which food–society relations are governed by the overarching politics of the market. The collapse of the Doha Round negotiations in July 2008 makes it possible, for the first time, to offer a conclusive assessment as to whether this is the case. Using a broadly conceived world-historical framework, this article contends that the WTO is more appropriately theorized as a carryover from the politics of the crisis of the second food regime, rather than representing any putative successor. The Doha Round’s collapse in Geneva in July 2008 should put an end to speculation of a WTO-led transformation of global food politics towards unfettered market rule; the supposed basis for a neo-liberalized ‘third food regime’. Consequently, it is through analysis of the factors that framed the Doha Round’s collapse, rather than in the WTO itself, that provide insights into the defining elements of a new global politics of food.
This is a preview of subscription content, log in via an institution to check access.
Similar content being viewed by others
Notes
Whalley (2000, pp. 1, 2) writes: ‘If as a developing country negotiator, one wanted to draw upon the model results [from the Uruguay Round] to support or help frame a negotiating position for the next round, seemingly there is support for almost anything one wanted to argue. The gains to developing nations could be large or small; agriculture could be the most important issue, or it could be services. Impacts on individual countries could be positive or negative, large or small’.
Data quoted here are Producer Support Estimates (PSE). This is defined by the OECD as being an indicator of the annual monetary value of gross transfers from consumers and taxpayers to support agricultural producers, measured at farm gate level, arising from policy measures, regardless of their nature, objectives or impacts on farm production or income.
Manifest in divergent ways. Firstly, the WTO chose its meeting sites henceforth with an acute eye to security and isolation. This presented itself most tellingly when the agenda for the aborted Seattle meeting was reconvened at Doha, in the Persian Gulf; arguably one of the most hostile environments in the world insofar as mobilizing protest is concerned. Secondly, the WTO strategically reached out to the NGO community after Seattle, hosting many conferences and workshops with NGOs with the view to ‘work through’ various issues. In a broader sense, too, of course, the explicit focus of the Doha Round on development sought to placate NGO complaints.
The system of multilateral trade rules enshrined by the WTO can be traced ultimately to the Atlantic Charter, the 1941 agreement established by Winston Churchill and Franklin D. Roosevelt aiming to structure these two countries’ relations in the context of the Second World War. Principle Four of the Charter specified that the two countries would ‘endeavour, with due respect for their existing obligations, to further the enjoyment by all States, great or small, victor or vanquished, of access, on equal terms, to the trade and to the raw materials of the world which are needed for their economic prosperity’ (US Department of State 2008). This premise provided the foundational basis for negotiations immediately after the Second World War among eighteen countries to establish a multilateral agreement on trade (Capling 2001, pp. 13–15). Initially intended to provide a constitution for a proposed International Trade Organization (ITO), which would be a third leg of the post-war family of international institutions (the other two being the United Nations and the International Monetary Fund), these goals were abandoned in 1948 following objections from the US Congress. Subsequently, a more loosely-structured treaty arrangement (the GATT) came to provide the focus for multilateral trade initiatives for a period of almost 50 years (Buckman 2005, pp. 37–45; Sands 2005, pp. 99–101).
The importance of the former rests with the way that bilateral and regional trade deals are reordering the economic geography of the global economy, with particular reference to food and agriculture. As the Doha Round became increasingly intractable, member states gave increased energy to the negotiation of strategically conceived Preferential Trade Agreements (PTAs) at bilateral and/or regional levels. Although countries remained nominally committed to the Doha Round, during the post-Seattle years there was tendency to side-step multilateralism in favour of ‘side-deals’. This was particularly apparent in the US, where trade policy unilateralism became a preferred modus operandi of the Bush Administration. During the life of the Doha Round, the US settled PTAs with Chile, the countries of Central America, Australia, Singapore, Thailand and South Korea. The ramifications of these arrangements were to complicate the rules of trade at a global level. (In the language of trade economists, they were ‘trade-diverting’ rather than ‘trade-creating’.) More importantly, however, they expressed a means through which larger and more powerful countries (such as the US) could pursue trade negotiations under their own terms, as opposed to the fraught circumstances of dealing simultaneously with the 153 members of the WTO. Emblematic of this, in the Australia–US Free Trade Agreement (AUSFTA), US negotiators extracted significant market access concessions from Australia for American pharmaceuticals and media industries, whilst the Australian negotiating team made minimal impact in terms of improving Australian market access into US agriculture. As documented by Weiss et al. (2004), the AUSFTA mandated that Australian legislation relating to its national pharmaceutical scheme be rewritten to accord with US standards and requirements.
