Review of International PoIiticaI Economy 4:4 Winter 1997: 611-29

Explaining change in the international

agro-food system
Neil Ward and Reidar Almis
Department of Geography, University of Newcastle upon Tyne, and
Centre for Rural Research, University of Trondheim

ABSTRACT
This article serves as an introduction to the collection that follows. The
articles engage with theoretical debates around the restructuring of inter-
national ago-food systems with particular emphasis on advanced
industrial economies. This introductory article outlines the nature of recent
changes in ago-food systems, introduces the contemporary debates
around the causes and consequences of restructuring processes and iden-
tifies three arenas of creative tension which concern: the relationship
between global processes and local change; the characterization of produc-
tion systems as Fordist or flexibly specialist; and the relationship between
political economy and micro-sociological perspectives.

KEYWORDS
Agro-food systems; globalization; international restructuring; political
economy; networks.

INTRODUCTION
The purpose of this introductory article is to provide an orienting frame-
work within which to position the articles that foilow. The ideas they
contain were first aired at a conference on the restructuring of the
international food system in Trondheim, Norway, in 1994. The confer-
ence addressed a set of immediate research concerns surrounding the
possible implications for Norway's national agro-food system and rural
development of both its then proposed entry into the European Union
and the deregulation of global food trade. A session at the conference
was devoted to discussions around recent theoretical developments in
social science approaches to understanding shifting patterns of food
production, consumption and trade, and it is from this session that the
articles are drawn.
O 1997 Routledge 0969-2290
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The articles have been produced at a time when a range of studies

in the political economy tradition have enriched our understanding of
the profound economic, technological and regulatory changes in the
international agro-food system. It is now much clearer, for example,
why most of the advanced capitalist world came to adopt protec-
tionist agricultural policies with high levels of state support for, and
regulation of, agricultural production in the early post-war period. The
concept of 'food regimes' (Friedmann, 1993; Friedmann and McMichael,
1989) has helped to highlight how the transformation of the global
capitalist economy shaped farm support policies and post-war trading
relations, and how recent agricultural trading reform has devel-
oped in the context of a prolonged crisis of accumulation in the
global food system. It has recently been argued by some, however, that
the research agenda around the political economy of food and agri-
culture has entered a 'mature' phase, or even an impasse (McMichael
and Buttel, 1990; Goodman, this volume). Having provided what in
broad terms are widely accepted accounts of the transformation and
industrialization of capitalist agriculture, the rising power of multi-
national food and agribusiness corporations and the global integra-
tion of the agro-food system, questions have begun to arise around
counter-tendencies such as the 'production of difference' in agro-food
systems. Heterogeneity at the local level remains an obvious feature
of the agro-food systems of capitalist economies by virtue of the
continuing importance of local and national cultures and histories. The
extent to which broad-brush accounts of the transformation of food
production internationally are alone sufficient to explain the way
restructuring processes are being experienced in localities is being
increasingly questioned (see, for example, Whatmore, 1994; Goodman
and Watts, 1994).
Creative theoretical tensions still, therefore, surround what has been
called the 'new political economy of agriculture', particularly over the
significance attributed to local social action in the face of what often
seem to be the 'constraints' imposed by increasingly integrated global
markets and systems of regulation. The collection of articles that follows
brings together different theoretical considerations to inform research
intocontemporary change. In this introduction, we briefly outline the
nature of recent changes in agro-food systems, introduce the contem-
porary debates on the causes and outcomes of restructuring processes,
and point to the main theoretical 'fault lines'. These fault lines relate to:
(1) the relationship between global processes and local change; (2) the
characterization of dominant production processes as indicative of
Fordist or flexible specialization models; and (3) the relationshp between
political economy and more micro-sociolo~cal or 'actor-oriented'
perspectives.
 EXPLAINING CHANGE IN THE AGRO-FOOD SYSTEM

