Rapid Reregulation,Agricultural Restructuring,and the Reimaging of Agriculture in New Zealand1

Abstract As a member of the Cairns Group, New Zealand is an excellent case for investigation of the impacts of market-based restructuring and the emergence of new mechanisms for regulation. The paper examines how agriculture in New Zealand has been impacted by economic reforms that have fundamentally changed the nature and interrelations of regulatory arrangements and economic processes. The paper sketches the origins of New Zealand's agricultural crisis and the main features of the reforms, outlines developments in several global commodity chains (meat, dairy, apples) that since the mid 1980s have shaped regulatory and governance adjustments, and explores dimensions of a reimaging of agriculture in new conditions. The paper concludes that agri-food restructuring in New Zealand is implicated in the wider integrative project of globalization. Agriculture's reconstruction reopens the scope and terms under which New Zealand labor and households might be able to participate in the agri-food sector.     

Redefining the Moral Responsibilities for Food Safety: The Case of Red Meat in New Zealand*

Abstract Food safety governance is shaped by social relationships among the state, the industry, and the public in the food system in a given country. This paper examines the contestation among actors in New Zealand's red meat chain over the implementation of the Animal Product Act of 1999 (APA), which became a cornerstone in the reform of food safety governance. The discussion focuses on the APA's impact on three types of social relations in the red meat chain, those between: (a) the state and the industry; (b) consumers and citizens; and (c) New Zealand and “offshore.” This paper argues that food safety governance is an important element of the moral economy in a given country and poses both policy and ethical challenges in balancing conflicting needs between the global and local agrofood systems.     

Rural change and the elderly in rural places: Commentaries from New Zealand

Rural New Zealand has been transformed in the last decade. Policies progressively introduced by the state since 1984 have led to significant changes in the economic and social fabric of rural places. While macro-economic changes have attracted comment, the local impacts on some groups have not been widely documented and are not well understood. This paper seeks to reveal some of the effects of ‘restructuring’ on the rural elderly by reporting comments on individual life experiences. Two intentions underlie this endeavour; to make evident and valorise the lived experience of a group often overlooked in rural places and to comment on the reflection of this lived experience in contemporary approaches to rural studies.     

Working collectively in competitive times: case studies from New Zealand and Australia

Collectives offer an alternative organisational structure toservice delivery organisations that seek to embody criticalsocial change. This model is challenging to implement as itsassumptions and values are contrary to the dominant socio-politicalclimate of economic rationalism. This paper explores experiencesof two workers employed as coordinators in collective-basedorganisations in Australia and New Zealand. They share the joysand challenges of these experiences, and conclude with fivekey reflections about implementing this model: keeping reflectiveand honest about philosophical assumptions, keeping processcentral, having robust conflict resolution processes, reflectabout the external factors influencing organisational structure,and finding ways to value workers.     

After the ‘Organic Industrial Complex’: An ontological expedition through commercial organic agriculture in New Zealand

This article uses the evolving understandings of commercial organic agriculture within two research programmes in New Zealand to address three problematic claims and associated framings that have underpinned analysis of the political economy of commercial organic agriculture. These three framings are: 1) that recent commercial developments in organic agriculture have become organised around a grand binary of large-scale, corporate, industrialised organic agriculture that is inhabited by pragmatic newcomers to the industry, against a small-scale, local, authentic remnant of the original organic social movement. This grand binary is most popularly recognisable in the claim by author Michael Pollan of the existence of an ‘Organic Industrial Complex’ that is slowly subsuming authentic organic agriculture. This relates to claim 2) that commercialisation creates inevitable pressures by which organic agriculture becomes ‘conventionalised’. Finally, claim 3) positions organic agriculture alone as the only option for enabling improved environmental outcomes in agriculture. The Greening Food and ARGOS research programmes in New Zealand have studied the emergence of commercial forms of organic and other ‘sustainable’ agriculture in the period since 1995. A series of key engagements are highlighted in the unfolding history of these two programmes which demonstrate moments of transition in understandings of commercial organic, particularly in relation to situations of engagements between the research team and wider actors in the organic sector. These key engagements establish a clear sense in which the three major framings around the political economy of organic commercialisation could not explain the unfolding dynamics of the New Zealand organic sector. Rather, engagement with diverse actors enabled a whole new set of theoretical questions that opened up new areas of politics, contestation and elaboration of commercial forms of organic agriculture – particularly around shifts in power to the retail end of the agri-food chain, around new forms of agri-food governance, and around the politics of new audit systems. Within these shifts, the ontology of some of the researchers within these projects underwent parallel transformation. These transformative influences operated in two simultaneous directions. While the engaged research strategy of the two programmes clearly discomforted the researchers’ underlying assumptions for framing the major trajectories of commercial organic development, the presence of the two research programmes also had an important enactive power in the sector by both rendering ‘thinkable’ particular trajectories and economic experiments and also by reinforcing a ‘metric-centric’ tendency in the evolution of global environmental audit systems. Seen in this light, these engagements open up new questions about the research programmes themselves in terms of the emerging politics of what Philip Lowe describes as a more ‘enactive’ rural sociology and help direct attention to an emerging ‘ontological turn’ in the practice and politics of research.     

