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history, could only exist through international trade and would suffer the most from
the collapse of the regime' (Friedmann, 2005, p. 236). In product terms, this
involved the addition of two new wage foods - red meat and wheat. When world
markets collapsed in the 1920s and 1930s, those farmers entered into new alliances,
including one settlement that led to the mercantile-industrial or second food regime,
from the late 1940s into the 1970s. This regime was an aid-based order that para-
doxically fuelled the emergence of the livestock complex - a mix of feed producers,
feedlot technology and intensive livestock producers. In an inversion of the fi rst
food regime where grain came from around the world to the core, the mid-20th
century saw wheat being sent from the core to the developing world as food aid.
Within geography Le Heron and Roche (1995) and Roche et al. (1999) explored
whether a 'fresh' food regime around fruit and vegetables existed, concluding that
while theoretically appealing, empirical evidence was insuffi cient.
Friedmann (2005) and McMichael (2005) now hold that food regimes should be
regarded as emerging from the politics around competing ideas (e.g., social move-
ments), contending with powerful institutions of rule and wealth. The period
between the fi rst and second food regimes thus deserves as much attention as the
food regimes themselves. This revised view exposes the struggles over framing issues
and understandings (Fagan, 2005). This emphasises change rather than stability and
reminds us that regimes are provisional compromises among some of the contending
social actors who manage to create a new interpretive framework in common. In
keeping with this view two moments in the 20th century were especially signifi cant
- for what was lost as well as what was gained. The fi rst was 1947 when the inter-
nationalist World Food Organisation, planned during World War II as a way
forward given the protectionist trade policies of the 1930s, failed to secure support
from the USA. Instead, a US-dominated and US-advantageous framework was
adopted. The second was the advent of the World Trade Organisation in 1995 and
the signing of the Agreement on Agriculture. This moment is considered critical in
destabilising the second food regime because new developments in commodity cir-
cuits are possible.
Globalised (Le Heron, 1993) and globalising (Goodman and Watts, 1997) agri-
culture and food refers not to 'the entirety of agriculture across the world but a
transnational space of corporate agriculture and food relations integrated by com-
modity circuits' (McMichael, 2005, p. 284). Developments in this space include:
agriculture reframed as production for trade, food security responsibility delegated
to households and villages, decimation of peasant agriculture through appropriation
of land and switching to export production, the targeting of the Third World
(urban) consumers, loss of local biodiversity of food sources, minimal intergovern-
mental intervention, selective adoption of economic standards (national standards
lower than private standards) and so on. The top 30 supermarket grocery chains in
the world control an estimated 33 percent of all global sales (Burch and Lawrence,
2007, 21). The authority vested in these supermarkets has arisen from strategies
involving trust building through associations with 'valued institutions, practices,
people and portfolios of products and services . . . supply chain control is pivotal to
the supermarkets ability to perform its role as guardian of household and family
life' (Dixon, 2007, p. 48). The goal of international retailers is to be able to trade
freely across borders and set up their preferred retail formats without restrictive
national legislation. Reardon and Swinnen (2004) document this trend internation-
ally. Campbell and Le Heron (2007, p. 149) qualify this, concluding that 'while a
