NEO-LIBERALISM, THE WTO AND NEW MODES OF AGRI-
ENVIRONMENTAL GOVERNANCE IN THE EUROPEAN UNION, THE
USA AND AUSTRALIA.1

Mark Tilzey
Imperial College London

Introduction
eo-liberalism in agricultural policy has exhibited a growing presence in the ‘new
N global economy’ (Coleman et al. 2004), pursuing an agenda that seeks to
dismantle the welfare components of established ‘national’ policies and to reconstruct
in their stead a new ‘post-Fordist’ accumulation dynamic and novel structures of
governance simultaneously at regional and global levels. The World Trade
Organsation (WTO) constitutes a key site for the re-regulation of international
governance in favour of neo-liberalism, a process in which state interventionism to
underwrite agricultural production and environmental and social protection is deemed
increasingly inadmissible where market ‘distortion’ is implied. Nevertheless,
implantation of neo-liberalism in agricultural policy exhibits considerable unevenness
between states, being characterised by varying levels of accommodation and
resistance. States appear to be seeking selective accumulation opportunities through
liberalisation whilst simultaneously, and in varying degrees, striving to sustain some
level of agricultural and socio-environmental ‘exceptionalism’ in policy, often
manifested in new modes of agri-environmental governance.
This paper proposes specifically to address the issue of agri-environmental
policy change in this post-Fordist conjuncture, since this appears symptomatic of key
concerns surrounding the emergence of neo-liberal governance in national and
international agricultural policy, its contradictory relationship to environmental and
social sustainability, and the politics of accommodation (regulation) and resistance to
this neo-liberal agenda. The aim, therefore, is to analyse agricultural-environmental
governance change as expressive of the environmentally and socially contradictory
character of neo-liberalism, of attempts to accommodate socio-environmental
contradiction and critique within post-Fordist regulatory structures, and of more
comprehensive opposition to neo-liberalism in the agro-food sector. Broadly, the aim
is to comprehend the nature and causal bases of varying forms of agri-environmental
governance by reference to three ‘developed’ capitalist polities – the European Union,
the USA, and Australia – and, more specifically, how these forms influence, and are
influenced by, the re-regulation of agricultural governance at the international level
through the WTO.
In so doing, the paper articulates a regulation theoretical and neo-Gramscian
interpretation of political economy in which a class and group interest based ontology
of change is deployed, conceptualising as political process the moment of class/group
agency. This perspective reconfigures as agency those ontological arenas recently

