Farmers' Interest Groups and Agricultural Policy in New Zealand during the 1980s

Abstract

During the 1980s in New Zealand the fabric of state support which had gradually expanded after World War 2 was suddenly removed. Farmers' interest groups found they were unable to influence appreciably the general direction of macroeconomic policy or to contain the influence of deregulationist policies on agriculture. A political economy approach is used to conceptualise and offer preliminary theoretical suggestions about the changing interconnections between economy and state during the present restructuring crisis, especially the need to focus on the disintegration and recomposition of political constituencies and organisations when macropolicy and sectoral frameworks are dismantled. The changing strategies of farmers' interest groups and related agricultural politics amidst an unprecedented episode of state-sector restructuring in New Zealand over the decade are discussed.

Can Rural Voices Effect Rural Choices? Contesting Deregulation in New Zealand’s Apple Industry

“…Tied up in the processes social change is the conceptually thorny issue of agrifood globalization and what it represents in the context of New Zealand's structural adjustment experiment. In writing about farmers' interest groups in the late 1980s and early 1990s, Roche et al (1992Roche et al ( , p. 1764 conclude that questions about New Zealand agriculture ". .…”

“…Research into regulatory change and the terms of New Zealand's agricultural crisis in the first decade of the structural adjustment experiment outlines a picture where farmer's interest groups were unable to influence appreciably the general direction of macroeconomic policy or contain the influence of deregulationist policies on agriculture (Roche et al 1992;Campbell and Ward 1992;Cloke 1996). During this time, the new regulatory order brought into question the rationale and operation of the producer boards, which initiated an ongoing process of restructuring, from internal as much as external pressures (Roche et al 1992;Campbell 1994;Cloke 1996). Throughout this process, farmer and rural interest groups had little time to respond to their increasingly contradictory position caught between private capital infiltration into the state and agricultural sectors, and continued existence of producer marketing boards.…”

Absolving the sins of emission: The politics of regulating agricultural greenhouse gas emissions in New Zealand

“…This is likely due, at least in part, to the legacy of agricultural deregulation in the 1980s and 1990s (Roche et al, 1992;Johnsen, 2003;Haggerty et al, 2009). The "success" of deregulation in establishing neoliberal subjectivities in New Zealand agriculture was aided to an extent by farmers' attachment to individualism and flexibility as essential characteristics of the successful farmer.…”

Neither ‘family’ nor ‘corporate’ farming: Australian tomato growers as farm family entrepreneurs

“…Lawrence's Capitalism in the Countryside (1987) introduced to Australian audiences key frameworks for these debates. In New Zealand, the research of Le Heron (1993) and Roche (1992) (see Cloke et al, 1990) sought to explain the processes by which agricultural formations were embedded within national economic and political spaces. Alongside these contributions, Fairweather (1992) examined the dynamics of contemporary restructuring in New Zealand, arguing that since the 1980s corporate entities were entering sectors such as horticulture and dairying altering the nature of farmer/ processor relations.…”