Retailing, the Food System and the Regulatory State

Abstract

This chapter illustrates at the conceptual level the ways in which the state attempts to legitimate itself over time and at the empirical level chart how this occurs through changes to prevailing social and political practices with the British food system. The agricultural sector is characterised by a large number of producers, each with a minute market share and, therefore, negligible influence over market prices. According to the Ministry of Agriculture, Fisheries and Food, approximately 144,000 full-time holdings produce over 97 per cent of total output. Since the mid 1960s, a key feature of the changing role of manufacturers in the food system has been ‘a fundamental shift in the balance of power in the industry away from the suppliers or manufacturers of grocery items and towards the rapidly expanding retail corporations’. The trend of concentration in UK food retailing is probably the most important process driving the restructuring of market and regulatory relations in the food system.

Cite this work

No public copy is stored for this record, so only the metadata is cited.

Stored only when both papers are in the corpus — 66 citations exist upstream.