References
Allard, T. 1999. We are being manipulated, say the poor. Sydney Morning Herald, 3 December, p. 11. Sourced from Factiva database. Document smhh000020010829dvc300we2.
Araghi, F. 2003. Food regimes and the production of value: Some methodological issues. Journal of Peasant Studies 30 (2): 41–70.
Barnett, M.N., and M. Finemore. 1999. The politics, power and pathologies of international organizations. International Organization 53 (4): 698–732.
BBC. 2000. Foreign minister criticizes agricultural subsidies: Remarks of Argentine Foreign Minister Adalberto Rodriguez Giavarini at Vilamoura, Portugal, 24th February. 4 March 2000. Sourced from Factiva database. Document bbcla00020010804dw34000u6.
Browne, W.P. 1988. Private interests, public policy and American agriculture. Lawrence, KS: University Press of Kansas.
Buckman, G. 2005. Global trade: Past mistakes. London, UK: Zed Books, future choices.
Buttel, F.H. 2003. Some observations on the anti-globalisation movement. Australian Journal of Social Issues 38 (1): 95–116.
Campbell, H., and B. Coombes. 1999. New Zealand’s organic food exports: Current interpretations and new directions in research. In Restructuring global and regional agricultures: Transformations in Australasian agri-food economies and spaces, ed. D. Burch, J. Goss, and G. Lawrence, 61–74. Aldershot, UK: Ashgate.
Capling, A. 2001. Australia and the global trade system: From Havana to Seattle. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press.
Commission of the European Communities. 2002. Mid-term review of the Common Agriculture Policy. Brussels, Belgium: European Commission.
Fold, N., and B. Pritchard. 2005. Introduction. In Cross-continental food chains, ed. N. Fold and B. Pritchard, 1–22. London, UK: Routledge.
Freeman, R. 2004. Trade wars: The exaggerated impact of trade in economic debate. The World Economy 27 (1): 1–23.
Friedmann, H. 1993. The political economy of food: A global crisis. New Left Review 197: 28–59.
Friedmann, H. 1994. Distance and durability: Shaky foundations of the world food economy. In The global restructuring of agro-food systems, ed. P. McMichael, 258–276. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press.
Friedmann, H. 2005. From colonialism to green capitalism: Social movements and emergence of food regimes. In New directions in the sociology of global development, ed. F.H. Buttel and P. McMichael, 227–264. Amsterdam, The Netherlands: Elsevier.
Friedmann, H., and P. McMichael. 1989. Agriculture and the state system: The rise and decline of national agricultures, 1870 to the present. Sociologia Ruralis 29: 93–117.
Gill, S. 2003. Towards a stark utopia? New constitutionalism and the politics of globalization. In Global tensions: Challenges and opportunities in the world economy, ed. L. Beneria and S. Bisnath, 13–26. New York, NY: Routledge.
Humphrey, J. 2006. Horticulture: Responding to the challenges of poverty reduction and global competition. Acta Horticulturae 699: 1–34.
Jessop, B. 1995. The regulation approach: Governance and post-Fordism, economy and society. Oxford, UK: Blackwell Publishing.
Krebs, A.V. 1991. The corporate reapers. Washington, DC: Essential Books.
Lamy, P. 2008. Negotiations can find compromise on the safeguards issue, Remarks to the ‘Global Partnership for Development’ conference, New Delhi, 13 August. Online Resource. http://www.wto.org/english/news_e/sppl_e/sppl98_e.htm. Accessed 11 Sep 2008.
Le Heron, R. 1993. Globalized agriculture: Political choice. Oxford, UK: Pergamon.
Le Heron, R., and M. Roche. 1995. A ‘fresh’ place in food’s space. Area 27 (1): 23–33.