1I would like to acknowledge the financial support of the Leverhulme Trust UK and the
National Europe Centre, Australian National University for the research on which this paper draws as
well as the helpful comments of three anonymous referees.
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occluded by assumptions of ‘structuralism’ and ‘structural force’ (see for example
Whatmore 1994; Murdoch et al. 2003), so that neo-liberalism becomes reconstituted
as a political project, variously proposed and opposed by discrete classes and class
fractions (see van Apeldoorn 2002 and Potter and Tilzey 2005 for detailed discussion).
Methodologically, this approach enables an “unpacking [of] capitalism, while
developing a more sophisticated theorisation of political agency, which incorporates
economy and culture, class and identity” (Wills 2002, p 97). Moreover, contestation
and the balance of class interests at the level of the nation state are considered to
remain key to the dynamics of post-Fordism and restructuring processes (see for
example Fagan and Le Heron, Weiss 1998; Jessop 2002; Larner and Le Heron 2002;
Schmidt 2002). This implies that neo-liberalism should be conceptualised,
substantively, as comprising multiple projects (Larner and Le Heron 2002)
instantiated in varying form in different state-society complexes (van der Pijl 1998) as
the outcome of spatially specific constellations of state/class interests, alliances and
compromises. By the same token, this contestation and balance of interests,
instantiated in state policy, is seen to be the primary determinant of functions and
processes devolved either downwards or displaced upwards towards local and
international governance structures respectively (see Jessop 2002).
This paper is also concerned to incorporate nature, both materially and in its
discursive mediations as environmentalisms, into an understanding of agro-food
system dynamics within a specific conjuncture given by the tendential, but contested,
rise of neo-liberalism. In so doing, this paper employs a political or social ecological
perspective, seeing nature and society as internally related, rather than as discrete
entities (see Castree 1995; Burkett 1999; Tilzey 2002). Whilst non-human nature is, in
varying degrees, socially (re)constructed in material terms through human
manipulation of ecosystems and the genetic material of ecosystem agents, such
‘hybrid’ agents nevertheless retain materiality and agency, thereby supplying
affordances and imposing constraints on human actions on nature. Combining this
approach with the socio-historical specificities of the class based ontology defined
above, we can discern how accumulation dynamics implicate environmental changes
and unsustainable outcomes. Nature, now re-conceptualised as ‘social’ nature, is
necessarily integral to the study of change in agro-food systems both in terms of the
way it is an inherent element of the production process and in terms of the way it is
impacted upon sustainably or unsustainably by that production process. Nature is thus
part of the materiality of uneven development in agriculture. And more reflexively, of
course, the environmental contradictions contingent on accumulation processes
implicate the differential integration of nature as the object of social modes of
regulation – in this case as modes of agri-environmental governance – by states.
The paper is structured in the following way. Firstly, it explores the
relationship between the emergence of post-Fordism, the rise of environmentalism,
and selective pressure to sustain the socio-cultural fabric of rural areas as agriculture
is ‘de-centred’ through the de-legitimation of economic ‘exceptionalism’ in policy.
This sets the frame for a discussion of the WTO as an axial institution in the
furtherance of neo-liberal international governance. Agri-environmental governance,
often focused around the issue of agricultural multifunctionality, has emerged as an
issue of considerable contestation in the WTO, representing as it does an attempt to
legitimate varying levels of agricultural and environmental ‘exceptionalism’ in the
face of a neo-liberal market model that systematically effaces agriculture’s
multifunctions through a singular focus on the valorisation of human labour. The


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paper then proceeds to explore the politico-economic and ecological bases for such
differential invocation of ‘exceptionalism’, using Australia, Europe and the US to
illustrate contestation in policy discourses and understandings of agri-environmental
interactions. It examines how these competing policy stances are being played out in
the current Doha Development Agenda (DDA) of WTO negotiations and provides
brief commentary on the possible outcome of the DDA and its implications for the
future of agri-environmental governance. The paper concludes with a call for
exploration of agri-environmental governance models currently marginalised in the
WTO, notably those, such as the food sovereignty movement, which hold out the
potential for a ‘re-embedding’ of agriculture in society and nature.
Post-Fordism, neo-liberalism and the challenge to agricultural
‘exceptionalism’
Post-Fordism expresses an historical conjuncture in which social forces in all
‘developed’ capitalist states appear to be undergoing reconfiguration, involving
continuing change in the balance of power between different social groups and classes
to the detriment of those hegemonic within the policy communities of Fordism. Neo-
liberalism is considered by many authors (Cox 1987; Gill 1990; Overbeek 1990;
Overbeek and van der Pijl 1993; van der Pijl 1998) to express a political project,
propounded by discrete fractions of capital, to restore class hegemony by, in is own
rhetoric, ‘freeing the market from the shackles of the state’. This process,
disembedding the market, reflects particularly the ambitions of finance capital but
advocacy appears to be extending to incorporate the more transnationalised fractions
of ‘productive’ capital. Polanyi observed that disembedding the market generates an
ideological pre-disposition towards the advocacy of “laissez faire and free trade” in
policy (1957, p.132). This he contrasted with embedded market proclivities of nation
centred productive capital, embodying the principle of social protection and “aiming
at the conservation of man and nature as well as productive organisation…, and using
… instruments of intervention as its methods” (ibid., p. 132). In many senses the
current era of post-Fordist restructuring reprises the contradictions and tensions which
Polanyi’s concept of ‘double movement’ sought to articulate, with the ‘traditional’
lines of contestation between capital fractions and between capital and labour being in
varying degrees re-enacted. The current conjuncture expresses a dimension much less
in evidence in the Great Transformation, however, since it is one symptomatic of the
crisis of modernism itself – the emergence of environmentalism as sustainability
discourse. Sustainability discourse, whilst reprising and encompassing more
traditional environmental themes relating to amenity, nature conservation and
resource conservation, is novel in its focus on the dependency of humanity upon
ecological functions and services (Tilzey 2002). It has, however, been appropriated as
a powerful legitimating tool by the major and pre-existing protagonists of the ‘double
movement’, in this way instantiated in various ‘weaker’ guises as environmental
managerialism in neo-liberal and social democratic state policy alike. As a
consequence ‘strong’ sustainability, as social ecology2, is assigned a marginal status
in policy, recognising as it does the politically unpalatable, but ineluctable, linkages
between capital accumulation and unsustainability.

