This chapter examines the implications of the 1997-1998 currency crisis from the perspective of the fast food industry in Southeast Asia, and describes some of the impacts this has had, or is likely to have, on local production and processing sectors. Fordism, as an organising principle for production, has long been recognised as a revolutionary concept which separated twentieth-century manufacturing from previous eras of capitalism. The CP Group had long been involved in the production of high quality animal feed, and the establishment of vertically-coordinated poultry production enabled it to both expand the market for its feed and to open up new lines of business in the export of frozen poultry to Japan. As in Thailand, the CP Group also had franchise rights over the 7-Eleven chain of convenience stores in Shanghai and elsewhere, and established a number of branches of its wholly-owned chain of chicken restaurants known as Chester's Grill.

Globalisation of food production, processing and retailing focuses our attention on social and economic relations between large-scale, often international, companies and local communities. We need to focus also on emerging and intensifying conflicts between mining and agriculture when the extraction of natural resources such as coal, limestone, or coal seam gas intersects with productive farmland and rural settlements. The ‘local’ and the ‘global’ are tied together in these issues, and ever more so as neoliberal policies are embraced by national governments in ways that tend to dissuade or dismantle regulatory hurdles or oversight for international agri-food and mining developments, and the social and environmental impacts of projects at local levels. Rural communities and regions in these circumstances are ‘contested terrains’, where accessing natural resources can add economic benefit and social vitality to rural areas. However, the risks of degradation of underground and surface water systems, air and land quality, valued rural landscapes, cultural heritage and the social sustainability of rural communities are costs often tied to these benefits. Relations of social power and trust (or distrust) characterise collaboration and conflict between community groups and individuals, company managers and responsible government agencies as they negotiate the risks and benefits of project development. Addressing social and environmental justice dimensions of economic objectives is a necessary focus of actor relations, and informs our understanding of sustainability, which we define as balancing economic goals with social and environmental justice. Powerful companies can push projects through local and national resistance. Yet their power is institutionally limited and project development across food and mining sectors is, to varying degrees, contingent upon the relationships corporate actors generate and maintain with local people. We examine here in particular the ways that mobilised local groups can influence access to natural resources, and how related costs and benefits are distributed.

The authors present a summary discussion of an empirical model of project-specific power sharing in a partnership between an international cement company and local community groups. Although the project is ongoing and large amounts of data are yet to be presented, we argue that meeting environmental and business sustainability goals are possible in these types of relationships. Managing the environmental and social impacts of natural resource extraction is a critical dimension of environmental sustainability, defined in this paper as 'balancing economic objectives with social and environmental justice' (Hoppe, Rickson and Burch 2007). Distributive justice is central to social and environmental assessment, and its variants such as risk assessment, even if, as many scholars have found, in the study of resource dependent communities, these concerns remain in a state of 'cumulative inattention' (Freudenberg 1976:8, cited in Krannich 2012). We address the question of whether and how equity or justice is or can be an essential dimension of project development strategies by private companies, public agencies and local communities. If it is, then social relations are essential to negotiating differences among parties equally dependent upon a natural resource for benefit of or dependent upon the behavior of the other to measure and mitigate the environmental and social 'harms' associated with large-scale resource development. Negotiations, in these circumstances, are formal conversations, based upon policy and law, encompassing economic and environmental considerations deeply embedded in social relations. Conversations occurring in local project sites between company managers, government officials and community groups are often 'face to face' and intense, involving historical antecedents conditioning how the actors think, believe and act. If economic and environmental relations are embedded in social relations, then impact management, like sustainability, has to be seen as a dynamic process based upon social interaction between affected parties. This process is often intense and responsive to changes across biophysical conditions, cultural locations and, most importantly, time. Social equity, like environmental sustainability, is a stated, if idealistic goal of resource development. Concepts promoting equity in development are found in corporate mission statements, public policy and law. They constitute a set of moral

This article examines the way in which an environmental ‘problem’ comes to be constructed as such. It takes as a case study the issue of sand and gravel aggregate extraction from the Brisbane River, in South-east Queensland, and analyses how this came to be defined as a ‘problem’ requiring a policy response on the part of key decision-makers, including concrete companies, local and state government agencies, riverside residents and environmental groups. The dispute over whether dredging should be labeled as an environmental problem is analysed using the theory of environmental claims-making, which provides an analytical structure for identifying the three major stages through which environmental problems are constructed, namely: assembling, presenting and contesting claims. In addition, we discuss the process of ‘non-decision making’ by which certain policy options are ruled out from consideration and political action. Data were collected from interviews with key players in the dredging dispute, and were combined with analysis of relevant documents and newspaper articles. The environmental claims-making analysis illustrates the way that environmental problems are socially constructed and therefore can be fully understood only when placed in their social, cultural and political context.

For the past two decades there has been much debate about the future of family farming. The basic question on which this debate has turned is whether current pressures on family farm systems should be understood as symptomatic of a terminal condition, in which farmers are replaced progressively by corporate ownership; or whether family farms will persist as a social formation, albeit increasingly subsumed by off-farm interests. Using evidence from the Australian processing tomato sector, this article documents the changing social and economic formation of ‘family farming’. We argue that in this industry, the appropriate way to describe farmers is through the deployment of that a new category of farming; farm family entrepreneurs. This phrase is coined to describe the situation where family units remain at the social and economic heart of farm ownership and operation, but in the context where they relate to their land-based assets through legal and financial structures characteristic of the wider economy. As this article explores, this formation seems to represent an accommodating modus operandi for farm units within neo-liberal agricultural governance. Nevertheless, however, this duality of family-based structures and capitalist entrepreneurialism inevitably provokes a series of tensions, whose resolution requires a variety of organizational strategies to be put in place.