**1. Introduction**

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For millennia food has been one of the central elements around which human civilizations have evolved. In pre-capitalistic societies food-related activities were at the core of all the material, cultural and institutional structures which shaped social relations. Besides being the adherent factor of society, food has always been a weapon and an instrument of power. Along with the development of capitalism, food-related activities have become increasingly integrated into the economic sphere, which has gained importance with respect to the sociocultural and political spheres. Food has become nothing more than a commodity, its trade has become a way of wealth accumulation and the market, instead of self-production in peasant societies, has become its main way of procurement for urban dwellers and the workforce required by industrialization. The "domestication" of food habits and trade has been an important leverage for capital accumulation. As a matter of fact, as the literature on food regimes has clarified, different stages of capitalistic development have required different features of food governance.

This paper analyses the particular features of food governance under neoliberalism, considered the most recent stage of capitalistic accumulation. The main goal is to identify the political and theoretical constraints which seem to prevent food policy from becoming an effective tool for promoting a just and sustainable food system. A basic argument of this paper is that the analysis of the food case may give important insights for identifying the 'ideological' powers that have hitherto guided the neoliberal political-economic design. The discussion is organized as follows.

The first section describes the neoliberal global food system starting from the recent literature on food regimes and shows how it has so far been unable to achieve the goals of sustainability, hunger eradication and social justice.

The second section directly addresses the issue of food policy. It compares the future challenges facing the system with the neo-liberal strategies of interventions, demonstrating how neoliberal food policy is a useless weapon against the increasing food safety and security risks. Particular attention is paid to the issue of private governance.

The third section illustrates the main traits of food policy programs alternative to neoliberalism. The focus is on the concept of food sovereignty, which encompasses the concepts of food as a human right and sustainability.

Food Policy Beyond Neo-Liberalism 377

corporations seeking new investments and market opportunities offered by trade liberalization and by the growing demand in emergent countries), the second food regime actually ends with the demise of Bretton Woods. Since then a third food regime has initiated which, notwithstanding its still blurred contours, may be termed neoliberal or corporate

The neoliberal food regime (sometimes also referred to as 'food from nowhere' regime or 'corporate' food regime, as reported by McMichael, 2009) is the product of neoliberalism, which has been shaping global economy over the last thirty years. The four credos of neoliberalism - deregulation, international trade liberalization, reduction of public expenditure and privatization - have produced a new international food order, characterized, inter alia, by: 1) a high level of consolidation at the manufacturer and retail level, with a dramatic rise of corporate power; 2) an international division of labor based on the organizational features of global food commodity chains, with the rise of export zones in the global south and the displacement of independent producers and small scale agriculture; 3) an increasing market differentiation, with low-quality mass products alongside with "high-tech/high quality" rich products; 4) bio-nano technologies and intellectual property rights as the new frontiers for profit extraction; 5) the accelerated depletion of natural resources, with a global food system increasingly dependent on oil and massively

The specific traits of the three food regimes are very different and in each of them food has had a different role in the economic as well in the political and socio-cultural sphere. This paper does not intend to review the concept and the history, and the related theoretical and political controversies, of food regime and therefore such differences are not explored. What is important here, in order to analyze the neoliberal food policy, is to highlight only the main common trait and the main difference between the neoliberal food regime and its predecessors. This will help to shed light on the core elements of the current economic and

The red thread which unifies the three food regimes is the integration of the food production and consumption activities into the processes of industrialization and capitalistic accumulation. As stressed by McMichael (2009), "the food regime concept is not about food per se, but about the relations within which food is produced, and through which capitalism is produced and reproduced". Since the beginning of the first food regime (which coincides with the second industrial revolution, 1870-1914) the capitalistic development has entailed: 1. The commodification of food, that is to say, in current terminology, that food production and distribution have entered the formal sector of the economy (i.e. that regulated by formal markets, whose sales and turnovers compose the GNP). Food markets have replaced self-sustained peasant communities, where production systems are governed by an array of institutions which range from authoritative feudal and family organizations to gift and community-based systems of reciprocal systems of exchange. In this way not only alternative ways of economic organization have been

1 The debate on the identification and definition of the third food regime is reported by McMichael

contributing to climate change (Garnett, 2008; Shiva, 2008).

political dynamics within the world food system.

destroyed, but also entire cultures and societies.

(2009). See also: Burch and Lawrence, 2009; Pechlaner and Otero, 2010.

regime1.

The last section, dealing with the obstacles faced by opponents to neoliberalism, analyzes the limits of the specific ethical and political theories endorsed by the standard economic model and shows the difficulties experimented by alternative approaches in drawing new theoretical paradigms. Given its theoretical scope, the paper does not however address the political obstacles arising from concrete political practices in real institutional contexts.

The main outcome of the paper is that, in order to overcome the neoliberal policies, one must enable processes of participatory democracy by appealing to the distinctive character of the human being, namely reflexive deliberation.
