The Dictionary of Human Geography by Michael Watts

tilted heavily in favour of the OECD sponsors of this neo liberal spectacle. mw (NEW PARAGRAPH) Suggested reading (NEW PARAGRAPH) Bobrow Strain (2007). (NEW PARAGRAPH)

agribusiness
A term coined by economists Davis and Goldberg (1957, p. 3) at the Harvard Business School, who defined it as (NEW PARAGRAPH) the sum total of all operations involved in the (NEW PARAGRAPH) manufacture and distribution of farm sup (NEW PARAGRAPH) plies; production operations on the farm; (NEW PARAGRAPH) storage; processing and distribution of farm (NEW PARAGRAPH) commodities and items made from them. (NEW PARAGRAPH) The term emphasizes the increasingly sys temic character of food production, in which the activities of farming are integrated into a much larger industrial complex, including the manufacture and marketing of technological inputs and of processed food products, under highly concentrated forms of corporate own ership and management. Agribusiness has since become used in much looser and more ideologically loaded ways as shorthand, on the Left, for the domination of capitalist corpor ations in the agro food industry and, on the Right, for the role of] in the modernization of food production capacities and practices. In this looser sense it has become a synonym of the industrialization of the agro food system. (NEW PARAGRAPH) The classic model of agribusiness centres on the vertical integration of all stages in the food production process, in which the manufacture and marketing of technological farm inputs, farming and food processing are controlled by a single agro food corporation. This model was based largely on the US experience, where corporations such as Cargill and Tenneco gained control of particular commodity cHains through a combination of direct investment, subsidiary companies and contracting relationships. Numerous studies in the 1970s drew attention to its significance for commodities such as fresh fruit and vegetables, broiler chickens and sugar cane (e.g. Friedland et al., 1981). It should be noted that a rival term, ?la complexe agro alimentaire', coined contemporaneously in the French research literature, proposed a much more diffuse model of the industrial development of the agro food complex (e.g. Allaire and Boyer, 1995). (NEW PARAGRAPH) The ?US school' of agribusiness research had considerable influence over the develop ment of agricuLturaL gEographY in the English speaking world, particularly in the 1980s. But it has increasingly attracted criti cism both because of a disenchantment with its theoretical debt to systems theory, and because vertical integration proved too empir ically specific to support the larger claims of agribusiness as a general model of food production today (Whatmore, 2002b). sw (NEW PARAGRAPH)

agricultural geography
In the second half (NEW PARAGRAPH) of the twentieth century, agricultural geog raphy has undergone profound changes, as has its subject. Until the 1950s, agricultural geography was a subset of economic gEog raphy, concerned with the spatial distribution of agricultural activity and focusing on vari ations and changes in the pattern of agricul tural land use and their classification at a variety of scales (see also FARMing). As the economic significance of agriculture declined in terms of the sector's contribution to GDP and employment, particularly in advanced industrial countries, so interest in the subject diminished in the geographical research community. Thus, by the end of the 1980s, leading practitioners were advocating the end of agricultural geography and the dawn of a ?geography of food? (see also food, gEog raphy of). (NEW PARAGRAPH) The importation of new theoretical concepts from political economy and a shift in the substantive focus of study to the Agro food system as a whole, rather than farming as a self contained activity, renewed the field of agricultural geography. Research agendas framed in terms of the agro food sys tem (see, e.g., Marsden, Munton, Whatmore and