Neoregulation, the State and Contested Agro-Food Governance in Ecuador

• In Event: Food sovereignty, neoregulation, extractivism and community governance

Abstract

With the adoption of neoliberal policies in the 1990s, Ecuador abandoned the structuralist agrarian reform policies of earlier decades, witnessing a deepening crisis of campesino agriculture and a rise in non-traditional agricultural exports. Neoregulation has been used by scholars to describe the role of the state, in concert with agro-business, in facilitating new models of agro-food governance that integrate national agro-economies into the global food system. As predicted by the literature, the Ecuadorian state, global actors and technological tendencies have been central to the ongoing transformation of the national agro-food system, as neoregulatory processes have advanced the country’s integration into the global food market. Nevertheless, for different reasons a variety of national actors have defended a nationally oriented agro-food system. Campesino and indigenous rural social movements have put forward alternative strategies like the food sovereignty framework, and alternative models of agro-food governance. National capitalist interests, although sometimes linked to global value chains, try to maintain a protected domestic produce and retail market. As a result, agrarian policies under the ‘post-neoliberal’ Correa government (2007-2014) have been incoherent as they serve different interest groups that are both in favor and against productivist policies and further global integration. In order to capture the complexities of the Ecuadorian case we argue that the concept of neoregulation should be expanded to include other forms and models of agro-food governance that respond to a variety of interests in national food and agricultural systems.

Authors

• Patrick Clark, Carleton University/ FLACSO-Ecuador

• Patric Hollenstein, Universidad Central del Ecuador