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There is no single undertaking regulating food assistance at the international level. International food assistance is regulated by a patchwork of rules emanating from different institutions and normative arrangements. This study aims to explore how international law shapes international food assistance. How is international law regulating food assistance, considering this patchwork of institutions and norms? What dominant narratives enshrined in legal agreements shape the evolution of international food assistance?

The author uses the concept of “regime complex”, which allows analyzing partially overlapping and nonhierarchical regimes governing a particular issue, shedding light on the narratives and institutional arrangements that lead to the consolidation of international rules. The author identifies two main regimes that govern international food assistance: the food assistance regime and the food trade regime.

The author shows that using the “regime complex” concept clarifies the evolution of international food assistance, highlighting that international law is a crucial element in shaping international food assistance and showing that the two main institutional regimes governing it interact and shape rules along three main themes: the centrality of donor States’ self-interests, the relationship between international food assistance and trade liberalization and the goal of achieving food security for the beneficiaries.

Using the regime complex concept, the author brings new light on the broader institutional and legal framework influencing the governance of international food assistance, showing that different regimes take part in its shaping.

This paper suggests that a corporate-environmental food regime is emerging as part of a larger restructuring of capitalism. Like past food regimes, it reflects specific social and political compromises, which I interpret through the social movement concept of interpretive frames. The diasporic-colonial food regime of 1870–1914 grew up in response to working class movements in Europe, and created a historically unprecedent class of commercial family farmers. When world markets collapsed, those farmers entered into new alliances, including one that led to the mercantile-industrial food regime of 1947–1973. Lineaments of a new food regime based on quality audited supply chains seems to be emerging in the space opened by impasse in international negotiations over food standards. Led by food retailers, agrofood corporations are selectively appropriating demands of environmental, food safety, animal welfare, fair trade, and other social movements that arose in the interstices of the second food regime. If it consolidates, the new food regime promises to shift the historical balance between public and private regulation, and to widen the gap between privileged and poor consumers as it deepens commodification and marginalizes existing peasants. Social movements are already regrouping and consolidation of the regime remains uncertain.

The corporate food regime is presented here as a vector of the project of global development. As such, it expresses not only the social and ecological contradictions of capitalism, but also the world-historical conjuncture in which the deployment of price and credit relations are key mechanisms of ‘accumulation through dispossession.’ The global displacement of peasant cultures of provision by dumping, the supermarket revolution, and conversion of land for agro-exports, incubate ‘food sovereignty’ movements expressing alternative relationships to the land, farming and food.

Purpose – This chapter responds to the re-centering of agriculture and food in official forums and public discourse in the current crisis context.

Design – It re-examines the assumptions of the agrarian question through the lens of food regime analysis.

Findings – By examining these developments, particularly the recommendations of the IAASTD report, it is clear there is growing interest in the multifunctional conception of farming that is attentive to ecological and social sustainability.

Research implications – This rethinking is symptomatic of a transformation of the agrarian question: moving away from a concern with the political trajectory of capital in agriculture and the process of depeasantization, towards a concern with ‘peasant’ renewal. This registers an ontological shift towards an agro-ecological paradigm in which an ecologically driven conception of ‘value’ addressing social reproduction rather than capital accumulation is emerging.

Practical implications – New research on “repeasantization” undergirds this claim, and complements the global mobilization of small farmers around the project of food sovereignty. Practically, food sovereignty projects mean growing land rights claims and adoption of diverse forms of biological (rather than chemical) farming.

Social implications – This implies stabilizing rural populations and the possibility of health food and environments.

Value – Intellectually, such developments call for an analytical shift (in food regime and other analyses) towards values other than those of price and productivism in assessing the contribution of agriculture to human survival in a climate-challenged future.

This chapter considers the place of responsibility in confronting ecological sustainability and social equity problems in the food system. We present two illustrations addressing the following question: In what ways does responsibility present a way to close the metabolic rift in line with the vision of the global food sovereignty movement? First, using the example of Metro-Vancouver in Canada, we consider the ways in which urban people claim responsibility for land protection through the concept of urban agrarianism, defined as an urban ethic of care for foodlands, with an associated responsibility to exercise solidarity with those who cultivate and harvest food. Second, we discuss how deepening relational responsibility in legal and regulatory frameworks might hold the corporate food regime accountable in the Canadian context to address their role in and responsibility for mitigating an increasingly risky world, as evidenced by the COVID-19 pandemic. We argue that the responsibility of urban people to mobilise in solidarity with food movements, and against the corporate food regime in particular, will play a critical role in supporting the transition to sustainable and just food systems. This applies both to finding new ways to claim responsibility for this transition and to hold those actors that have disproportionately benefitted from the corporate food regime responsible. Such a reworking of responsibility is especially necessary as the context for food systems change becomes increasingly urbanised and risky.

