GLOBALIZATION, SUSTAINABILITY, AND APPLE ORCHARDING, HAWKES BAY, NEW-ZEALAND

The political economy of agriculture literature increasingly focuses r esearch on production-consumption relations of different agro-food sys tems. This paper examines contextual pressures facing orchardists in t he globally oriented apple complex of Hawke's Bay, New Zealand. The pa per details the emerging political economy of orcharding in the crisis conditions of the 1990s under the joint influences of globalization f orces, interest in sustainability principles, and disruptive natural h azard events. New regulatory politics embracing apples is implicated i n attempts to reinsert the regional apple complex into the global fres h fruit industry. Developments in Hawke's Bay are shown to be embedded in wider processes (including those of regulation) stretching across nations and are affected by conflicting spatialities of operational ge ographies of agents. Accommodating the risk of the apple sector appear s to be closely tied to supportive networking in which investors are g radually refashioning the apple sector into a buyer- or consumer-drive n production complex.