Resistance to the Neoliberal Agri-Food Regime A Critical Analysis Earthscan Food and Agriculture Series

This volume explores the contents, forms, and actors that characterize current opposition to the corporate neoliberal agri-food regime. Designed to generate a coherent, informed and updated analysis of resistance in agri-food, empirical and theoretical contributions analyze the relationship between expressions of the neoliberal corporate system and various projects of opposition.

Contributions included in the volume probe established forms and rationales of resistance including civic agriculture, consumer- and community-based initiatives, labor, cooperative and gender-based protest, struggles in opposition to land grabbing and mobilization of environmental science and ecological resistance. The core contribution of the volume is to theorize and to empirically assess the limits and contradictions that characterize these forms of resistance. In particular, the hegemonic role of the neoliberal ideology and the ways in which it has ?captured? processes of resistance are illustrated. Through the exploration of the tension between legitimate calls for emancipation and the dominant power of Neoliberalism, the book contributes to the ongoing debate on the strengths and limits of Neoliberalism in agri-food. It also engages critically with the outputs and potential outcomes of established and emerging resistance movements, practices, and concepts.

Introduction Part I: The Corporate Domination of Agri-Food 1. Is Resistance Futile? How Global Agri-Food Attempts to Co-opt the Alternatives 2. Best Practices: The Artificial Negativity of Agri-Food 3. Accountability, Rationality, and Politics: Critical Analysis of Agri-environmental Policy Reform in USA 4. Market Civilization’ and Global Agri-Food: Understanding their Dynamics and (In)Coherence through Multiple Resistances 5. Resistance to the Neoliberal Food Regime in the Sphere of Consumption: Considering the Importance of Mental Labor in Food ProvisioningPart II: Resistance and/through the State 6. Reflecting on Counter-Hegemonic Strategies of Food and Nutritional Security: Notes on the Brazilian Case 7.Geographical Indication and Resistance in Global Agri-Food: The Case of Miso in Japan 8. Community Action, Government Support and Historical Distance: Enabling Transformation or Neoliberal Inclusions? Part III: The diversity of Resistance 9. Peasant Resistance to the Transnationalization of Agriculture in Mexico’s South Frontier 10. Communities Against Capital? The Politics of Palm Oil Expansion in Colombia’s Middle Magdalena 11. Resisting Monsanto: Monarch Butterflies and Cyber-Actors 12. Haiti – Open for Business’: New Perspectives on Inclusive and Sustainable Development 13. Imperfect, Partial, and Interstitial: Gradations of Resistance in a Failed Food Hub Conclusions: The Contradictions of Resistance to Neoliberal Agri-Food

Alessandro Bonanno is Texas State University System Regents’ Professor and Distinguished Professor of Sociology at Sam Houston State University, Texas, USA.

Steven A. Wolf is Associate Professor in the Department of Natural Resources at Cornell University, New York, USA.