The Neoliberal Food Regime and Its Crisis: State, Agribusiness Transnational Corporations, and Biotechnology

Biotechnology has become the central technological form in agriculture since the neoliberal reformation of capitalism in the 1980s. The food-regime perspective introduced by Friedmann and McMichael (1989) anticipated a transition to a third regime from the second, nation-centred regime of the post-World War II years. This paper proposes a characterization of what is called the “neoliberal” food regime to capture its central dynamic components: the state, which promotes international and national neoregulation imposes the neoliberal agenda; large agribusiness transnational corporations (ATNCs), now the crucial economic actors in global capitalism; and biotechnology, the driver behind the modern agricultural paradigm.