第１章 ネットワーク、協定と地域：「食の世界」の理論化 第２章 農・食料のグローバル管理：政策、統率力及び協定 第３章 農業食品の「地理」—地域的特性 第４章 トスカーナ地方の地産食品の品質 第５章 カリフォルニア：競争的な農・食品システムの併存する世界 第６章 ウェールズにおける農食品の世界 第７章 産地なき食景観を超えて：産地、力および由来

In recent times, an apparent contradiction between high levels of output and improved food quality has arisen within the food sector. The development of mass food markets, alongside ‘Fordist’ methods of production and their associated economies of scale, has generated unprecedented abundance (Montanari 1994). Yet, at the same time, industrialisation processes have resulted, seemingly, in greater and greater product standardisation, so that differing foods are rendered more alike in terms of their manufactured content. This process of standardisation affects not just production, processing and retailing, but eating itself, so that meals now carry their industrial properties into the stomachs of modern consumers. Critics of the industrial approach to food provisioning argue that food quality is compromised both by the growing homogenisation of foodstuffs and by the increased health risks that emerge from within overly industrialised food production processes. The ensuing food scares provoke increased consumer concern about the conditions of food production (Griffiths and Wallace 1998) and, as a consequence, a sizeable and growing minority of consumers turn to alternative food sources. Fernandez-Armesto summarises this trend, at the end of his recent history of food (2001: 250), when he says that

Introduction 1. Networks, Conventions, and Regions: Theorizing 'Worlds of Food' 2. The Regulatory World of Agri-food: Politics, Power, and Conventions 3. Geographies of Agri-food 4. Localized Quality in Tuscany 5. California: The Parallel Worlds of Rival Agri-food Paradigms 6. The Commodity World in Wales 7. Beyond the Placeless Foodscape: Place, Power, and Provenance Bibliography Index

Chapters 1 and 2 have reviewed the contemporary theoretical and policy context of agri-food with specific reference to Europe and North America. In this chapter we turn our attention to the nature of the new agri-food geographies. What are the driving forces behind these geographies, and how do they play themselves out across time and space? This theme is central to the more detailed treatment of three different regions (Tuscany, California, and Wales) in succeeding chapters. Here, we introduce a conceptual framework that helps us to understand the new agri-food geographies. The chapter starts by outlining the nature of the conventional agri-industrial system. In general terms, we see this as a system that leads to a process of deterritorialization of foods. That is not to say that it comes without any actual geography; rather, its geographies are the result of corporate capitals’ attempts to continue to intensify and to appropriate some of the functions of agriculture in ways that stretch the links, networks, and chains between production and consumption spheres. We then place this trend in conceptual juxtaposition with the more recent forces of reterritorialization (or what some scholars term ‘relocalization’), a process whereby local and regional geographies come back again to play a central role in reshaping food production and consumption systems. We argue here that it is important to see these conflicting geographical forces as distinctive, even though both processes may indeed be operating—to varying degrees and in different ways—in the same region or locality at the same time. This is at the heart of our contingent notion of ‘worlds of food’. Throughout the twentieth century, agri-industrialism struggled with resolving Kautsky’s formulation of the agrarian question, that is, how to continue to intensify production and appropriate some farming functions in processing and agri-industry while at the same time maintaining some sort of ecological or natural balance in the agricultural transformation process (Kautsky, 1988; Goodman and Watts, 1997). In the agri-industrial model, the driving force was corporate capital.

The aim of this chapter is to explore the nature of the contemporary agri-food worlds—the conventional and the alternative—in California. More specifically, we ask: what are the variations within each world? What sources of contestation are leading to (1) convergence and potential appropriation by the dominant agri-industrial complex; or (2) separation and real ecological modernization; or (3) a sort of coexistence and spatial multifunctionality and regulation of the two systems? In this chapter we make some preliminary assessment of the agri-industrial pathway that distinctively marks out California as one of the most highly productivist agrarian regions in the world. This region has applied successive waves of capitalist and endogenous development, with or against a series of ‘obstacles’. As the literature has traditionally emphasized, the history of agri-food in California is the history of a tension within a regional brand of agrarian capitalism continually wrestling with its own contradictions between economic accumulation and social legitimacy. The chapter first examines the historical and contemporary dynamics of the agri-industrial paradigm as it has played itself out in this bountiful but peculiar agrarian space. Specifically, it describes how the agri-food system in California has (quite successfully) attempted to overcome ‘the obstacles’ of what we term ‘first’, ‘second’, and ‘third’ natures. More so than any other region, California has developed since 1849 an agri-industrial dynamic that continues to exploit its natural and social conditions in ways that sustain an exceptional and endogenous form of ‘agri-cultural economy’. After exploiting the natural resource ‘initial endowments’ through a very effective ‘extractive’ mode (i.e. ‘first nature’), the agri-industrial paradigm assembles a specific form of fictitious circulation of capital, goods, and services. This creates a ‘second nature’: a longstanding framework of flows of capital and labour, infrastructure and technologies, which provide a superstructure for the state to overcome the well-documented obstacles of labour and production time in the agri-food sphere. However dominant or celebrated this peculiar model becomes at the end of the twentieth century, we see another set of profound challenges ahead. These are ‘third nature’ obstacles which were in part created out of the very success of a century of Californian agri-industrialism.

