Agriculture Reference
In-Depth Information
ture mid-nineteenth century, the agreement of the US and Europe (along with other
key countries suh as Japan) to allow agriculture to enter discussion in the Uruguay
Round of the GATT in 1985 signalled a possible step-hange in global trade in ag-
ricultural products. While both the US and Europe found mehanisms to blunt the
effect of potential trade liberalization, other countries - notably the 'Cairns Group'
of free traders - embraced the new liberalized trade model as the way to secure
sustainable livelihoods for their farmers. Foremost among these countries was New
Zealand - whih provides some kind of paradigm of the 'neoliberal' model of secur-
ing agricultural livelihoods.
New Zealand was not always a free trade advocate. Until the entry of the UK
into the European Common Market in 1973, New Zealand - as a faithful ex-colony
- had enjoyed unfetered access to the lucrative UK market. Under this privileged
arrangement, New Zealand agriculture had solidiied its nihe in world agricultural
trade via the mehanism of 'single-desk' producer boards and extensive state invest-
ment into agricultural R&D. The loss of privileged market access to the UK in 1973
created a major crisis for whih the neoliberal model, apparently, provided the solu-
tion.
The rapid adoption of neoliberal policies in agriculture provoked an even deeper
crisis (for a review see Campbell and Lawrence, 2003), although many commentators
(including this author) have been surprised at the degree to whih a medium-term
recovery took shape around a particular model of high-value, quality-audited pro-
duce directed towards high-end multiple retailers in markets like Europe and the US
(see Campbell, 2009).
At the heart of the New Zealand model lies a dynamic identiied by Pek and
Tikell (2002) as 'roll bak' and 'roll out' neoliberalism. According to this shema, the
irst phase of neoliberal reform involves a rolling bak of state regulatory functions
and structures to 'liberate the market'. When this turns out to be less than success-
ful (or blatantly dysfunctional), a 'roll out' phase takes place in whih new forms of
governance and organizational experiments begin to fill the gap left by the removal
of state regulation. In the case of New Zealand, the roll out phase involved the pro-
liferation of forms of private sector governance within agri-food systems (Le Heron,
2003), whih reintegrated New Zealand's food export industries into wider forma-
tions of new economic and governance arrangements (Larner and Le Heron, 2004).
This new style of integration into world food markets has been peculiarly powerful
for those food export industries that have moved into the high-value, quality-audited
