Agriculture from neoliberalism: financialization, corporate power and threats to food sovereignty

Abstract

This article was prepared after discussions in the debate “Food Sovereignty, Biotechnology and Monopoly” of the Earth's, Food and Freedom seminar: what do you feed when you eat?, performed in the Department of Geography at the University of São Paulo in June, 2013. What I propose to do is try to expose in this article a look into the present moment in which we live using the notion of Food Regime. This notion is to be understood as the way in which the production, circulation, marketing and consumption of food in the world is given. The objective is to help clarify some of the changes that occur in the field of Brazil since the 1970s, through the analysis of the creation of what we call corporate feeding regime. One hypothesis investigated was that with the advent of neoliberalism consolidation and deepening of the hegemony of food businesses has occurred, as well as a change in eating pattern that caused great threat to food sovereignty.