Learning that milk comes from a cowsupply management and the character of neoliberalism in Spain’s dairy chain
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Universidad de Zaragoza
info
Year of publication: 2015
Issue: 15
Type: Working paper
Abstract
This article takes Spain’s dairy chain as a study case of the transformations in the political economy of the food system in the West since the Second World War. I find that there is much to support the prevailing narrative in food regime analysis: the organised capitalism of 1952-1986 was gradually weakened by a policy agenda of deregulation stemming from both internal and external pressures. I also find, however, a thread of continuity between the period 1952-1986and the post-1986 period – in both periods there were strategies of supply chain management by means of which the power of political or business elites joined the market as a mechanism for the coordination of decisions. I argue that there is a case for reassessing the degree up to which the term “neoliberalism” does a good job at describing the new historical era that started in the food system in the latter decades of the twentieth century.