PATTERNS A N D PROCESSES OF CHANGE IN THE

AGRO-FOOD SYSTEM
The production, distribution and consumption of food in the advanced
industrial economies have been subject to profound economic and orga-
nizational changes in recent decades. The most important processes have
been: the concentration of production in the farming and non-farming
sectors of the agro-food system; the increasing integration of all sectors
of the system; technological change in the agricultural, food-processing
and retail sectors; regulatory reform; and the changing spatial organi-
zation of the international agro-food system. In what follows, the key
patterns and processes of change are briefly outlined along with the
perspectives used in political economy to explain them.
Concentration of production among the farming and non-farming
sectors of the agro-food system has been a major feature of post-war
change across the advanced capitalist world. In the farming sector, the
number of farm businesses has steadily diminished, while the share of
total output produced by the largest farm businesses has continually
increased. The result has been declining farm employment, squeezed
farm incomes and, for much of the. post-war period, the increasing
capital intensity of farm-based production. Most commonly, these
changes have been attributed to the extension of capitalist production
relations throughout farming, the effects of state agricultural support
policies and the competitive pressures of the so-called 'technological
treadmill'. These trends have traditionally been examined primarily
in terms of the persistence versus the demise of family-based farm
units, with researchers in the political economy tradition pointing to
state policies and the increasingly capitalist nature of agriculture as
key contributory factors in declining farm numbers, incomes and
employment.
More recently, attention has moved beyond the parameters of farm-
based production and turned to the concentration of market power in
those (upstream) sectors supplying agriculture with technical inputs
and in those (downstream) sectors which process, distribute and sell
food. The stagnation of markets resulting from declining economic
fortunes in agriculture has prompted rationalization and concentration
upstream. In shrinking markets, suppliers of farm inputs seek to
maintain market share by encouraging brand loyalty and through
continual innovation. As a result, farm husbandry practices become
increasingly affected by the strategies of the suppliers of inputs, who in
turn become an important influence upon the general trajectories of tech-
nological change in agriculture. Similarly, farm businesses become tied
to input suppliers through the development of credit links, the provi-
sion of combined 'packages' of technologies and specialist advisory
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services, and increasingly through biotechnologies (Busch et al., 1991;

Munton et al., 1990). Thus, multinational companies have been able to
exert increasing influence over the day-to-day practicalities of farm-
based production.
Since the 1970s, corporate concentration has also accelerated in the
downstream sectors of the agro-food system, especially as a result of a
string of major take-overs, mergers and leaveraged buy-outs. As a result,
much of the international trade in food and agricultural products
now lies in the hands of a small number of very large multinational
corporations (Bonanno et al., 1994). An important outcome of corporate
concentration has been a shift in the power of different agro-food inter-
ests with, for example, food retailers in the ascendancy recently, both
in terms of the economic power they hold in relation to food manufac-
turers and the increasing influence they wield over agricultural
production through contractual arrangements.
Food retail concentration has driven the restructuring of market and
regulatory relations in the agro-food system. In the UK, for example,
while there has been a progressive concentration of capital within food
retailing since the 1950s, the 1980s saw the increasing dominance of large
corporations, with the combined share of total grocery sales controlled
by the largest five corporations rising from 43 per cent in 1984 to 61 per
cent in 1990 (Wrigley, 1992). Comparable increases in market concen-
tration in food retailing can be found across Europe too (Centre for Rural
Research, 1994).
Another feature of the restructuring of the 1970s and 1 9 8 0 ~
in~partic-
ular, has been the development of vertical links in the food chain
as large corporations seek to gain control over a greater proportion
of the production process in order to sustain accumulation. A good
example of vertical integration in the UK is the case of Hillsdown
Holdings. Hillsdown is a diversified food company that grew rapidly
during the 1980s to achieve a turnover of well over £3,000 million
through over 150 subsidiary companies. As a major producer of red
meat and bacon, poultry and eggs, Hillsdown supplies the majority
of its own animal feed requirements from its ten mills and its own chicks
from its commercial hatcheries. Similarly, downstream processing
activities are integrated within the group, through the control of abat-
toirs and food-processing, distributing and meat-trading companies
(Ward, 1990).
Large agro-food companies are able to modify the farm production
process by influencing the direction of technological change. Throughout
the 1950s and 1960s, much effort within the increasingly concen-
trated agricultural supply industries was spent persuading farmers of
the benefits of adopting particular innovations such as larger-scale
machinery and manufactured fertilizers and pesticides. Recognition
 EXPLAINING CHANGE IN THE AGRO-FOOD SYSTEM

