New Left Review I/197, January-February 1993

Harriet Friedmann

The Political Economy of Food: a Global Crisis

International conflict over agricultural regulation continues after more than six years to threaten to destroy the whole Uruguay Round of the General Agreement on Tariffs and Trade (gatt), and with it an agreement that greatly extends corporate power relative to national (and public) power. Paradoxically, the deadlock has been caused by a type of national regulation of agriculture whose days are numbered. Even more paradoxically, Europe, cast as defender of the old ways, has committed itself to more basic domestic reform than the United States. Major changes have been initiated in the European Common Agricultural Policy which go further than anyone imagined possible at the outset of the Uruguay Round. [1] The choice is not between ‘regulation’ or ‘free trade’, therefore, but between new forms of implicit or explicit regulation. [*]

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