2 Social ecology invokes a perspective in which nature and society are configured in terms of internal
relations rather than discrete entities, thus abjuring the traditions of ecocentrism and anthropocentrism.


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From this post-Fordist restructuring process there has yet to emerge a new
stable accumulation model comparable to post-war Atlantic Fordism (see for example
Jessop 2002), an arguably inevitable outcome given the heightened social and
environmental contradictions that attend neo-liberalism. Rather than witnessing a new
single ‘post-Fordist’ accumulation regime, the present era of economic upheaval is
characterised by a plurality of ‘rival concepts of restructuring’ (Ruigrok and van
Tulder 1995) in which neo-liberalism exhibits a highly uneven pattern of implantation,
subject to varying levels of compromise and contestation 3 . Thus, although neo-
liberalism may be formalised as a unitary doctrine and its ascendancy attributed in
part to advocacy or imposition by the global hegemon (the USA), substantively it is
more helpful to conceptualise neo-liberalism as constituted by multiple projects
instantiated in varying form in different state-society complexes as the outcome of
territorially-bounded constellation of state/class interests, alliances and compromises.
Whilst acknowledging the differential power of states in the ‘world system’, this
model vitiates any simplistic notion of state-society complexes functioning as passive
recipients of policies transmitted, on the conveyor belt model of internationalisation,
from ‘core’ to ‘periphery’. As Hagan and Le Heron note, “Capital still requires
nation-states to secure economic, social and political conditions under which any
accumulation can continue” (Hagan and Le Heron 1994 p 271). States thus remain the
key sites for securing the regulatory and legitimacy functions surrounding the
contradictory process of capital accumulation (Wood 2005; Tilzey and Potter 2006a).
Hagan and Le Heron have usefully synthesised the relationship between
‘internationalisation’ and ‘national restructuring’ when they note that “within specific
countries, interactions between capital, labour and state both shape and are shaped by
the different ways in which capital is inserted into global accumulation. Restructuring
since the mid-1970s … has resulted from these specific social relations inside nation-
states. Although these interactions have been conditioned by the global system of
accumulation, this itself has emerged from changing relationships between capital,
labour and state since the mid-1960s” (Hagan and Le Heron 1994 p 272).
For the agro-food sector, the transition from Fordism has entailed a
progressive challenge to the embedded market structures of ‘political productivism’
(Tilzey 2000; 2002) which have informed the character of state intervention in the
sector since the Second World War. Under a Fordist mode of regulation, state
assistance to the agriculture sector has fulfilled both economic accumulation and
social legitimacy functions as part of a larger contract between capital and labour.
These unitary economic and social objectives of the state assistance paradigm have
been premised on strong assumptions concerning agricultural ‘exceptionalism’ arising
from a Fordist consensus in relation to the economic vulnerability of farming, and
small farmers particularly, to unfettered market forces (Keeler 1996; Coleman 1998;
Potter and Lobley 2004). The fracturing of Fordism in the wider economy has been
mirrored, however, by the progressive fragmentation of these unitary objectives
within the agro-food sector and the legitimacy of the ‘agricultural welfare state’
(Sheingate 2000) has been subject to increasing challenge. While the lower and

3 This pattern is well exemplified in the European Union where, since the mid-1980s, a struggle has
ensued in relation to its socio-economic order, the welfare state, the post-war institutions of the labour
market, industry (including agriculture) and its global competitiveness and sustainability (Bieler and
Morton, 2001; van Apeldoorn, 2002). This struggle is structured around the interests of three major
class fractions that would have been familiar to Polanyi – neo-liberalism, neo-mercantilism and social
democracy – with the new dimension of environmentalism modulated and lending greater legitimacy to
the particular precepts of each class fractional discourse.


