A pluralist and pragmatist critique of food regime’s genealogy: varieties of social orders in Brazilian agriculture

ABSTRACT

The food regime approach occupies a privileged place in the sociology of agriculture and food. However, it is criticized for its structural, universalist and homogenizing bias. From a dialogue between institutionalism and pragmatism, this contribution discusses an alternative framework constructed from the ‘social order’ concept, which defines the existence of different arrangements of practices related to socio-technical and institutional apparatuses. Both the critique of the ‘regime’ narrative and the new proposition are associated to a reinterpretation of Brazil’s agricultural trajectory. Contrasting with the overemphasized export-oriented plantation/agribusiness image that prevails in the majority of analysis about Brazilian insertion in globalized agri-food regime, this paper explores the heterogeneity of production and consumption practices, arguing for the coexistence of multiple and contradictory ordering processes.

KEYWORDS:

• agriculture
• food
• practices
• institutions
• social orders

Acknowledgements

I am grateful to Sergio Schneider, John Wilkinson, Fabiano Escher, Valdemar Wesz Junior, Maycon Schubert, Catia Grisa and the anonymous reviewers of The Journal of Peasant Studies for their helpful comments on early versions of this paper. Responsibility for any errors is my own.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.

Notes

1 I believe someone will certainly disagree with me, maybe arguing that the FR approach has become a historical method of ‘incorporated comparison’ (McMichael 1990), or simply ‘a way of understanding the unfolding of parts and wholes in mutual relation, without reducing part to whole or whole to part’ (Friedman, Daviron, and Allaire, 2016). While very unspecific, I can accept this idea. However, in this case, I will show that this methodological tool is quite different from that proposed in this paper.

2 Discussed by several authors, this periodization is a recognized critical point. Anyway, it is still one of the most recurrent components of the analysis. Notwithstanding, several studies do not refer to all the historical sequence, while most of them mention one or another regime. Otherwise, recently Friedmann has presented a sort of defense of this methodological tool: ‘periods are the way I make sense of the flow of history. If history is more like a river than a canal, then periods are like whirlpools, slowing the stream and patterning the flow’ (Friedmann, Daviron, and Allaire 2016).

3 The topicality of this fact was much debated in 2016, when Brazil imported almost 100,000 tons of beans from Argentine and China that, along with rice, is one of the most consumed foods in the country.

4 Between 1955 and 1963, the USA was already responsible for 43.5 percent of the total foreign direct investment in Brazil (USD 497.7 million). Almost all these resources were directed to manufacturing industries (97.69 percent), especially automotive production, including agricultural machines (Caputo and Melo 2009).

5 The virtual character does not make it less real or true (James 1978), in view of, for example, its ability to structure representations that guide the construction of agricultural policies.

6 The last Agricultural Census presents data for 2005.

7 While the data from the Demographic Census show a reduction of 35.7 to 29.6 million people between 1991 and 2010, the number of households increased from 7.6 to 8.1 million. In turn, the most recent data from sample surveys (BRASIL 2016) estimate an increase of between 2001 (27.8 million) and 2014 (30.6 million) in rural population. From this, Favareto (2014) suggests the emergence of a more heterogeneous and multifunctional rural space.

8 ‘As a different way of measuring it, holdings larger than one thousand hectares cover more than 43% of total agricultural land, whereas those of less than 10 ha occupy only 2.7%’. (De Paula and Delgado 2016, 123).

9 USD 1.00 = BRL 3.35 (exchange rate of 20 December 2016).

10 In 2015, soybeans represented 34 percent (BRL 98.7 billion) of the agricultural GVP (BRL 288 billion) and by 38 percent, i.e., BRL 28 billion, of Brazilian agricultural exports. In 1997, this percentage was 33 percent, representing only BRL 5.5 billion (Wesz 2016).

11 While the regime is rapidly changing its configuration, sometimes we seem too busy trying to conclude whether it is (or is not) a new period. Maybe some of us are waiting for a new global crisis, similar to that of the 1930s, to proclaim the death of the second FR and the growth of the third one. Unfortunately, social analysts disagree about the effects of the evolving ecological, financial and political crisis. In our view, it just illustrates that the transition can be much more gradual.

12 Whereas we find difficulties to place these styles of dairy production in regime or niche, the second divide, those contrasting agribusiness and family farm, does not even solve the analytical problem for these cases (and they are only two possibilities of a much more diverse reality).

13 The ‘homogenization’ thesis also gained space in the sociology of consumption. However, here too, instead of McDonaldization (Ritzer 1998), many authors have preferred to draw attention to the diversity of consumption practices, which results from the encounter between different cultures, each with its own practices, ways of doing, objects and meanings (Lang 1999; Warde 2005).

14 An example can be found in the analysis that Niederle and Gelain (2013) propose about how the World Trade Organization property rights related to geographical indication have been incorporated in Brazilian context.

15 In other words, we are no longer comparing previously established categories of farmers such as family farm and agribusiness. The difference between them shall be expressed a posteriori considering the prevalence of one or another set of practices and orders.

16 We can illustrate this from the recent dispute between two giants of Brazilian and global food industry. While BRF Foods has partnered with the British chef Jamie Oliver to promote ‘healthy and gourmet’ products of the brand, JBS Foods hired the ‘fan of high gastronomy’ Robert de Niro to promote the Seara Gourmet trademark.

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Paulo Andre Niederle

Paulo Andre Niederle is an assistant professor of rural and economic sociology at the Federal University of Rio Grande do Sul (UFRGS) in Porto Alegre, Brazil. His research interests focus on food markets, food quality, family farming, agroecology and social theory.