The potential impact of farmer's innovations for the development of food regimes is the topic of this chapter. Two case studies analysed from the perspective of strategic niche management show that there is niche formation visible as an alternative to the dominant modern food regime. These innovations are based upon the active rediscovery of marginalised and often forgotten knowledge and result in effective linkages between old and new knowledge. This retro side of innovations can have a large potential for developing viable alternatives for rural development. Social scientists play an important role in the understanding of the retro side of innovations and its potential and influence on the prevailing knowledge and information systems inside and outside of the scientific domain.

Purpose – This chapter introduces the book collection and sets the theoretical framework for the subsequent chapters.

Design/methodology/approach – The approach of the book is to re-interpret major challenges to global agriculture – particularly climate change and the food crisis of 2008 – as demonstrating shocks to the resilience of global food systems.

Findings – Using resilience to shocks as a key quality of food systems enables recent crises to be understood as central to the ongoing dynamics of food systems rather than simply atypical events. Alongside climate change and food security, other potential shocks are identified: biosecurity, energy, financial and volcanic.

Originality/value – This framework establishes new criteria for examining the potential merit of multifunctional and neo-liberal policy regimes with world food systems.

This introduction provides an overview of the discourse on alternative agrifood movements (AAMs) to (1) ascertain the degree of convergence and divergence around a common ethos of alterity and (2) context the chapters of the book. AAMs have increased in recent years in response to the growing legitimation crisis of the conventional agrifood system. Some agrifood researchers argue that AAMs represent the vanguard movement of our time, a formidable counter movement to global capitalism. Other authors note a pattern of blunting of the transformative qualities of AAMs due to conventionalization and mainstreaming in the market. The literature on AAMs is organized following a Four Questions in Agrifood Studies (Constance, 2008) framework. The section for each Question ends with a case study to better illustrate the historical dynamics of an AAM. The literature review ends with a summary of the discourse applied to the research question of the book: Are AAMs the vanguard social movement of our time? The last section of this introduction provides a short description of each contributing chapter of the book, which is divided into five sections: Introduction; Theoretical and Conceptual Framings; Food Sovereignty Movements; Alternative Movements in the Global North; and Conclusions.

Over the last years, the olive oil produced in the Mediterranean countries has obtained growing success in international markets. Olive oil has benefited from the growing appetite of European and World consumers for products that are part of the so-called Mediterranean diet. For centuries, the olive crops were vital for communities that have occupied the territories bordering the Mediterranean Sea. Despite this long historical drive, this chapter analyses changes that took place since the Second World War. It is recognized that in the decades that followed the end of the war the transformation of western agriculture and rural societies together with commercial and cultural transnational connections have accelerated. Even in peripheral areas, such as Portugal, different processes of globalization have developed, making it necessary to identify the mechanisms that have established the connections to distant territories. Focused on the Portuguese case, this chapter examines how olive oil has contributed to inserting this peripheral territory in the global trade network. A path analysis of this crop is used as a lens to observe how various factors (political, ecological, technical, commercial, social and institutional) have been combined to inhibit or stimulate the inclusion of these rural territories in the dynamics of globalization.

The complex value chain that facilitates local food production and consumption includes purveyors positioned across a range of marketspaces who through the various ways they present and sell their products help create and convey the meaning of “local food.” Limited governance within local food systems (LFSs) and a lack of consensus on the definition of “local food” provide purveyors with notable latitude in how they frame the meaning of “local” in the food products they produce, market, and sell. Consequently, the expansion of food products that are framed as being “local” within conventional marketspaces threatens to convolute the meaning and representation of local food within specific LFSs and across the broader local food movement (LFM). Here, I use a structured photo analysis design to explore the elements that influence the visual representation of “local food” by purveyors within five farmers’ markets and five grocery stores located across the Southern Arizona LFS (SALFS). I consider the farmers’ markets to be alternative marketspaces and the grocery stores to be conventional marketspaces. The data consist of 683 original photos taken of local food framing practices within the farmers’ markets and grocery stores and extensive field notes captured throughout multiple direct observations at each market space. My exploration is guided by a theoretical framework composed of constructs specific to institutional logic, product framing, and taste regimes. The findings illustrate how local food framing practices across alternative and mainstream marketspaces foster a local food taste regime that fails to convey the fundamental principles and values of the LFM. Recommendations for both practice and research are developed from the findings.