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significance for commodities such as fresh
fruit and vegetables, broiler chickens and
sugar cane (e.g. Friedland et al., 1981). It
should be noted that a rival term, ‘la complexe
agro-alimentaire’, coined contemporaneously
in the French research literature, proposed a
much more diffuse model of the industrial
development of the agro-food complex (e.g.
Allaire and Boyer, 1995).
The ‘US school’ of agribusiness research
had considerable influence over the develop-
ment of agricultural geography in the
English-speaking world, particularly in the
1980s. But it has increasingly attracted criti-
cism both because of a disenchantment with
its theoretical debt to systems theory, and
because vertical integration proved too empir-
ically specific to support the larger claims
of agribusiness as a general model of food
production today (Whatmore, 2002b). swagricultural geography In the second half
of the twentieth century, agricultural geog-
raphy has undergone profound changes, as
has its subject. Until the 1950s, agricultural
geography was a subset ofeconomic geog-
raphy, concerned with the spatial distribution
of agricultural activity and focusing on vari-
ations and changes in the pattern of agricul-
tural land use and their classification at a
variety of scales (see alsofarming). As the
economic significance of agriculture declined
in terms of the sector’s contribution to GDP
and employment, particularly in advanced
industrial countries, so interest in the subject
diminished in the geographical research
community. Thus, by the end of the 1980s,
leading practitioners were advocating the end
of agricultural geography and the dawn of a
‘geography of food’ (see alsofood, geog-
raphy of).
The importation of new theoretical
concepts from political economy and a
shift in the substantive focus of study to the
agro-food systemas a whole, rather than
farming as a self-contained activity, renewed
the field of agricultural geography. Research
agendas framed in terms of the agro-food sys-
tem (see, e.g., Marsden, Munton, Whatmore
and Little, 1986), set the parameters for a
new phase of geographical interest; the initial
momentum for the shift came from encoun-
ters with interdisciplinary networks and ideas,
notably those of rural sociology, as much
as with conversations with the broader geo-
graphical community.
By the early 1990s, researchers had taken
the field beyond the farm gate in two direc-tions. First, it had expanded to the wider
organization ofcapital accumulationin the
agricultural and food industries, focusing on
the social, economic and technological ties
between three sets of industrial activities:
food raising (i.e. farming), agricultural tech-
nology products and services, and food pro-
cessing and retailing. Second, it now
encompassed the regulatoryinfrastructure
underpinning these activities, focusing on
the political and policy processes by which
national and supranational state agencies
intervene in agricultural practices and food
markets.
The contemporary agro-food system is a
composite of these various perspectives and
concepts (see Millstone and Lang, 2003), as
depicted in the accompanying figure. The fig-
ure illustrates the enlargement of the scope of
agricultural geography from a focus primarily
on activities taking place on the farm itself (B)
to one spanning the diverse sites and activities
of food production and consumption (A–D).
In addition to emulating economic geogra-
phy’s enduring emphasis ontransnational
corporations, this broadening focus of agri-
cultural geography includes particular atten-
tion to the regulatory agencies and processes
that are so prominent in the organization of
advanced industrial food production and con-
sumption (see Marsden, Munton, Whatmore
and Little, 2000).
Research within this political economy
tradition has been driven by two contradictory
impulses. On the one hand, it has sought to
treat agriculture and food production as just
another industrial sector, like cars or steel,
thus aligning it much more closely with the
broader community ofindustrial geography
and its concerns withglobalization, corpor-
atecapitalism and the so-called transition
from fordism to post-fordism. Indeed,
many concerns associated with theagrarian
question, such as the uneven process of
capitalist development, came to preoccupy
industrial geographers in the past decade.
On the other hand, researchers have sought
to make sense of the distinctive features of
the industrial organization of farming that
persist, particularly the adaptive resilience of
family and peasant forms of production
(e.g. Whatmore, 1991; Watts, 1994a), and
their intimate relationship with ruralland-
scapesand national historiographies, which
magnifies their political significance in the
electoral and policy processes of developed
and developing countries to this day (e.g.
Moore, 2005).Gregory / The Dictionary of Human Geography 9781405132879_4_A Final Proof page 17 31.3.2009 9:44pmAGRICULTURAL GEOGRAPHY