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middle strata of agricultural productive capital have retained an ‘embedded’
perspective on the market, the upper stratum of farmers and the agro-food processing,
distribution and retailing sectors, by contrast, have undergone considerable capital
concentration and a concomitant shift in interest preference towards the
‘disembedded’ market. These capital fractions find the nation-centred regulatory
structures of Fordism increasingly restrictive and now seek to construct a minimalist
‘Lockean’ pattern of domestic and international governance4 (see Potter and Tilzey
2005), the latter centred on the disciplines and procedures of the WTO (see below).
The processing and retailing sectors in particular find themselves under increasing
competitive pressure to source suppliers globally on a least cost basis (Hart 1997;
Josling 2000). This shift in interest preference towards a global and ‘disembedded’
market is corroding the coherence of the Fordist agricultural policy community,
challenging corporatist models of policy governance and introducing new discourses
into the agricultural policy debate which emphasise international competitiveness and
improved overseas market access (McMichael 2000).
At the same time, structural change within agriculture has opened up a
division of interest between the larger, more capitalised businesses able to respond to
the demands of processors, distributors and retailers and those labour intensive
family-run holdings, many of them still dependent on state assistance and the ability
to secure other non-agricultural sources of income in order to be able to continue
farming. Within the relative policy security offered by Fordist productivism, the upper
stratum of farmers has been both willing and able to allow the progressive ‘formal’
subsumption of their enterprises within corporate agro-food networks, both as buyers
of inputs and suppliers of unprocessed products for food manufacturing. This
formalisation of upstream and downstream relations has both enhanced the position of
corporate agro-food capital and led to interest differentiation between the larger,
restructured farms and those marginalised in this process (Cafruny 1989; Ingersent
and Rayner 2000; Hennis 2002). The unitary objectives of the agro-food sector under
national Fordism have therefore undergone progressive attenuation, with the ‘non-
productive’ fractions of capital tending increasingly to favour a liberal trade and
investment regime. Under these circumstances, neo-liberalism presents an increasing
challenge to the economic ‘exceptionalist’ status of agriculture under Fordism, a
critique reinforced by growing evidence for the environmentally malign impacts of
productivism.
The new modes of agri-environmental governance have their genesis in this
conjuncture, characterised by the threatened ‘de-centring’ of agriculture particularly
in those spaces where global competitiveness is difficult to sustain on the basis of
productivist scale economies. Concomitantly there is a new emphasis on revenue
generation for less competitive producers through diversification and pluriactivity,

4 This ‘economic constitutionalism’ is associated with key processes of ‘denationalisation’ and
‘destatisation’ (Jessop 2002). ‘Denationalisation’ entails the re-scaling of selective state functions
upwards to international bodies, or downwards to the regional and local, and is manifested, for example,
in the increased influence of the WTO in formulating the substance and direction of agricultural policy.
‘Destatisation’ entails the increased incorporation of the private sector and civil society into
management and regulation of economic, social and environmental issues, including the creation of
independent regulatory agencies to police the new economic constitutionalism. Destatisation is
embodied in the progressive de-legitimation of agricultural ‘exceptionalism’ as states shift from
positive coordination (state management of the market through price support, intervention, export
subsidies, tariff walls, etc) to negative coordination (broadly, assuring an appropriate environment for
competitiveness and entrepreneurialism).


