Agri-Food Globalization in Perspective : International Restructuring in the Processing Tomato Industry

This study provides insights into the globalization of agriculture and food.

By presenting a detailed case study of international restructuring in the processing tomato industry, agri-food globalization is revealed as a set of heterogenous and fragmented processes, bounded in multiple ways by the separations of geography, culture, capital and knowledge. In charting these developments, this study investigates the market power of large food companies, the advertising and marketing of tomato products, consumer attitudes towards organic and genetically modified tomatoes, pressures to deregulate the arrangements by which tomato growers sell their output to firms, debates on the future of European Union subsidies for the tomato industry, and the capacity for low cost countries in the Third World to supply tomato products on the world market. Containing the results of field research from eleven countries, including the United States, Canada, Italy, Spain, France, Thailand, China and Australia, this volume is most suitable for scholars of business and management, development, rural sociology, economics and geography.