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maintenance (Maye et al., 2007). Strong warnings, however, are being made about
the geographic and social exclusivity of alternative food networks originating
from the European and North American contexts (Abrahams, 2007). Such analyses
stress the diversity of economic relations (Gibson-Graham, 2006). Third, a strand
of research involving 'following the commodity' and representing the encounters
that emanate from such a research methodology (e.g., bananas, beans, chicken,
coffee beans, cut fl owers, tomatoes, papaya) has thrown new light on mobilising
political possibilities around new visions of agri-food relations (Cook et al., 2006).
Fourth, conventions theory emphasising the multiplicity of motivations and evalu-
ations in economic relations (Rosin, 2008) has given additional understandings of
the coordination of particular agri-food chains. Fifth, new research on fi sheries
management has extended the frontiers into ecological issues relating to food
(Mansfi eld, 2003; Le Heron et al., 2008). Sixth, a post-production thread is address-
ing multifunctionality of land use in the context of reduced production subsidies
(Wilson, 2005). Finally, a number of studies have explored how the research
agenda might be shifted, by recognising the social construction of international
food (Arce and Marsden, 1993), what happens to differently structured commodity
chains under competition (Morgan and Murdoch, 2000), the need to resist aban-
doning political economy and instead utilising post-structural insights (Marsden
2000), leading to the conclusion that only new styles of politics will produce endur-
ing alternative outcomes.
Given the wide acceptance of the supply chain idea, what do we know about
changes in food supply chain drivers? In the 1960s-1970s, for instance, companies
strove to develop new products and processes and cut prices, as national competi-
tion intensifi ed from merger waves that led to bigger units and spawned the emer-
gence of supermarket power. More recently, other factors have affected supply chain
actors - privatisation, information technology, internationalisation, retailer-driven
choice, risk containment, brands and concentration of supermarket power, full cost
accounting, water shortages, fuel price rises, low-cost versus ethical and healthy
products, ethical and fair trade sourcing, the rise of corporate social responsibility
and so on. Supply chain pressure come in part from the falling proportion of house-
hold expenditure going on food. In the UK, this went from 24 percent in 1970 to
8 percent in 2006 (Bowyer and Lang, 2006).
Food regimes
The food regimes concept captures the patterning and dynamics of investment tra-
jectories and the behaviours of a multiplicity of actors that underlie such arrange-
ments. Friedmann (2005, p. 228) defi nes a food regime as 'a specifi c constellation
of governments, corporations, collective organisations and individuals that allow
renewed accumulation of capital based on shared defi nitions of social purpose by
key actors while marginalising others'. Early food regime writing distinguished two
regimes. The latest work argues that a third food regime is perhaps cohering, though
its dimensions are by no means clear or its existence certain.
The fi rst food regime, from the 1870s to World War I saw the rise of food and
fi bre fl ows, under colonial relationships from peripheral resource areas to the
expanding metropolitan core of Europe and North America. This was in response
to working-class movements in Europe and created a historically unprecedented
class of commercial family farmers. These 'family farms which had never existed in