of the role of large agro-supply firms in the early post-war period in

facilitating a particular chemical technological trajectory for agriculture
has led researchers to examine the role of contemporary agro-food
corporations in the promotion of new biotechnologes. The contribution
of political economists to this field has been in assessing the changing
power relations within the food system arising from the introduction
of biotechnologies. Goodman et al. (1987) have described how techno-
logical change has transformed what were discrete elements of the
agricultural production process into industrial activities which are
then reincorporated into agriculture as inputs (a process termed 'appro-
priationism'), while at the same time industrial activities (such as
manufacturing inputs and processing farm produce) make up a steadily
increasing proportion of value added in the food production process
(termed 'substitutionism'). More recently, innovation in the non-farm
sectors is also being reshaped as a result of the biotechnology revolu-
tion. In response to the recognition of the importance of seeds in the
marketing of new plant biotechnologies and pesticide, large chemical
and pharmaceutical corporations have been purchasing smaller seed
firms and plant genetic research companies with a view to controlling
the next wave of technological change.
Regulatory change has also continued to attract the attention of polit-
ical economy scholars (Lowe et al., 1994). Regulatory reforms in recent
years have sought to encourage the liberalization of agricultural trade
and reduce state subsidies for farm commodity production. For
European food manufacturers and processors who, for example, have
historically tended to operate at a regional or national rather than a
European level, the Single European Market has prompted European-
wide restructuring and internationalization. During the 1 9 8 0 ~only
~ half
of Europe's major ago-food firms operated in more than two countries
and only Unilever and Nest16 were substantial concerns by global stan-
dards (Munton, 1992: 38). However, a series of international take-overs
in the late 1980s greatly increased the scope for cross-national sourcing
and production strategies. Similarly, the last GATT deal has facilitated
world market integration, allowed multinational corporations increas-
ingly to challenge nationally based regulations, increased the power of
these corporations vis-d-vis agro-exporting nations in the south and
providedthe institutional centre of a new regime of global accumula-
tion (McMichael, 1994a, 199433).
Many of the most recent efforts within the political economy of
food and agriculture have examined the 'globalization' of the ago-food
system both in terms of causes and consequences (see, for example,
Bonanno et al., 1994; McMichael, 1994a, 1994b; Raynolds et al., 1993).
Attention has focused on the role of large multinational corporations,
seen by Hefferman and Constance (1994: 29) as being 'the driving force'
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in the reorganization of the global food system. Of crucial importance

has been the emerging new international division of labour, with trade
in low-value, temperate crops being dominated by the north while the
south comes to rely more on the export of high-value crops. It is to a
more detailed discussion of the globalization of the ago-food system
that we now turn.

THE GLOBALIZATION OF THE AGRO-FOOD SYSTEM

It is now more than two decades since studies of the transformation
of capitalist agriculture and the international food system received a
much needed 'shot in the arm' from the infusion of political economy
perspectives.' Interest in the new political economy has coincided not
only with a prolonged structural crisis in the global agro-food system
following decades of unprecedented stability, but also with a turbulent
period within the social sciences. Poststructuralist and other theorists,
for example, have sought to map out the limits to overly structuralist
explanations of change, and the charge of reductionism has hung heavy
in the air (see, for example, Hirst and Zeitlin, 1991; Murdoch, 1995).
This coincidence has helped to expose one of the creative tensions
within studies of the political economy of the agro-food system, that of
the extent to which economic change can be 'explained' either in terms
of the shifting structural properties of global capitalism or the actions
of individuals or groups of actors in particular localities. It is this creative
tension that provides one of the themes of the articles that follow. Since
the 1980s, it has been the former perspective that has been dominant in
studies of agro-food restructuring, particularly as a result of the adop-
tion of ideas from regulation (or 'regulationist') theory, with its central
tenet that capitalism develops in the form of a succession of periods
('regimes of accumulation'), each with specific institutional frameworks
and social norms. Friedmann and McMichael (1989) use the concept of
food regimes to link international relations of food production and
consumption to the broader regimes of accumulation identified by the
regulationist school.
Applylng regulationist concepts to the study of the agro-food system
paved the way for the new 'globalization' paradigm. A particular focus
became the post-war export of the US agro-industrial (Fordist) model
across the advanced capitalist world (see, for example, Goodman and
Redclift, 1991; Marsden et at., 1993), especially through US post-war
reconstruction programmes such as Marshall Aid in Europe, but also
through the diffusion of the transatlantic chemical paradigm for crop
protection (Ward, 1995). In addition, the diffusion of North American
food consumption patterns helped to displace traditional and seasonal
foods with mass-produced 'durable' foods (Friedmann, 1993).
 EXPLAINING CHANGE IN THE AGRO-FOOD SYSTEM

