Shifts in Food Regimes, Regulation, and Producer Cooperatives: Insights from the Australian and US Dairy Industries

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Abstract
A prominent theme of recent agrifoods research has been the interpretation of current restructuring in terms of a collapse of the postwar food regime, and its incomplete replacement by one based around transnationally organised capital and regulatory structures. In this paper I argue that, for empirical research into concrete instances of agrifood restructuring, the food-regimes perspective is usefully augmented by conceptualising regulation as a contestable social practice—what Clark (1992) dubs as ‘real’ regulation. Evidence from the Australian and US dairy industries is used to illustrate this argument. In these sectors, producer cooperatives have successfully realigned their strategies in light of new conditions for capital accumulation, mitigating against the direct entry of transnational capital. This finding underlines the importance of specific regulatory contexts in determining outcomes of restructuring, and points to complex relationships between national and transnational capital in the agrifood system.