Section on Underdevelopment THE INTERNATIONAL POLITICAL ECONOMY OF FOOD: A GLOBAL CRISIS Harriet Friedmann The largest gap between national regulation and transnational economic organization is in the agro-food sector. This gap is the legacy of the post- World War I1 food regime, whose implicit rules gave priority to national farm programs (including import controls and export subsidies); placed the United States at the center; generated chronic surpluses; and allowed international power to take the unusual form of subsidized exports of surplus commodities, particularly wheat. The author analyzes the emergence and contradictions of the postwar food regime as a tension between replication and integration of national agro-food sectors, often interpreted as “export of the U.S. model.” By the early 1970s, replication led to international economic conflict, while transnational corporations found national regulatory frameworks to be obstacles to further integration of a potentially global agro-food sector. A new axis between Asian import countries and new agricultural countries, such as Brazil, has destabilized the Atlantic-centered food regime, without creating a new regime. Alternative future regimes are identified, based on the shift from agriculture to food, employment, and land use as political issues: private global regulation or democratic regulation of nested, regional agro-food economies. federated at the international level. International conflict over agricultural regulation for more than six years threatened to collapse the whole Uruguay Round of the General Agreement on Tariffs and Trade (GATT), and with it an agreement that greatly extends corporate power relative to national (and public) power. At issue, paradoxically, was a type of national regulation of agriculture whose days were already numbered. Even more paradoxically, Europe, cast as defender of the old ways, had committed itself to more basic domestic reform than the United States. Major changes initiated in the European Common Agricultural Policy have gone further than anyone imagined possible at the outset of the Uruguay Round (1). The choice in 1994 is International Journal of Health Services. Volume 25, Number 3, Pages 51 1-538. 1995 511 doi: 10.2190/451A-896W-GGLK-ELXT http://baywood.com