Richard Le Heron

State, economy and crisis in New Zealand in the 1980s: implications for land-based production of a new mode of regulation

Abstract The paper examines the restructuring of land-based production in New Zealand following deregulation and opening of the New Zealand economy in the mid-1980s. The framework adopted situates New Zealand in the world capitalist order, establishes the partial structural isolation of the New Zealand economy in an earlier era of state policy, outlines the main features of New Zealands agrocommodity chains before a major shift in state policy towards a more market-orientated philosophy of economic management and reviews the range of possibilities available to re-articulate the connections between production and consumption in a fully global context.

A political economy perspective on the expansion of New Zealand livestock farming, 1960–1984 — Part I. Agricultural policy

Abstract This paper forms the first of two papers examining the state-led expansion of New Zealands livestock industries between 1960 and 1984 from a political economy perspective. The paper identifies the mixture of economic, ideological and political-administrative features that distinguished New Zealand society at the time and sketches the evolution of the agricultural policy framework under the structural conditions. Specifically, the paper establishes the form of New Zealand capitalism, emphasising the broad regulatory order and the place of agriculture in the New Zealand economy, it outlines the nature of New Zealand pastoralism and analyses the evolution of state policy relating to the livestock industries. The analysis shows three clear phases to policy: input assistance to start off a fresh round of investment in livestock production in the 1960s; output and input assistance to revitalise the sector in the early 1970s after a period of zero growth; and price support to curtail wholesale contraction of national farm output in the face of price falls in the early 1980s. A case is made that the policy matrix outlined formed the main context in which farmers made investment decisions.

A political economy perspective on the expansion of New Zealand livestock farming, 1960–1984 — Part II. Aggregate farmer responses — Evidence and policy implications

Abstract In the New Zealand governments indicative planning of national development in the 1960s and 1970s the nations livestock industries (sheep/beef and dairying) were expected to make a major contribution to foreign exchange earnings. This paper focuses on aggregate farmer responses in the policy environment and the policy implications of information on changes in the nations livestock system. Evidence on four matters is presented: (1) changes in national farm production that took place under the emerging policy regime, (2) the rise in export earnings attributable to agricultural policy, (3) changing aggregate farmer investment patterns throughout the period of state intervention, and (4) the geography of farm production response to government incentives. Policy-maker assumptions about farmer responses are discussed and an assessment made of the policy implications at the time. The paper concludes that while the national planning objective of significantly raising livestock numbers was achieved in the sheep/beef sector (especially in hill country areas), the physical results did not translate into substantially increased total export earnings or real returns per commodity unit. Government policy had the unintended effects of misleading farmers about market prospects for livestock products and inhibiting technological and organisational change in farming. Assistance that was aimed at strengthening farmings contribution to export earnings gradually undermined the credibility of pastoralism as a national project.

Reglobalisation of New Zealand's food and fibre system: Organisational dimensions

Abstract The paper provides theoretical and empirical evidence that the external links of New Zealand food and fibre production are rapidly and radically changing. A case is made that the restructuring of New Zealands agro-commodity chains is now being driven by consumption rather than production pressures and that production from the land is being reintegrated into principal markets by a handful of increasingly global private and public New Zealand-based organisations. A series of adjustments at the national and regional level to land use systems are likely to be associated with the new structural conditions.

Book review: Maye, D., Holloway, L. and Kneafsey, M., editors Alternative Food Geographies: Representation and Practice. Oxford: Elsevier, 2007. 376 pp. £80.95 cloth. ISBN 978 0 08 045018 6

them, or illustrate other issues that could have been drawn out further, such as gendered expectations and relationships, and individual autonomy within structural constraints. The afterword by Chris Philo and Kate Swanson is arguably more successful at reflecting this fluidity through their identification of three main cross-cutting themes: ‘crisis in the categories of adult, youth and child’, ‘crisis in identity and transition’ and ‘the remarkable and the unremarkable’. The portraits contained in this volume are undoubtedly very powerful and contain an energy that is rarely found in academic writing. The style and the subject matter mean that it is indeed more accessible to non-academic audiences than the average youth geographies publication, yet the academic themes are still there in the text, even though they often require a little more effort from the reader to draw them out and locate them within wider academic work. Presenting research in this nontraditional way is an innovative and radical endeavour, so there will always be challenges in terms of getting the balance right between accessibility on the one hand and academic rigour on the other. It may fall to the individual reader to judge how well this volume meets those particular challenges.

Book reviews : Tansley, G. and Worsley, P. 1995: The food system. A guide. London: Earthscan. xii + 260 pp. f14.95 paper. ISBN: 1 85383 277 4

women played a far greater role in radical activity that previously realized. Moreover, they acknowledge that a stable monolithic working class never existed. However, they say nothing about the importance of race and ethnicity, other than remarking that such divisions were less intense than in the USA (p. 72). The ’Irish question’ is apparently irrelevant. To a geographer, their discussion at times has an oddly parochial air, apparently confined to a Britain in which imperialist expansion and chauvinistic nationalism had

Book reviews: Lowe, P., Marsden, T. and Whatmore, S., editors, 1990 : Technological change and the rural envi ronment. London: David Fulton Publishers. iii + 202 pp. ISBN: 1 85346 112 1

dedicated to critical perspectives on rural change. It treats two themes often neglected by social scientists, technological change ’a factor traditionally regarded by social theorists as exogenous’ and the rural environment, a ’residual’ factor outside the urban-industrial centres (p. 1). The focus of the book is ’agriculture which, as the most extensive user of land, is thereby the primary social and economic activity creating and recreating the physical environment’ (p. 2). The editors argue that modem farmers have available to them many chemical and mechanical aids to boost production, yet individual farmers actually know very little about the impacts of the technology they use. By their very sophistication and potency, they suggest, ’agricultural technologies have cast the ordinary farmer into the role of the sorcerer’s apprentice’ (p. 2). The book attempts

Book reviews : Cloke, P.J. 1989: Rural land-use planning in developed nations. London: Unwin Hyman. xiii + 289 pp. £30.00 cloth

to my undergraduates, but I would also design the course to create opportunities for critiquing the book, for expanding and intergrating various partial explanations, and for discussing the ideological implications of urban decline. As a theoretically inclined, urban political economist, however, I finished the book reinforced in my belief that the theoretical interpretation of postwar urban decline of western cities remains to be written.