Can Fairy Tales Come True? The Surprising Sotry of Neoliberalism and World Agriculture

The paper analyses the historical and ideological evolution of the implementation of neoliberal policies in the food sector and how this has been accompanied by the emergence of movements of resistance to these policies around the world. In tracing the evolution of neoliberalism and the framing of its major proponents, Hayek and Friedman, the author identifies the capacity of neoliberalism to resonate with the goals and projects of the owners of corporate financial capital as a key strength for its imposition as a self-evident truth. Linking economic and political freedom was pivotal and this notion adjusted into different contexts in different ways. The author identifies key stages and techniques for the imposition of neoliberalism around the world: enrolment, technologies of governance, strategies, financialisation, genetics and genomics, transport, nanotechnologies, ICT. 1- For the enrolment phase, two ideas were injected in the system via the economic model on the capital and financial actors on one hand and on the people on the other. The former were easily convinced by the prospect of being able to take decisions that were previously prevented by laws and regulations of the state, in their company boards and strategy sessions. The latter, where convinced through the idea that the expansion of the market to goods previously outside of the market system, would have ensured a better quality, reduced prices and would have overcome the inefficiency of the state. 2- Then the author identifies the key international institutions of the neoliberal project: the World Bank, the World Trade Organisation, the International Monetary Fund and the WIPO. The key organisation is the WTO: states adhering to it agree to limit tariffs and quotas, agree on international sanitary and phytosanitary standards, expand the scope of intellectual property rules and apply them to avoid non-tariff barriers to open the market to global trade. Dispute among members are settled through the dispute settlement process. It provides a global legal regime, dispossessing the States of their role of protecting their citizens, while augmenting the power of corporations to determine political economy policies. Some examples of the impact of these organisations in the world economy: multinational companies putting pressure on a State are able to push it to sue another state for not implementing patent agreements. In the agrifood sector producers like Monsanto have 23% of the share of the global patents; global trade in food and agriculture have increased from 135$ billion in 1961 to 12$ trillion in 2006; 70 buying desks for supermarket chains control most of Europe’s food supply and have extended their reach far beyond national borders. 3- Two strategies are fundamental for the expansion of the neoliberal project, even though they were not foreseen by the ideators of the neoliberal project: Supply Chain Management (SCM) and Tripartite Standards Regime (TSR). SCM implies the domination of the supply chain captain on the whole supply chain, which are the largest supermarkets. They organise they chain, but they require stringent standards to protect reputation. TSR consists of standards, accreditation and certifications, and has turned into a quasi-state, according to Foucault governmentality, which govern aspects of much of international trade. 4- The final technology of neoliberalism is the financialisation, the tendency of financial markets to dominate and for financial organisations to dictate conditions to those organisations involved in production. It has expanded in 4 interrelated ways: through the growing role of financial transactions in the everyday lives of the middle class; through financialisation of innovations, which are new sources of profit for financial institutions; the use of financial instruments in the restructuring of economies by the WB and the IMF; speculation on grain and oilseeds. 5- Investment in genetics and genomics, two highly individualising technologies, which compress time and space and increase the rate of turnover of capital, are well-suited to enclosures of private property. Research at the molecular level, supported by private institutions and not by the state together with the privatisation of the agricultural research. 6- Transportation has been neoliberalised through the imposition of standard containers and forms of de-regulation and re-regulation that have changed the landscaper of the transport sector, which has also been privatised. 7- nanotechnologies are another form of development tending to individualisation and allowing control on a very detailed level. The evolution of the bar codes is exemplar to understand the way neoliberalism permeates technology development. 8- information technologu (ICT) is the privileged technology of neoliberalism and permits the transformation of vast wuantities of information into data that are gathered and analysed by the central headquarter which may be very distant from the space where decisions based on data are implemented. Neoliberalism has taken different forms and shapes in different countries and there is no central place from where neoliberal policies have been directed. Neoliberals agree that the state should foster markets and quasi-markets while destroying collective forms of action but they disagree as to how to do so and what form these markets should take. Responses. The agri-food sector has reacted developing forms of resistance such as farmers’ markets, box schemes, community supported agriculture, organic agriculture, fair trade, slow food and so on, while general farm and commodity groups have attempted to maintain agricultural exceptions in world trade. Resistance has varied consistently in different places responding to different forms of neoliberalism. There has been a change slow but perceptible from petitioning the state for legal redress towards petitioning the private sector and in the nature of the NGOs themselves. the neoliberal state is far less likely to respond to popular protests than the previous liberal one and growing concentration, especially in the retail sector, has increased its vulnerability. Alternatives in California to develop a sustainable and just food system tended to employ by large neoliberal categories. Ngo advocates and other stakeholders play a constitutive role in producing the neoliberal outcomes of the project. Founders proved to be concerned in developing indicators of success as the advocates of neoliberalism. There has been a shift from membership organisations in which active participation is an essential part of membership, towards organisations where participation for most people consists in donating money. Some alternatives still require direct involvement by participants, but others such as fair trade and organic agriculture require most participants only nominal participation, usually in the form of seeking out logos of one sort or another before purchasing food items. Neoliberal insistence on the elimination of all forms of solidarities by their transformation into market exchanges.