New Challenges for the Players in Global Agriculture and Food

Abstract

Quality, as defined by grades, standards, codes and conventions, is being established as the major connection between locales of production and consumption of food. Literature and empirical evidence reveal that quality, however, results from social relations among several actors, commodities, territories, institutions and people, unevenly situated in society. Therefore, quality must be analyzed against a background of social inequality, which comes to be explicit in instruments and competing ways in which control is established along the supply chain; and for that matter, become object of disputes and resistance This article argues that quality definitions are made explicit through regulations, which are becoming the measure to evaluate the work of several people and institutions enrolled in the process of globalization of agriculture and food., the understanding of which shall explain the actual politics prevailing within the globalization of food and society. The article explores contexts of the relationships that link up producers, workers and consumers involved in the activities to globalize food, inspired by a novel and restructured agricultural site, localized in the Brazilian Northeast. Empirical evidence used derives from research carried out both in the fruit region of the San Francisco Valley - the largest project of this kind in Latin America, and in the hortifruit department of a supermarket, part of a global food chain