The foregoing chapters bring us to the point where we can directly address the three themes that constitute the subtitle of the book—namely place, power, and provenance. Reflecting the binary thinking that pervades the agri-food literature—global versus local, embedded versus disembedded, conventional versus alternative, quantity versus quality, and so forth— these themes tend to be treated in a highly compartimentalized fashion, with place and provenance being the preserve of the alternative food literature, while power seems to be the proper object of analysis in the conventional food literature. This binary conceptual tradition has the effect of segmenting the food sector into unduly rigid and path-dependent worlds of production. It could even lead to the (erroneous) conclusion that the conventional food chain is inextricably tied to a particular world of production, invariably the Industrial World, while alternative food chains are embedded in, and tethered to, the Interpersonal World. To overcome this unwarranted division of labour, we propose to examine the roles of place, provenance, and power in both the conventional food chain and the ecological food chain. However, we also want to suggest that the borders between these worlds are more porous and much less static than the worlds of production literature sometimes implies, leaving open the possibility that firms and regions can move from one world to another. Each world of production may have its own nuanced regulatory environment, where a specific mix of rules, regulations, and quality conventions defines its distinctive milieu, but all worlds are subject to some meta-regulatory trends that are emerging in the global food sector, two of which have the potential to induce significant changes. For the sake of simplicity, we shall refer to these meta-regulatory trends as the new moral economy on the one hand and the neo-liberal economy on the other. Taken in isolation, these regulatory trends could trigger very different trajectories of development, with major implications for place, power, and provenance in the food chain, because the former involves reregulating the food sector, while the latter aims to deregulate it.

From farm to fork, the conventional food chain is under enormous pressure to respond to a whole series of new challenges - food scares in rich countries, food security concerns in poor countries, and a burgeoning problem of obesity in all countries. As more and more people demand to know where their food comes from, and how it is produced, issues of place, power, and provenance assume increasing significance for producers, consumers, and regulators, challenging the corporate forces that shape the 'placeless foodscape'. Far from being confined to niche products, questions about the origins of food are also surfacing in the conventional sector, where labelling has become a major political issue. Drawing on theories of multi-level governance, three leading scholars in the field explore the geo-politics of the food chain in different spatial arenas: the World Trade Organization, where free trade principles clash with fair trade concerns in the debate about agricultural reform; the European Union, where producers are under pressure from environmentalists for a more traceable and sustainable food system; and the US, where there is a striking contradiction between the rhetoric of free markets and the reality of a heavily subsidised farming sector. To understand the local impact of these global trends, the authors explore three different regional worlds of food: the traditional world of localised quality in Tuscany, the peripheral world of commodity production in Wales, and the frontier world of agri-business in California.

As the first industrial nation, the UK was one of the earliest countries to experience the industrialization of agriculture, a process that led to an unprecedented increase in productivity, with more and more food produced by fewer and fewer people. Early exposure to intensive food production clearly left an abiding cultural legacy; to this day, one of the proudest boasts of the British food industry is that it renders cheap food to the consuming public at ever lower prices. This production ethos was both cause and consequence of a mainstream consumption culture which sets a high premium on price and treats food more as fuel than as pleasure. In his thousandyear history of British food, Spencer (2002) caught this aesthetic perfectly when he suggested that the British ‘were unexcited by the food they ate, but they knew that they had to get on and eat the wretched stuff’. In its attachment to cheap, processed food, the UK is far closer to the US, the quintessential fast-food nation, than to Italy, France, or Spain, countries where there continues to be a strong cultural appetite for fresh, local, and seasonal food. Although Britain’s cheap-food culture has complex and manifold causes, its origins lie in the early period of industrialization, especially in the system of colonial preferences from the Commonwealth countries, which created a low-cost template for locally produced food. In other words, the global–local interplay that did so much to shape economy and society in Britain also influenced the economics of food production and the culture of food consumption. To a greater extent than in other European countries, the supermarkets have become the key players in shaping food consumption patterns in the UK. As in California, retailer power is now the key to understanding the enormous asymmetries of power that punctuate the British agri-food chain from farm to fork. One reason why supermarkets seem to wield so much more power in the UK than their analogues in other countries is that there is less countervailing power at the production end of the UK food chain.