The Organic Crisis of the British State: Putting Brexit in its Place

The Brexit vote was a singular event that is one symptom of a continuing organic crisis of the British state and society and a stimulus for further struggles over the future of the United Kingdom and its place in Europe and the wider world. This crisis previously enabled the rise of Thatcherism as a neoliberal and neoconservative project (with New Labour as its left wing) with an authoritarian populist appeal and authoritarian statist tendencies that persisted under the Conservative–Liberal Democrat coalition (2010–2015). The 2015 election of a Conservative Government, which aimed to revive the Thatcherite project and entrench austerity, was the immediate context for the tragi-comedy of errors played out in the referendum. The ensuing politics and policy issues could promote the disintegration of the UK and, perhaps, the EU without delivering greater political sovereignty or a more secure and non-balkanized place for British economic space in the world market.     

The Panic to Leave: Economic Crisis and the "New Emigration" from Ecuador

Prior to the late 1990s, Ecuadorian international migration was directed primarily toward the United States. Of the estimated 400,000 Ecuadorians living in the United States, most are concentrated in metropolitan New York and many hail from the south–central highlands of Cañar and Azuay Provinces. In the mid– to late–1990s, Ecuador entered a political and economic crisis just as clandestine transportation to the United States became increasingly expensive and dangerous. Within two years Ecuadorian migration diversified radically and a "new emigration" formed. Many thousands of Ecuadorians from throughout the country migrated to Europe, mostly Spain, but also to France, Italy, and The Netherlands. Prior to 1998, few Ecuadorians lived in Europe, but now, Ecuadorians are the largest immigrant group in Madrid and one of the largest in Spain. The migrant stream was led by women and composed of people from a variety of ethnic and socioeconomic backgrounds. Ecuadorians find themselves working in a variety of services (especially women) and negotiating a volatile, even hostile, social, and political environment.
This "new emigration" has numerous implications for Ecuadorian families, the economy, and the nation–state. Understanding the implications requires a comparative approach that examines at least three aspects of the new emigration: the role of gender, the importance of transnational ties and connections, and the emerging roles of state and non–state actors in the formalization of migration.     

自贸试验区新片区新型国际贸易发展与上海国际贸易中心建设

新片区的未来发展应与国家战略实现更好的"同频共振",在顺应"一带一路""长三角一体化"等国家大战略前提下,在中国与国际关系重构当中挖掘自身独特优势,发现自身差异化发展空间,形成自身独有的发展之路;力求在国家产业短板方面寻求突破,解决"卡脖子"问题,并力争在新型国际贸易领域做"领头羊"和"破局者".     

Beyond bifurcation: Examining the conventions of organic agriculture in New Zealand