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capitalising on agriculture’s ancillary multifunctions such as biodiversity, landscape
and cultural tradition where relations of jointness are retained. These ‘post-
productivist’ spaces therefore express both the selective decline of productivist
agriculture under conditions of globalising competition and responses to the
environmental (and social) contradictions of productivism. However, state level
responses to post-productivism, as agri-environmental governance, exhibit variability
in the degree to which there is willingness to intervene in the market to secure
sustainability objectives. This variability appears to co-vary according to the depth of
neo-liberal policy implantation in the economy. High levels of neo-liberal
retrenchment in the economy, as in Australia, tend to generate low levels of market
intervention in agri-environmental governance norms. More qualified acceptance of
neo-liberalism, as in the EU and US, tends to coincide with more interventionist
proclivities in the governance of post-productivism. These states are still willing and
able to uphold traditions of welfarism – here the social and the environmental are, in
varying degrees, coupled to constitute a new form of ‘exceptionalism’ in agri-rural
policy.
In those spaces characterised by the realisation of global ‘comparative
advantages’, by contrast, market productivism becomes the dominant productive form,
increasingly divested of its multifunctions through a singular focus on labour
valorisation through processes of ‘appropriationism’ and ‘substitutionism’ (Goodman
et al. 1989). To the extent that agri-environmental issues are addressed in such
circumstances, they assume a purely environmental dimension, divested of their social
support functions and retaining at best only attenuated relations of jointness with
agricultural production. In their totality, therefore, post-Fordist spaces tend to
juxtapose a dominant market productivism and a subordinate post-productivism
(Tilzey and Potter 2006a).
The WTO and agri-environmental governance
The WTO constitutes a structure of governance that crystallises some of the key
trends in the emergence of a post-Fordist regime of accumulation in agriculture and
the ‘denationalisation’ strategy of neo-liberal class fractions. ‘Denationalisation’
entails the selective rescaling of regulatory functions to supra or sub-national levels
(Jessop 2002) in a way designed to bypass institutional resistance at the level of the
state (see Tilzey and Potter 2006a). Thus, despite the continuing presence of the
strong nation-centred and mercantilist concerns that characterised the Uruguay Round
(or the investment-constrained fraction of national capital (see Bryan 1987 and Hagan
and Le Heron 1994), the DDA appears to express the (intended) implantation of a
more purely neo-liberal regime of accumulation, reflecting the increasingly
transnationalised character of agro-food capital (or the global fraction of capital in
Bryan’s classifcation (Bryan 1987)). Commodity circuits are increasingly integrated
and managed by private capital transnationally rather than by states, progressively
removing the logic underlying mercantilist export drives (see for example Vorley
2003; Coleman, Grant and Josling 2004)5. Thus, contra Peine and McMichael (2004),
the logic imputed to EU and US direct payments in underwriting the competitiveness
of domestically produced commodities no longer appears as compelling as before
under new circumstances in which alternative supplies can be sourced globally.

5 This does not mean, however, that transnational capitalist interests are ‘stateless’. TNCs remain
headquartered in, and retain allegiance to, certain states and in turn rely upon advocacy by those states
on their behalf (for example in the WTO) to further their interests.


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Furthermore, the political influence of remaining regionally-embedded agro-exporters
in the North has been progressively countered within the WTO since Seattle by the
new-found influence of their Southern competitors in the G20. Over the longer term at
least, the scene thus appears set for the further erosion of neo-mercantilism, and the
deeper entrenchment of neo-liberal reforms.
This process of market-liberal retrenchment is indeed normatively implied in
the very structure of WTO disciplines (WTO 2000), tolerating rather than welcoming
as they do ‘exceptionalism’ in agricultural policy. This is so because WTO disciplines
define normatively the way in which commodities should be produced and,
concomitantly, the way in which intervention to address any negative or positive
environmental and social externalities should be configured in policy (Potter and
Tilzey 2002). WTO disciplines embody a neo-classical view in which ‘efficiency’
(defined as the efficiency of human labour not as ecological/energetic efficiency)
constitutes the sole arbiter of economic viability in agricultural production (Tilzey
2000a). This arises since human labour in capitalism constitutes the sole source of
surplus value, the means by which capital accumulation proceeds (see for example
Burkett 1999). This singular focus upon human labour valorisation implicates the
exclusion of environmental and social considerations from the capitalist metric of
efficiency, defining the inherently oppositional relation between economic
accumulation and sustainability (Tilzey 2002). The WTO instantiates this metric, its
‘traffic light’ categorisation of allowable interventions being designed to pursue a
programme of reform whose desired endpoint is the maximal elimination of market
frictions (trade-distorting interventions) that might inhibit the globally competitive
valorisation of human labour (Peine and McMichael 2004). In a globalising world,
international trade, through the circuit of realisation (see Palloix 1977), is an essential
precondition of labour valorisation, thereby explaining the WTO’s singular
preoccupation with the minimisation of ‘trade-distortion’. The hegemony of labour
valorisation within the structure of WTO disciplines similarly defines the normative
and tendential restriction of legitimate interventions to a category (the ‘green box’)
defined as ‘non-, or at most minimally, trade distorting’ (Potter and Tilzey 2002).
The normative and Lockean endpoint of WTO reform embodies the
transnational or radical neo-liberal ideal of capital accumulation and, by implication,
defines the place and form of agri-environmental governance within it (Potter and
Tilzey 2005). While the normative categorisation of WTO disciplines embodies a
transnational and radical neo-liberal class perspective (Coleman et al. 2004), it has
thus far of course made allowance for competing and more interventionist models of
capitalism. The clear implication of this categorisation and the process of continuing
reform, however, is that only an essentially evolutionary accommodation should be
entailed, pending the longer-term elimination or minimisation of trade-distorting
interventions (Tangermann 2003). WTO disciplines thus define a favoured mode of
capital accumulation and, by implication, the means of intervention, exceptionalism
and hence agri-environmental governance along a spectrum of decreasing legitimacy
from transnational/radical neo-liberalism to ‘strong’ multifunctionality discourses6.

