Chapters 1 and 2 have reviewed the contemporary theoretical and policy context of agri-food with specific reference to Europe and North America. In this chapter we turn our attention to the nature of the new agri-food geographies. What are the driving forces behind these geographies, and how do they play themselves out across time and space? This theme is central to the more detailed treatment of three different regions (Tuscany, California, and Wales) in succeeding chapters. Here, we introduce a conceptual framework that helps us to understand the new agri-food geographies. The chapter starts by outlining the nature of the conventional agri-industrial system. In general terms, we see this as a system that leads to a process of deterritorialization of foods. That is not to say that it comes without any actual geography; rather, its geographies are the result of corporate capitals’ attempts to continue to intensify and to appropriate some of the functions of agriculture in ways that stretch the links, networks, and chains between production and consumption spheres. We then place this trend in conceptual juxtaposition with the more recent forces of reterritorialization (or what some scholars term ‘relocalization’), a process whereby local and regional geographies come back again to play a central role in reshaping food production and consumption systems. We argue here that it is important to see these conflicting geographical forces as distinctive, even though both processes may indeed be operating—to varying degrees and in different ways—in the same region or locality at the same time. This is at the heart of our contingent notion of ‘worlds of food’. Throughout the twentieth century, agri-industrialism struggled with resolving Kautsky’s formulation of the agrarian question, that is, how to continue to intensify production and appropriate some farming functions in processing and agri-industry while at the same time maintaining some sort of ecological or natural balance in the agricultural transformation process (Kautsky, 1988; Goodman and Watts, 1997). In the agri-industrial model, the driving force was corporate capital.
Driving forces on dislocations: finite element analysis in the context of the non-singular dislocation theory