The Historical Evolution Of The Global Wheat Regime

What are the causes of the recent rising international food prices?This problem attracted widespread attention.Many existing appraisals were superficial and piecemeal.They tended to use quantitative estimates and focused on the supply-demand perspective,which treated market as an independent system and ignored the power structure.While food regime theory took another way,it unlocked the power structure,paid attention to the transitions of food systems,and demarcated stable periodic arrangements in the production and circulation of food on a world scale,associating with various forms of hegemony in the world economy.For food regime theory,in order to find the reason of food prices,one should focus on the long-run drivers,especially the power relations in the market.But the food regime theory thought the power belongs to nation,and didn,t distinguish the economic power and political power in and out the market,it didn't figure out the consistency and diversity of these two as well as the relations between them,thus this theory had a weak point in explaining the change of the market system.This dissertation argued that the power was in the hand of class,and the nation was just the tool for class to fulfill its aims.So when the economic power and the political power belonged to one same class,they then enjoyed the consistency.The class which gained the strength from its economic advantages in the market might use the political power to strengthen its control of the market.So the market tends to be shaped by the most powerful class and shifted with as the dominant class changes.Thus this dissertation used the world wheat market as an example to identify the dominant class of the world wheat market system,and to explore how the class controlled the market system.Followed the food regime theory,this dissertation carved out two different regimes:the first wheat regime and the second wheat regime.The first wheat regime was controlled by British industrial classes to fulfill their aim of reducing food prices through greater grain imports.The industrialists built the Britain,s free trade wheat regimes,and in this period the world wheat price was very low.The second wheat regime began after the World War ? and rooted in the class power of the United States.During the first step of the second wheat regime,the farmers controlled by capitalists searched for the protection from national power to solve the overproduction and general disarray in world wheat market;and established a regime of intervention.In this period,the world wheat price was pushed down by the overproduction of the United State.After 1970s,the capitalists wished to control the world wheat market and gained the monopoly profits,they then pushed the United States to build a free trade market system,thus the international wheat prices began to rise.In recent years,the international wheat price have surged upward in dramatic fashion as well as the whole food system,that,s because the whole system is controlled by the capitalists and served for their aim to control the international market and to gain the monopoly profits.Searching for the monopoly profits,private capital dominated today's global food market trends,which caused the current turmoil in global wheat markets.In this sense,as long as the future of the global food market continues to serve the needs of private capital to grab monopoly profits,the global grain market prices will continue to maintain this high volatility.This monopoly of the global market for private capital to extract high profits also brings great challenges to Chinese food security.As a special commodity,food should be kept steady in order to serve the economic development and social stability.For maintain the domestic food security,China should keep the self-production and self-sufficient,also should take part in the construction of global food system,to use the international regime to safeguard Chinese food interests.