The US model has subsequently been exported to southern economies

through technological and food aid programmes. The south, tied into
an increasingly globalized agro-food complex, switched from producing
staple foods to unseasonal or 'exotic' export crops and animal feed-
stuffs for the north. Agribusiness multinationals altered their sourcing
strategies to sustain accumulation as the Fordist regime destabilized.
Increasing capital mobility, the collapse of the Bretton Woods system
and the centralization of banking capital all helped to facilitate the
geographical extension of food production-consumption networks
(Raynolds et al., 1993). As a result of these trends, recent restructuring
has increasingly been 'explained' with recourse to these processes of
'globalization'.
Studies of the globalization of economic activity have traditionally
been dominated by research into the high-tech and manufacturing
sectors, and much less attention has been paid to agriculture and food.
However, recent years have seen a series of accounts of ago-food system
restructuring (see, for example, Ufkes, 1993; McMichael, 1994a, 1994b;
Bonanno et al., 1994), a number of elements of whch can be identified.
Primarily, these are: the increasing importance of transnational compa-
nies in food production, processing and distribution; the changing
ownership, control and financing of multinationals which weaken their
ties to particular national bases and lead to more geographically 'foot-
loose' strategies; the increasingly complex, flexible and geographically
spread sourcing strategies of agro-food multinationals; the integration
of diverse localities into commodity filigres; the internationalization of
consumer tastes, particularly among the most affluent groups; the shift
towards more international and global forms of regulation (Lowe et al.,
1994). However, while regulation theory and the associated globaliza-
tion paradigm provide useful insights into the processes driving
aggregate changes, concerns about their 'explanatory limits' have been
expressed.
First is the concern that regulationist concepts such as food regmes
'impose a categorical logic on the restructuring of the production and
consumption of food representing it as a coherent process determined
by the structural requirements of capital accumulation' (Whatmore, 1994:
53; see also Munton, 1992: 32). As a result, there is not only a tendency
to conceal rather than reveal local and regional differentiation in the
integration of agriculture into wider circuits of capital, but also a down-
playing of the role of social agency in building and maintaining the
technical and institutional relations of global agro-food complexes. This
leaves a difficulty in dealing with the empirical diversity that remains
characteristic of advanced capitalist agriculture (van der Ploeg, 1990)
and raises the familiar dilemma of how we distinguish structural
change from social agency. Thus, while useful as ordering devices wluch
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illuminate broad structural shifts in capitalist agro-food systems, regu-

lationist concepts are prone to producing what Goodman and Watts
(1994: 48) call 'reductionist readings' of contemporary change in the food
systems of particular places. In response to some of these charges,
Whatmore (1994) calls for analyses which treat globalization as a
contested social process and so 'open up the analytical space' for social
agency and local diversity. Similarly, when McMichael sketches out a
future research agenda around the global restructuring of agro-food
systems, he stresses the tensions that arise between local processes and
transitions that are worldwide and suggests that global restructuring is
'a contested and fluid process' (1994a: 280).
A second concern centres on the propensity for regulationists to 'peri-
odize' history. Once the defining characteristics of the extensive and
Fordist regimes were established, and given that Fordism's post-1970
crisis is widely accepted, the task then all too often becomes one
of 'discovering' the defining characteristics of the next 'regime'. As a
result, technical, economic, social and organizational forms come to be
assessed in terms of 'new' stages of capitalist development and labelled
as 'post-Fordist' or as indicative of 'flexible specialization', with the
result that economic change becomes reduced to so-called 'binary histo-
ries' (Williams et al., 1987; see also Goodman and Watts, 1994). Thus in
studies of the restructuring of the agro-food system, a debate has ensued
over whether contemporary practices are best characterized as Fordist
or post-Fordist. However, what has to be recognized, according to Sayer
and Walker (1992: 199), is that
capitalist industry has always combir:ed flexibilities and inflexibil-
ities. What may be emerging now are new permutations of each
rather than a simple trend towards greater flexibility alone. The
variety of such combinations cannot be grasped by inflexible dual-
istic frameworks which counterpose the old as the inflexible and
the new as flexible.
A third concern leads to a more fundamental challenge to regulation
theory and the current form of the research agenda around globaliza-
tion. Murdoch (1995) argues that regulationist accounts of economic
change lapse too easily into structuralism because institutional relations
and practices are only explained through their structural 'coupling' to
the prevalent modes of production and regulation. The globalization
perspective, therefore, only provides 'a "macro" account [of economic
change] in which the "micro" level is ultimately pulled into place' (1995:
738)'. Instead, Murdoch suggests that in explaining economic change,
different levels of analysis should not be adopted in advance and
'external' forces (such as the 'logic' of capital) should not be privileged.
Rather, using micro-sociological perspectives, systems (or networks or
 EXPLAINING CHANGE I N THE AGRO-FOOD SYSTEM