6 It appears possible to discern some five discrete and ideal typical forms of agri-environmental
governance discourse, extending along a spectrum from ‘very weak’ to ‘strong’. The first, as suggested
earlier, may be characterised as a very weak radical neo-liberal (‘New World’) discourse, a position
articulated most prominently in the context of the current WTO negotiations by the Cairns Group, the
US Administration, and the G20 group of agro-exporting developing countries. This discourse


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With the exception of strong multifunctionality, these discourses of agri-
environmental governance all receive varying degrees of evolutionary
accommodation within the WTO (IISD 2002), as states seek to maximise
accumulation opportunities whilst minimising the adverse impacts of globalisation.
As each discourse on agri-environmental governance reflects the favoured
means of accumulation and intervention on the part of its class protagonists, so each
has a discrete view on how WTO disciplines should be defined and deployed. Of the
three ‘pillars’ through which WTO disciplines are exercised – export subsidies,
market access, and domestic support – domestic support is of greatest immediate
relevance to agri-environmental governance, with each discourse possessing a discrete
stance regarding the definition and deployment of its ‘traffic light’ system of
subvention categorisation 7. With the exception of strong multifunctionality, these

constitutes a denial of agricultural ‘exceptionalism’, claiming that while multifunctions may be
characteristic of agriculture they do not differ qualitatively from those of other sectors
The second discursive form may be characterised as ‘embedded’ neo-liberal (‘Old World’) discourse, a
position embodied in EC Commissioner Fischler’s integrated rural development paradigm, in the
European Landowners’ Organisation’s advocacy of ‘third generation’ agriculture (ELO, 2004), and in
the OECD’s Multifunctionality: Towards an Analytical Framework (2001). This position is also
articulated in Multifunctional Agriculture: A New Paradigm for European Agriculture and Rural
Development (van Huylenbroeck and Durand, 2003).
Neo-mercantilist discourse, by contrast, is premised on a political productivist conceptualisation of
agriculture, regarding the function of the state as being to safeguard and underwrite productive capacity,
the domestic market and export potential (Potter and Tilzey, 2005).
A further form of may be described as social democratic or social income support discourse. This
emphasises the provision of social income support to farmers under circumstances in which farms lack
competitive capacity in international markets (due to small farm size and/or topographical constraints)
but retain considerable political influence within the state.
Finally, we may identify a ‘strong’ discourse of agri-environmental governance. Contra neo-
mercantilism, Via Campesina internationally argues for a multifunctional concept of agriculture which
confronts “the global regulation of commodities per se irrespective of local character” (Saurin, 1999: p.
226). In other words, multifunctionality constitutes a path to radical reform in all rather than in
particular situations because it challenges the capitalist mode of production as the perpetrator of
unsustainability globally. Strong multifunctionality’s counter-hegemonic status implicates its exclusion
from state policy (despite representing immanently or actually the interests of the majority of food
producers globally). This is symptomatic of its oppositional posture in relation to all capitalist modes of
accumulation, whether neo-liberal, neo-mercantilist, or social democratic. It also distinguishes strong
multifunctionality from the other discourses delineated above, these possessing either hegemonic or
sub-hegemonic status in relation to dominant modes of accumulation
7 Firstly, and least interventionist, is the transnational or radical neo-liberal discourse. This envisages a
complete separation of green box support from agricultural production. Environmental and social
welfare issues are conceptualised as ‘non trade concerns’ (NTCs), deliverable by non-agricultural
means, with subvention strictly delimited to defined environmental and social outcomes. The approach
embodies a thoroughgoing dichotomy between the ‘natural’ and the ‘social’ (‘wilderness’ versus
market productivism) in which the principal pre-occupation lies with the negative externalities (the
‘impact model’) generated by productivist agriculture (see Ward 2004)
Secondly, ‘embedded’ neo-liberalism recognises the principle of jointness in production and recognises,
therefore, that certain forms of agriculture generate positive externalities. It considers, however, that
agriculture is only contingently, rather than necessarily, required for the delivery of these beneficial
environmental outcomes.
Thirdly, the social democrat or income support view of agri-environmental governance places
emphasis on the need for income support in addition to remuneration for positive environmental
services/income foregone as a social security safety net in the face of downward pressure on farm
commodity prices. A generous green box is envisaged, resulting from the modulation of former
commodity related supports into direct payments.
Fourthly, the neo-mercantilist position invokes state intervention to secure the continued supply of
mass markets through family farm dominated productivism (political productivism). This discourse