The last 10 years have witnessed numerous attempts to evaluate the merits of new theoretical approaches – ranging from Actor Network Theory to ‘post-structural’ Political Economy and inhabiting a ‘post-Political Economy’ theoretical space – to the explanation of global agricultural change. This article examines Convention Theory (CT) as one such alternative approach, assessing its potential in the context of ongoing change within commercial organic agriculture in New Zealand. More specifically, CT is used to expose the insufficiency of recent ideas of conventionalisation and bifurcation, both reflecting more traditional Political Economic approaches, as explanatory concepts for the emerging condition of the New Zealand organic sector. In this paper, the concept of worlds of justification as developed in CT is utilised to address the emerging complexity of organic production. While farmers supplying a more diversified domestic market can be distinguished from those supplying export markets, an exclusive focus on such distinctions ignores the influential role of extra-economic factors on the viability of organic production systems. Thus, in addition to what are classified as market and industrial worlds in CT, the paper addresses aspects of civic, green, domestic, inspired and renown worlds. Producers' selections of organic certification organisations are used to demonstrate the interaction of these worlds in the development of the organic sector in New Zealand. The article concludes with the imperative to move ‘beyond bifurcation’ and acknowledge the greater complexity of negotiated outcomes that might be achieved from a CT perspective than from existing political economy-derived models like conventionalisation and bifurcation.     

Community development: working in the bicultural context of Aotearoa New Zealand

This paper explores the relationship between community developmentand working within bicultural contexts in Aotearoa New Zealand.It identifies a number of key themes that have been found bythe authors to have significance for working with biculturalcontexts. It provides definitions that are used within AotearoaNew Zealand and identifies how lessons learned in this countryhave relevance for an international context. While the paperexamines the tensions and struggles in working within a biculturalframework, it also articulates possibilities for sustained changethat has positive outcomes for diverse populations.     

Methods used to teach social work students in the field: A research report from New Zealand

This article reports the findings of research conducted in three schools of social work in New Zealand on 'methods' used to teach social work students in the field. Students were polled before the first placement ( N = 80) to find how 'effective' they rated a range of teaching methods. This was followed up by a post-placement student survey ( N = 77) to ascertain the extent to which these same methods were employed by field educators. Pre- and post-placement student results were compared with the effectiveness ratings that field educators ( N = 130) gave to each method. Field educator and student pre-placement ratings listed most methods as being effective or very effective. Post-placement student survey results suggest consistent incongruity between the effectiveness ratings given to each 'method' by field educators, and the degree to which field educators actually utilised the methods with students during the field placement. Students report that methods enabling the direct observation of their practice were amongst those least used in the field.     

The social practice of sustainable agriculture under audit discipline: Initial insights from the ARGOS project in New Zealand

One of the most interesting recent developments in global agri-food systems has been the rapid emergence and elaboration of market audit systems claiming environmental qualities or sustainability. In New Zealand, as a strongly export-oriented, high-value food producer, these environmental market audit systems have emerged as an important pathway for producers to potentially move towards more sustainable production. There have, however, been only sporadic and fractured attempts to study the emerging social practice of sustainable agriculture - particularly in terms of the emergence of new audit disciplines in farming. The ARGOS project in New Zealand was established in 2003 as a longitudinal matched panel study of over 100 farms and orchards using different market audit systems (e.g., organic, integrated or GLOBALG.A.P.). This article reports on the results of social research into the social practice of sustainable agriculture in farm households within the ARGOS projects between 2003 and 2009. Results drawn from multiple social research instruments deployed over six years provide an unparalleled level of empirical data on the social practice of sustainable agriculture under audit disciplines. Using 12 criteria identified in prior literature as contributing a significant social dynamic around sustainable agriculture practices in other contexts, the analysis demonstrated that 9 of these 12 dimensions did demonstrate differences in social practices emerging between (or co-constituting) organic, integrated, or conventional audit disciplines. These differences clustered into three main areas: 1) social and learning/knowledge networks and expertise, 2) key elements of farmer subjectivity - particularly in relation to subjective positioning towards the environment and nature, and 3) the role and importance of environmental dynamics within farm management practices and systems. The findings of the project provide a strong challenge to some older framings of the social practice of sustainable agriculture: particularly those that rely on paradigm-driven evaluation of social motivations, strong determinism of sustainable practice driven by coherent farmer identity, or deploying overly categorical interpretations of what it means to be ’organic’ or ’conventional’. The complex patterning of the ARGOS data can only be understood if the social practice of organic, integrated or (even more loosely) conventional production is understood as being co-produced by four dynamics: subjectivity/identity, audit disciplines, industry cultures/structure and time. This reframing of how we might research the social practice of sustainable agriculture opens up important new opportunities for understanding the emergence and impact of new audit disciplines in agriculture.