even 'regimes') can be explained from within. That is, actors can be
followed as they weave together heterogeneous materials and resources
to build and maintain the economic systems that tend to form our objects
of analysis (see also Marsden, 1996).
These concerns suggest the need for care over explanations of change
in the agro-food system which 'spiral off' into the global to the detri-
ment of more nuanced and interactionist approaches dealing with the
relations between global restructuring and local change, or between
globalization and localization. Indeed, because production and consump-
tion always take place somewhere, in some specific geographical
location, when it comes to understanding the evolution and operation
of agro-food systems 'some component of localism is always involved'
(Bonanno et al., 1994: 9). In the 1990s literature on agro-food restruc-
turing, however, it has often appeared that the emphasis on concepts
imported from regulation theory has channelled efforts towards the
study of broad structural arrangements and stimulated a search for
the defining characteristics of the 'next regime'.
The role of multinationals as key agents of globalization has been
highlighted but empirical work in this area has been limited. Somewhat
exceptionally, Heffernan and Constance (1994: 37) have examined
ConAgra's role as the largest US turkey processor, sheep slaughterer,
flour miller and seafood processor, the second largest broiler processor,
beef processor, pork processor, cattle feedlot and catfish processor, the
fourth largest dry corn miller and the fifth largest multiple elevator
company. The potential influence of such concentrated economic power
on the operation of markets, the direction of technological change
and the development of regulatory relations could be considerable,
but we still remain poorly informed about the precise strategies and
priorities of such companies in relation to globalization and the restruc-
turing of agro-food systems. Also as yet unclear is the extent to which
counter-pressures against market concentration and globalization are
likely to develop. The (re-)emergence of local and regonal organic
food markets, community-supported agriculture and local farmers'
markets would seem to suggest some contestation over how food is
produced, distributed and sold, although at least two trajectories
seem possible. Either artisanal, regionally differentiated food systems
could be subsumed within the increasingly global, integrated and MNC-
dominaied ago-food complex, or new forms of consumer politics and
farmer-consumer alliances could create the space to re-localize systems
of food provision at sub-national levels. Such a notion of strength-
ening locally based systems of food production has emerged as a
key concern of a growing body of work by European rural sociologists,
and it is to a discussion of local food systems that we turn in the
next section.
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Among the articles that follow, Goodman's critically scrutinizes the

recent literature on the 'globalization' of international ago-food systems
and draws distinctions between 'internationalization', 'multinationaliza-
tion' and 'globalization'. He argues that ago-food studies have, perhaps
uncritically, drawn upon concepts relating to the spatial restructuring
of manufacturing industry without sufficient recogrution of the speci-
ficities or exceptional circumstances of agro-food systems. McMichael's
article goes on to discuss the recent phase of globalization through
the prism of the classical agrarian question posed by Kautsky at the
end of the nineteenth century. The agrarian question concerned the polit-
ical consequences of capitalist transition of rural areas and was posed
at a time of nation building. McMichael's piece helpfully re-examines
the question at a time when the nation-state itself is coming under
increasing question, and highlights how the distinctive conditions of
the late-twentieth-century agrarian question lie in the reformulation
of the politics of agriculture.

LOCALIZATION A N D THE AGRO-FOOD SYSTEM

In an attempt to move from reductionist notions of change being 'driven'
by the logic of accumulation under different regimes of capitalist devel-
opment, to approaches which are more sensitive to the role of social
action, some European social scientists have begun to explore the
concept of agro-industrial districts (or 'agri-food districts'). Four key
features of industrial districts have been identified by Amin (1994). The
first, inter-firm dependence, arises from local product specialization with
a detailed division of tasks between specialist producers, 'each of whom
reaps the cost savings accruing from task-based, rather than product-
based, specialization' (Amin, 1994: 20). Second, structures of sociability
(or 'local industrial embeddedness') result from the local containment
of the division of labour and the local specialization along the entire
length of a given production chain. The local embeddedness of the chain
arises from a locality's ability to build large enough markets to generate
sustainable demand for intermediate goods from other local suppliers.
Local industrial atmosphere, Amin's thud feature, represents 'the consol-
idation of an area as a centre of knowledge creation, inventiveness,
entrepreneurial capability and dormation dissemination within a global
industrial filigre' (1994: 21). Under such conditions, the competitive
strengths of a district are derived from the use of flexible, multi-purpose
technologies, craft skills and product adaptability, with information
and 'know-how' 'seeping through every channel of the local economic
system (firms, institutions, households etc.)' (1994: 21). Knowledge is
thus collectively created and diffused in an atmosphere of socialization,
sociability and 'studied' trust. For this to be so, networks of institutions
 EXPLAINING CHANGE IN THE AGRO-FOOD SYSTEM

