Agriculture Reference
In-Depth Information
credited with entrenhing a particular model of intensive industrial agriculture that
is ecologically unsustainable (McNeill, 2000).
The economic, institutional, and political power of these corporate entities (as
well as the wider farming constituencies that became embedded around this partic-
ular model of Second Food Regime agriculture) has ensured that the subsidized, ex-
port/commodity approah to sustaining US farmer livelihoods has endured well bey-
ond the Cold War - and through a series of crises, wider trade policy shifts, political
administrations and hanges of economic orthodoxy. It largely endures not because
it helps solve world hunger in its destination markets, but because it secures a par-
ticular level of livelihood for US farmers and a particular level of profitability for US
agri-corporates.
The European model
Emerging out of the Marshall Plan's reconstruction of the European economy, the
European Common Market (and soon the Common Agricultural Policy (CAP)) took
a strikingly different path to that of the US agri-corporate model.
Concentrating on subsidizing the productivity of local agricultural producers,
European food products were initially intended for the domestic (European-wide)
market. This market was protected by significant tariffs, with subsequent elaboration
of governance mehanisms suh as Appellations, Geographical Indicators and no-
tions like 'terroir' also privileging local production in the local market. When sig-
nificant food surpluses emerged in the 1960s and 70s, the EU did not pursue export
markets as the only solution to disposing of surplus production (although it did not
entirely ignore this option either). Rather, a complex series of reforms and negoti-
ations that both pre-dated and occurred in parallel to the GATT Uruguay Round
(1985-1995), culminated in the McSharry Reforms of 1992. These represented an at-
tempt to mitigate the full hallenge of the trade liberalization that was being mobil-
ized against European agriculture in the GATT negotiations. The tactic of negotiat-
ors to agree to a process of removal of tariff protection around the European market
by some distant date also bought time to allow the elaboration of a particular farm-
ing model that could enable Europe to continue as a leading member of the WTO
(World Trade Organization) while still protecting the livelihoods of its domestic pro-
ducers.
The particular European model for supporting domestic agriculture that emerged
from this period is often termed 'multifunctionality'. Deployed as an explicit
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