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discourses – ranging from radical neo-liberalism to neo-mercantilism – are in varying
degrees embodied in negotiating stances of WTO member states, with increasing
interventionist proclivities correlating with politically influential but vulnerable
constituencies and state capacity to implement ‘exceptionalism’ in policy.
Thus, the EU negotiating stance appears to comprise elements of ‘embedded’
neo-liberalism (the dominant element) together with decreasingly influential elements
of neo-mercantilism, and social democracy/social income support (Potter and Tilzey
2005; Tilzey and Potter 2006a). As such, the EU posture appears to reflect relatively
accurately the domestic balance of class and class fractional interests. The US
negotiating stance appears less interventionist, conforming to a hegemonic radical
neo-liberalism but containing elements of subaltern neo-mercantilism and social
democracy. Nevertheless, there appears to be something of a disjuncture between this
posture and the real balance of domestic interest group power (Moyer 2004).
Domestic trends in the US since 1996 indicate that neo-liberal advocacy is heavily
qualified by neo-mercantilist and social democrat discourses under circumstances in
which US agro-exports and import sensitive commodities appear under increased
threat from overseas competition. The US therefore articulates a radical neo-
liberalism of an ambivalent kind, reflecting the generosity of its domestic green box
and the new-found need to accommodate its quasi-decoupled commodity
compensation payments within the blue box (Ayer and Swinbank 2002; Petit 2002).
Nevertheless, the bulk of US environmental green box payments are disbursed in
relation to non-working land conservation (Zinn 1999), perpetuating a dichotomy
between nature and social production that largely occludes the principle of jointness.
The Australian negotiating position, for its part, likewise embodies radical neo-liberal
discourse but, unlike the US stance, appears accurately to reflect a domestic situation
in which market liberalism has attained almost unchallenged hegemony (Pritchard
2000; 2005a; 2005b). Australia articulates a radical neo-liberal discourse on agri-
environmental governance in which all forms of agricultural ‘exceptionalism’ are
considered invalid. Any state subvention to address socio-environmental concerns
should be unrelated to agricultural production. Conservation entitlements are
considered indirect subsidies, and any on-farm activity to address environmental
issues should be entirely voluntary (Tilzey 2005).
Causality in new modes of agri-environmental governance
It is evident that the level of agri-environmental ‘exceptionalism’ invoked, and
embodied, in state-level policy continues to vary significantly between states, despite
the tendential hegemony of neo-liberalism. This unevenness in the incursion of neo-
liberalism into agri-environmental governance appears both to influence, and to be
influenced by, the course of WTO negotiations. How is this continuing differentiation
in state-level policy to be explained? There would seem to be a number of key
determinants at play here. Firstly, it would seem to reflect the hegemony, or the
balance, of class interests at the level of the state, together with the relationship