are required to mediate conflict and facilitate cooperation. This network

is termed 'institutional thickness', Amin's fourth feature of industrial
districts, and is defined as a
strong institutional presence, that is, a plethora of institutions of
different kinds (for example chambers of commerce, innovation
centres, financial institutions, training agencies, trade associations,
unions, local authorities, government agencies, marketing boards)
which are highly proactive and provide a basis for widespread
trust in collective representation.
(1994: 21)
More than sixty different industrial districts have been empirically
identified in Italy, many of which are geographically characterized
by clusters of small towns surrounded by rural regons (Fanfani,
1994). Studies of such districts have been dominated by the need to
move away from top-down, global and structuralist explanations of
change towards more micro, locally based studies, which see the role
of localities as more than just the expression of structural processes. As
a result, new industrial districts have been examined by those interested
in economic organizational forms characterized by 'flexible special-
ization' as an antithesis to the 'Fordist' model developed as part of
regulation theory.
The term 'agro-industrial' or 'agri-food' district has been coined by
Fanfani (1994) and Iacoponi et al. (1995) to introduce an explicitly rural
and agricultural dimension to the study of industrial districts. The
(currently very small) literature on agro-industrial districts has devel-
oped from a different (and perhaps complementary) perspective to that
common in political economy, with an explicit focus on localism and
flexibility. Studies of agro-industrial districts tend to take global
processes as the 'contextf for change but then examine the strategies of
individual firms and institutions in localities. As a result, studies high-
light the ways that global processes are differentially articulated at the
local level. They also emphasize the scope for local action to retain value-
added within a buoyant regional economy.
Agro-industrial districts are understood in the context of the growing
integration between food production, processing and retailing. During
the post-war period, Italy was no different from most of rural Europe
in that different types of agricultural production became increasingly
territorially concentrated, facilitating the evolution of agro-food fili5res
with locally agglomerated, small and medium-sized firms specializing
in the processing and distribution of local, hgh-quality foods. Closely
networked relations between local farms, processors, distributors and
retailers make for flexibility in adapting to technologcal and market
changes, but at the same time allow value-added in the non-agricultural
 THEME SECTION

aspects of the food chain to remain within the regional economy rather
than being captured by exogenous capitals.
Agro-industrial districts have, however, been empirically identified
before being theoretically conceptualized, although there is an emergng
economics literature which is beginning to identify transaction costs
as a key explanatory factor in their success (Saccomandi, 1995; van der
Ploeg and Saccomandi, 1995).Transaction costs are those costs associated
with 'going to market'. They include, for example, the costs associated with
negotiating a price, arranging a transaction, drawing up contracts, travel-
ling to market, examining stock and so on. Conventional economic theory
makes several assumptions about the conditions for competition and the
market-place, including the existence of a large number of buyers and
sellers, equal access to information, a homogeneous product and the
absence of transaction costs. Of course these conditions are rarely, if ever,
met. As a result, transaction costs come to be seen as closely associated with
industrial organization, as the willingness to 'go to market' will depend on
the hierarchical and organizational features of firms.
In considering strategies for promoting local (or 'endogenous') devel-
opment in agro-food districts, van der Ploeg and Saccomandi (1995)
propose that an important difference between endogenous and exoge-
nous development patterns is that quite different relations between
transaction costs, transformation costs and management costs are
entailed. Their suggestion is that 'exogenous development is generally
characterised by comparatively high levels of transaction and transfor-
mation costs, whereas endogenous development represents, on the
contrary, very low levels for the cost categories concerned; management
costs on the other hand are comparatively high in the case of endoge-
nous development' (1995: 12). Such a theory, in which the balance
between transaction and transformation costs on one hand and manage-
ment costs on the other turns out to be decisive, might help to explain
the 'mystery' of why so-called 'less developed' styles of farrning are able
to compete with 'more developed, high-tech' farms, as well as the
economic success of agro-industrial districts.
Agglomerations of specialist food-producing farms and firms (in-
cluding input suppliers and food processors, for example) in specific
local or regional places means that within the local system firms can
exchange semi-finished products with each other in what Iacoponi et al.
(1995) call a 'collective production process' within which transaction
costs are very low. The technologies employed in each firm are similar
and familiar to local actors, and the relations between local firms are
regulated not only by formal, national laws and regulations, but also
through local institutional norms and customs.
It is this thick network of social, economic and institutional relations
that Fanfani (1994) argues is crucial in understanding the success of
 EXPLAINING CHANGE IN THE AGRO-FOOD SYSTEM

