International Perspectives on European Agricultural Policy Reform

1
International Perspectives on European
Agricultural Policy Reform

• Neo-liberalism, neo-mercantilism and
  multifunctionality as contested policy discourses

2
The Neo-Liberalization of European Agriculture

• Contemporary struggle to achieve international
  farm policy reform essentially about the drive to
  establish, resist or modify neo-liberalism as the
  dominant policy discourse
• The post-productivism debate is misleading in
  these terms it says little about underlying
  driving forces, falsely dichotomises structure
  and agency and evades some essential
  contradictions in the current policy conjunction

3
Agricultural restructuring as a socio-political
project

• Starting point for our analysis is the need to
  re-discover international restructuring of
  agriculture as a socio-political project centred
  on the struggle for power and influence by
  competing interests
• Recent theoretical debates polarised between
  agent-less food regime theory and the highly
  contingent, localistic formulations of ANT
• We argue for an integration of agency and
  structure by focussing on the strategies,
  deployments and discursive practices of interests
  groupings that are themselves constitutive of the
  capitalist relations of production

4
The importance of discourse and discursive modes
of regulation

• Role played by ideas, social framings and mental
  paradigms in the policymaking process now widely
  recognised
• At one level, all political battles are waged
  through discourse and selective deployment of
  myths and symbols
• In a regulationist sense, state favours and
  entrenches those discourses which become
  hegemonic to the extent that they command the
  stage

5
Agricultural neo-liberalism as a policy discourse

• Since early 1980s, neo-liberalism has emerged as
  a powerful source of ideas, justifications and
  policy programmes for the deregulation of the
  state
• Effect of structural change in agriculture has
  been to open up a division between
  state-assistance-dependant family producers and
  an agro-industry increasingly aligned with
  corporate capital
• Groupings such as ERT and CIAA have emerged as
  powerful advocates of a new discourse of
  agricultural liberalization centred on the
  disciplines and procedures of the WTO

6
The neo-liberal project

• At its heart, the aim of the neo-liberal project
  is to promote new discourses, subjectivities and
  ways of representing the world which establish
  the legitimacy of the market economy, the
  disciplinary state and an enterprise culture
  (Jessop, 2002, p467)

7
Defending the European Model of Agriculture

• Ability of entrenched farm interest groups to
  sustain a protectionist agricultural welfare
  state much commented on
• conditions in agriculture change, the numbers of
  farmers steadily declines, but attempts to map
  out a future direction for policy confront an
  institutional environment that (continues to)
  privilege the status quo (Sheingate, 2001, p241)
• Nevertheless, the WTO process, post-URAA, has
  offered a venue in which the neo-liberal project
  can be consolidated and taken forward
• Resistance to this agenda is strong - but
  diversely expressed

8
Counter Discourses Agricultural
Multifunctionality

• Advocates of a multifunctionality discourse seek
  to re-assert a social welfare justification for
  continued state support
• Narrowly defined, this emphasises the technical
  jointness of agri-environmental production and
  the need to secure environmental goods linked to
  farming
• Broadly interpreted, multifunctionality is seen
  to be an attribute of rural space and one of the
  main engines of consumption-driven? rural
  development

9
Counter Discourses Neo-mercantilism

• Starts from an essentially productivist
  conception of the farmers vocation function of
  state policy is to safeguard and underwrite
  productive capacity and export potential
• Historically, N-M provided the discursive
  rationale for community preference and export
  subsidisation
• Today, neo-mercantilist actors such as COPA speak
  of the need to safeguard the European Model of
  Agriculture through continued commodity support

10
Competing narratives for the future of European
agriculture

• Emerging policy stance in face of these competing
  claims is one which attempts to reconcile a
  dominant neo-liberal framing with continued
  commitment to state assistance in various forms
• Current two-pillar configuration of CAP reflects
  a roll-out agenda (Peck and Tickell)
• Sets the stage for regulation of an increasing
  bifurcated industry, comprising both productivist
  and post-productivist sectors
• Policy debate and contestation, meanwhile,
  becoming a three-level game, with various policy
  justifications being deployed to satisfy the
  demands of different constituencies and power
  networks

11
(No Transcript)
12
(No Transcript)
13
(No Transcript)
14
Conclusions II

• But where there are few opportunities to question
  the segregation and commodification of rural
  space that this implies