McMichael, P. 1994. Introduction: Agro-food system restructuring—unity in diversity. In The global restructuring of agro-food systems, ed. P. McMichael, 1–18. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press.
McMichael, P. 1998. Global food politics. Monthly Review 50 (3): 97–122.
McMichael, P. 1999. Virtual capitalism and agri-food restructuring. In Restructuring global and regional agricultures: Transformations in Australasian agri-food economies and spaces, ed. D. Burch, J. Goss, and G. Lawrence, 3–22. Aldershot, UK: Ashgate.
McMichael, P. 2000a. A global interpretation of the rise of the East Asian food import complex. World Development 28: 409–424.
McMichael, P. 2000b. Sleepless since Seattle: What is the WTO about? Review of International Political Economy 7 (3): 466–474.
McMichael, P. 2005. Global development and the corporate food regime. In New directions in the sociology of global development, ed. F.H. Buttel and P. McMichael, 265–300. Amsterdam, The Netherlands: Elsevier.
Mujumdar, N.A. 2006. Introduction. In Indian agriculture in the new millennium: Changing perceptions and development policy, vol. 1, ed. N.A. Mujumdar and U. Kapila, 21–35. New Delhi, India: Academic Foundation Press.
Nair, R., D. McDonald, M. Chen, D. Gunasekera, and B. Fisher. 2006. The Cairns Group: Catalyst for agricultural reform. ABARE Research Paper 06.11.
Nerve India. 2008. No compromise on livelihood issues, Kamal Nath hits back at critics, Saturday, 26 July 2008. News item 253500149426 (On-line news service). http://www.nerve.in/news:253500149426. Accessed 17 Sep 2008.
OECD. 2008. Producer and consumer support estimates. OECD Database 1986–2007, Online resource. www.oecd.org/tad/support/psecse. Accessed 11 Sep 2008.
Oxfam. 2002. Rigged rules and double standards. Oxford, UK: Oxfam.
Pieterse, J.N. 2000. The World Trade Organisation after the battle of Seattle. Review of International Political Economy 7 (3): 465.
Potter, C. 2006. Competing narratives for the future of European agriculture: The agri-environmental consequences of neoliberalization in the context of the Doha Round. The Geographical Journal 172 (3): 190–196.
Pritchard, B. 1998. The emergent contours of the third food regime: Evidence from Australian dairy and wheat sectors. Economic Geography 74 (1): 64–74.
Pritchard, B. 2005. How the rule of the market rules the law: The political economy of WTO dispute settlement as evidenced in the US-Lamb Meat decision. Review of International Political Economy 12 (5): 776–803.
Private Sector Agricultural Task Force. 2002. Supporting document to the Agricultural Trade Taskforce Communique. World Food Summit of the FAO, 10–13 June.
Rosset, P.M. 2006. Food is different: Why we must get the WTO out of Agriculture. London, UK: Zed Books.
Sands, P. 2005. Lawless World. London, UK: Allen Lane.
United States Department of State. 2008. The Atlantic Charter. http://usinfo.state.gov/usa/infousa/facts/democrac/53.htm. Accessed 16 Sep 2008.
Wallerstein, I. 1974. The modern world-system. New York, NY: Academic Press.
Weiss, L., E. Thurbon, and J. Mathews. 2004. How to kill a country: Australia’s devastating trade deal with the United States. Sydney, Australia: Allen & Unwin.
Whalley, J. 2000. What can the developing countries infer from the Uruguay Round models for future negotiations. UNCTAD Policy Issues in International Trade and Commodities Series 4, United Nations Conference on Trade and Development, Geneva, Switzerland.
Williams, M. 2004. Contesting global trade rules: Social movements and the World Trade Organization. In Global tensions: Challenges and opportunities in the world economy, ed. L. Beneria and S. Bisnath, 193–206. New York, NY: Routledge.
Author information
Authors and Affiliations
Corresponding author
Rights and permissions
About this article
Cite this article
Pritchard, B. The long hangover from the second food regime: a world-historical interpretation of the collapse of the WTO Doha Round. Agric Hum Values 26, 297–307 (2009). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10460-009-9216-7
Received:
Accepted:
Published:
Issue Date:
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s10460-009-9216-7