Introduction Between the local and the global: Confronting complexity in the contemporary food sector. (Terry Marsden and Jonathan Murdoch). SECTION 1 Network Theories and Political Economy: From Attrition to Convergence? (John Wilkinson). Audit Cultures and the Antipodes: the Implications of EurepGAP for New Zealand and Australian Agri-food Industries (Hugh Campbell, Geoffrey Lawrence and Kiah Smith). Differentiated Standardization, Standardized Differentiation: The Complexity of the Global Agrifood System. (Maki Hatanaka, Carmen Bain, Lawrence Busch). Neoliberalism and the problem of space: competing rationalities of governance in fair trade and mainstream agri-environmental networks. (Stewart Lockie and Michael Goodman). SECTION 2 Post-rural processes in wealthy rural areas: hybrid networks and symbolic capital. (Gianluca Brunori). Highlighting the retro side of innovation and its potential for regime change in agriculture. (Marian Stuiver). The Dynamics of Local Development: From Hunger to Quality Food. Cases from North Eastern Brazil. (Josefa Salete Barbosa Cavalcanti). Slow Foods Presidia: What Do Small Producers Do with Big Retailers? (Maria Fonte). Just Values or Just Value? Remaking the Local in Agro-Food Studies. (E. Melanie DuPuis, David Goodman and Jill Harrison). Exploring dimensions of qualities in food. (Egil Petter Straete and Terry Marsden). Alternative Food Networks in the South West of England: Towards a New Agrarian Eco-economy? (Roberta Sonnino and Terry Marsden). The strategic turn of Organic Farming in Europe: from a resource based to an entrepreneurial approach of Organic Marketing Initiatives. (B. Sylvander and N. Schieb-Bienfait).

With its rolling hills, small farms, diverse products, and high-quality foodstuffs, Tuscany easily conjures up a world of diversification and localization. In fact, so many of the region’s products are seen as world class—notably its wines, olive oils, cheeses, and processed meats—that it is tempting to see this region as the prime example of an Interpersonal World (in Salais and Storper’s terms). Yet, Tuscany’s perceived success in this world of food is a recent phenomenon. Until the 1990s the region was thought to be rather ‘backward’ in character, mainly due to its inability to adopt conventional industrial approaches to food production and processing. While some effort was made to shift Tuscany on to a more industrialized development path during the 1960s and 1970s, by the early 1990s this was widely regarded as having failed. Out of this failure, however, came the search for a new development model, one that could work with, rather than against, the region’s core assets—notably, its localized variety in foodstuffs and environmental features. Thus, a distinctively Tuscan approach to the agri-food sector is explicitly identified in the recent Rural Development Plan (RDP) drawn up by the Tuscan regional government. The document states that the strategy elaborated in the plan is aiming at ‘strengthening the ‘‘Tuscan model’’ of agricultural and rural development’. The plan goes on to identify key characteristics of the model, including the presence of small and mediumsized farms, the existence of quality products, the diversification of agricultural production, the provision of adequate marketing networks, and the enhancement of the environment and the agricultural landscape (Regione Toscana, 2000). It is tempting to imagine that the consolidation of a diversified and localized world of food production in Tuscany owes much to the implementation of this model by governmental authorities in concert with other actors in the food sector. However, it will be argued below that the emergence of a new world of food in Tuscany owes as much to happenstance as it does to the conscious agency of differing institutions and organizations.

The history of agriculture in developed countries over the past seventy years is first and foremost a political history because of the intense interplay between farming and the state. Indeed, it is difficult to think of any other ‘industry’ which has been so comprehensively regulated by the state, over such a long period of time, as agriculture. Even neo-liberal governments in OECD countries have accepted the political compact between farming and the state on account of the ‘exceptionalism’ of agriculture. The rationale for its exceptional status might vary from country to country, but it invariably has something to do with one major aspect that distinguishes agriculture from all other industries: the fact that we ingest its products. In other words, the centrality of agriculture to human health is far and away the most important reason why many countries have sought to ensure a measure of food security by protecting their national farm sectors through permutations of production subsidies, price supports, and import controls—the origins of which stretch back to the 1930s in the case of the US and as far back as the nineteenth-century Corn Laws in the case, for example, of the UK. Agricultural history can be read in a number of different ways. The most polarized readings are the productivist and the ecological interpretations. The productivist discourse, which emphasizes the phenomenal productivity gains that have been achieved since the Second World War, is essentially a story of unalloyed economic success due to a tripartite alliance of state, science, and farmers. The ecological discourse, by contrast, points not to the economic benefits of the post-war productivity miracle, but to the social and environmental costs of agricultural intensification. In the US, where intensive farming practices are most advanced, such problems as soil erosion and animal welfare were attributed to the regulatory regime operated by the United States Department of Agriculture (USDA), which actively encouraged unsustainable farming practices. Similar connections have been made in Europe, where the Common Agricultural Policy (CAP) was deemed to be the main culprit.