advocates the retention of blue box and ‘coupled’ green box payments, together with continuing
elements of amber box support, all seen as essential to the maintenance of farm income derived
primarily from the sale of commodities.
Finally, the discourse of strong multifunctionality refuses to recognise the legitimacy of the WTO and
its regulatory structures, conceptualising these as the embodiment of corporate power, implicating the
erosion of small farmer and peasant livelihoods. This is an essentially counter-hegemonic, anti-
capitalist discourse articulated by organisations such as the Coordination Paysanne Europeenne (CPE),
a member of the international small farmers’ and peasants’ movement Via Campesina.


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Tilzey – Vol. 14(1), September 2006
between the agriculture sector and the remainder of the economy. Secondly, it reflects
the politico-economic status of the state within the ‘world system’, particularly in
terms of the state’s ability or willingness to intervene financially, or in a regulatory
fashion, to underwrite ‘exceptionalism’ in policy. Thirdly, it reflects particular agro-
ecological contexts and the way in which these are mediated through environmental
discourses. Thus, agriculture may possess co-evolutionary relationships with nature,
in which multifunctions such as biodiversity and landscape are generated as joint
products along with food and fibre. Alternatively, this co-evolutionary relationship
may be largely absent, incipient, or even unrecognised, as in much of the ‘New
World’ (including Australasia). It may also be negative, actively corroding
multifunctional attributes (soil, water, biodiversity landscape, and socio-cultural
structure) as in the case of productivist agriculture, whether in ‘Old’ or ‘New World’
settings. What is the nature and relative significance of these determinants in relation
to the three polities of concern to this paper?
Australia, for its part, occupies a semi-peripheral status in the global economy
(Lawrence and Vanclay 1994) by contrast to the ‘core’ status of both the EU and the
US. Characteristic features of such an economy include: exports comprising primary
products generated by technologies and capital/labour ratios typical of ‘core’
economies; industrialisation limited to first stage processing, import substitution with
tariff barriers being a local means of stimulating domestic industrial growth; the
dominance of the economy, particularly manufacturing and mineral production, by
foreign TNCs (see Lawrence 1989; 1990). Truncated industrialisation is a feature of
such semi-peripheral states, together with a concomitant reliance on agricultural and
mineral exports to support domestic economic growth. Australia may be described
simultaneously as both a developed as well as a dependent economy. In times of crisis
this ambiguous status within the world capitalist economy generates specific problems
for Australia as a result of its heavy dependence on export agriculture and branch
transnationals in manufacturing industry, on the one hand, and its characteristic wage
structure more typical of core economies, on the other (Gray and Lawrence 2001). In
times of declining overseas revenue, considerable pressure is placed on the state to
restructure the conditions of surplus generation throughout industry, including the
subsidisation of infrastructural expenditure and the facilitation of wage reductions as a
means of appeasing TNCs. States such as Australia live in particular fear that the
corporate sector may threaten or effect the withholding of investment or, worse, the
transferral of investments and activities to lower cost regions. The implication is that
the Australian state, in contrast to the US and the EU, is less able or willing to invoke
or implement ‘exceptionalist’ arguments/policies in relation to agriculture (and
particularly in relation to their social/environmental legitimacy functions) and lacks
the politico-economic power to engage in neo-mercantilist activities to secure
overseas markets for its commodities.
Thus, despite a brief post-war interlude during which Fordist policies were
relatively dominant, Australia since the 1970s has undergone a process of progressive
and thoroughgoing market-liberal retrenchment and a concomitant invocation of
radical neo-liberalism in agricultural policy (Pritchard and McManus 2000; Gray and
Lawrence 2001; Pritchard 2005a; 2005b). This may be attributed firstly, then, to
Australia’s semi-peripheral (politically/economically weak) status and its
susceptibility to pressure from TNCs (and their home states) to accommodate itself to
their favoured accumulation strategies. Relatedly, Australia has a long tradition of
agro-export dependency in which any constraints on the production of competitively


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