agro-industrial districts. Networks appear 'thickest' in areas of greatest

specialization, but differ from district to district. In the four provinces
of. Italy where milk processing and Parmesan cheese production are
concentrated, more than 800 (mainly cooperatively run) cheese factories
process milk from around 15,000 small and medium-sized farms,
producing around 100,000 tonnes of Parmesan cheese per year, with
numerous and close relations between farms and factories. However, in
the areas around Verona and Forli, where around 60 per cent of Italy's
poultry production is concentrated, processing is more closely linked to
large, industrial poultry production units rather than small farms.
It is the local embeddedness of networks in regions that provide the
conditions for successful local economic development. Strengthening
what Amin and Thrift (1995, following Latour, 1986) call local 'powers
of association' helps to improve 'institutional thickness' to the extent
that networks of local actors and institutions can be built up, such that
the sum is greater than the parts. Thus, the industrial districts concept
has been held up as a model for rural development. As outlined above,
part of the problem of maintaining farm incomes and an economically
buoyant agricultural sector has been the farm sector's squeeze between
increasingly oligopolistic upstream and downstream sectors. In this
context, the normative agenda behind the study of agro-industrial
districts has been to discover what makes such localities successful in
order that this success may be replicated.
While the consequences of contemporary global restructuring for
many small producers in the food system are increased dependency,
vulnerability and exploitation, the literature on agro-food districts sug-
gests that for a few areas at least, the nature of the skills and resources
they have to offer, plus a rich and responsive cultural and institutional
milieu, have generated successful, self-reliant local economies. The most
pressing question about agro-food districts, however, is their repro-
ducibility. While individual districts have been identified, and the par-
ticular attributes considered to contribute to their success have been
described and accounted for, it is less clear how the success of these
spatial agglomerations can be replicated elsewhere..Many of the charac-
teristics of industrial districts hailed as responsible for their success,
such as, for example, local inter-firm cooperation and institutional
networks, are attributed to local socio-cultural factors that may be
difficult to establish outside the particular localities studied.

MICRO-SOCIOLOGY, NETWORKS A N D THE

GLOBAL AGRO-FOOD SYSTEM
Although many accounts of recent agro-food system restructuring
point to the construction of an increasingly integrated global agro-food
 THEME SECTION

complex, numerous studies continue to emphasize the heterogeneous

nature of both farm production practices (van der Ploeg, 1990; Marsden
et al., 1992) and production-consumption linkages within food systems
(Arce and Marsden, 1993). In response to the continuing evidence of
heterogeneity and local diversity within the agro-food system, there
have been calls for a more 'actor-oriented' approach to the study of dif-
ferential economic and social change (see, for example, Marsden et al.,
1993; Marsden, 1996).In part, this builds on a micro-sociological tradition
already well-established in the sociology of rural development. Long
(1990), for example, has shown how what he calls the 'actor-oriented par-
adigm' has provided a counterpoint to structural analysis in the sociol-
ogy of development for many years. Although structural changes may
result from the impact of 'outside' forces, analysis cannot be wholly based
on the concept of 'external' determination. Structural changes enter the
existing lifeworlds of individual actors and are thus mediated and trans-
formed. Long has called for 'a more dynamic approach . . . which stresses
the interplay and mutual determination of "internal" and external factors
and relationships, and which recognizes the central role played by human
action and human consciousness' (1990: 6). Concern to grasp this 'inter-
play' can be seen in the language of other researchers interested in change
in the agro-food system. For example, Arce and Marsden argue that
systematic studies of the political economy of food have tended so
far to hide rather than disclose social differentiation in the value
construction of food. Such work grants inadequate significance to
social action in the analysis of commodities. Actors shape, and are
shaped by, institutions, different styles of farming, and different
ways of consuming.
(Arce and Marsden, 1993: 296-7)
The need to provide theoretical and conceptual tools to allow particular
patterns and processes to be linked to the larger global context is a
pressing one. In addressing questions of the interlinkages between actors
and institutions in different parts of the agro-food system, Arce and
Marsden (1993: 309) go on to point to a set of questions requiring concep-
tual consideration. Included among these are: (1) how can we link more
clearly socially specific aspects of change to broader levels of interna-
tional analysis? (2) how are local production and consumption spaces
linked internationally and what social and knowledge-based networks
help to sustain these? and (3) how do different types and spatial scales
of regulation influence the corporate food sector, both within and
between regions?
One framework recently proposed to address such questions centres
on the study of actors in networks (see Marsden et al., 1993; Murdoch,
1995; Busch and Juska, this volume). Networks are being increasingly
 EXPLAINING CHANGE IN THE AGRO-FOOD SYSTEM

