The Neoliberal Food Regime in Crisis?

Abstract

Until the turn of the new millennium, neoliberalism appeared to be carrying all before it, without serious contradiction for this regime of accumulation. The collapse of state communism and the opening up of China and other centres of super-cheap labour as manufacturing zones for Northern transnational corporations enabled the attack on labour in the imperium to be mitigated by the import of ‘cheaps’ from the global South. As we have seen, this served a crucial legitimation function as well as maintaining satisfactory consumption levels in the global North. Environmental contradictions of productivist agriculture, of manufacturing, and of energy production in the imperium could also be mitigated through shifting these activities to the periphery. As the first decade of the new millennium progressed, however, a variety of contradictions, in terms of capital accumulation, in terms of the supply of basic needs to the global majority (perhaps most notably food), and in terms of the biophysical fabric of the planet and resource supply (all the while representing contradictions of capital for the subaltern classes and extra-human nature), began to ‘come home to roost’ as mounting contradictions for capital, and for neoliberalism in particular.