adopted as an orienting perspective in other strands of social science

including the study of industrial organization and regional development,
and recent works have highlighted networks as a key organizational
form. For example, Dicken and Thrift describe the capability of the large
firm as one which 'binds places together through its own internal links
and multiple links with other firms' (1992: 288). Of course, networks are
not new phenomena, and Murdoch (1995: 745) warns that
the discovery of networks must be rescued . . . from ideas about
paradigmatic and epoch shifts. If networks are 'found' suddenly
to predominate in economic life, marking the shift from Fordism
to post-Fordism, then they will merely be placed within existing
accounts of economic change. Suddenly they will be everywhere
and will constitute the future in much the same way as 'flexibility'.
Marsden et al. (1993) propose actor network theory2 as a means by
which the associations between actors can be studied in order to identify
how actors become tied together in networks (be they production-
consumption relations, technological relationships, political alliances and
so on). Callon et al. (1985: 10) describe the aim of actor network theory as
being to analyse the creation of 'categories and linkages and . . . the way
in which some are successfully imposed while others are not'.
Approaching social action in this way allows identities and interests to
be viewed not as pre-given but as emerging out of the interactions
between different actors. Thus, power becomes an outcome of action rather
than a cause (Latour, 1986).As Callon (1986: 224) explains,
understanding what sociologists generally call power relationships
means describing the way in which actors are defined, associated
and simultaneously obliged to remain faithful to their alliances.
The repertoire of translation . . . permits an exploration of how a
few obtain the right to express and to represent the many silent
actors of the social and natural worlds they have mobilised.
By combining an actor-oriented perspective with a concern to concep-
tualize the wider social processes influencing action, Marsden et al.
(1993) call their hybrid approach 'action in context'. Such an approach
'provides a useful corrective to the earlier concentration on structuralist
analysis' (1993: 145). This is especially because the focus for analysis
becomes the means by which interests and objectives are constructed
and represented, and come into effect. Adopting an action in context
perspective for the study of change in ago-food systems therefore
requires that local action be considered as the outcome of power rela-
tions meeting in places. It allows the focus of analysis to be the methods
adopted by actors in formulating and seeking to achieve their objectives
by building networks of people and things.
 THEME SECTION

Applying the approach to the study of farmers and other actors in

the agro-food system would involve scrutiny of the linkages between
actors, and between actors and technical artefacts, within networks.
The central questions thus concern how networks are constructed and
what representations and translations prevail within them. The perspec-
tive does not mean that individual human agency reigns supreme.
Rather, the identification of different 'norms' and 'visions of the world'
ought to help highlight the stability or strength of networks and the
ways in which context is reproduced through action. Of particular use
is the idea that within network analysis, the categories of 'global' and
'local' melt away. The issue becomes the reach of networks and the
ways in which others in distant places come to be 'fixed' by actors in
strategic centres.
Network analysis, however, does not lend itself to the study of epochal
shifts in the way that regulation theory, for example, has proved to do.
But, as Murdoch (1995) has shown, where the discourse surrounding
Fordism and post-Fordism lends itself to inherently 'structuralist'
accounts which explain social processes by reference to some pre-
existing story of profound societal shifts, network analysis can be seen
as an attempt to infuse modesty into sociological enquiry. The article by
Busch and Juska represents a rare attempt to operationalize actor
network theory in a study of the Canadian rapeseed sector. As such, it
demonstrates the ability of the network perspective to focus attention
on the dynamics of change in agro-food systems involving both
human-human and human-artefact relations.
Taken together, the articles that follow reflect the diversity of posi-
tions and perspectives within contemporary studies of the political
economy of the ago-food system. Such methodologcal and conceptual
pluralism is no bad thing, and a continuing constructive dialogue
between different perspectives is probably preferable to a continual
search for new all-encompassing paradigms. These contributions begin
to tease out the ways in which relations between local and global
processes and practices in agro-food systems are being transformed.
They also underline the need for a concerted attempt to establish inter-
national comparative research in the sociology and politics of the
agro-food system. Such research is inevitably more difficult to design,
administer and carry out, but the rewards not only in terms of new
insights and understandings generated, but also in terms of enriching
theoretical debates, could be immense.

NOTES
We would like to thank Bill Friedland, Philip Lowe, Phil McMichael and two
referees for their comments on a draft of this introduction.
 EXPLAINING CHANGE IN THE AGRO-FOOD SYSTEM

1 See Friedland (1991) for a recent history of the so-called 'new political
economy of agriculture'.
2 See Murdoch (1995) for a discussion of actor network theory and the study
of economic change.

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