Green protectionism and organic food exporting from New Zealand: Crisis experiments in the breakdown of fordist trade and agricultural policies

The exporting of organic produce from New Zealand is a response to the ongo ing breakdown of Fordist regulatory measures for agriculture in destination markets. The unambiguous neoliberal revolution in New Zealand has survived only through the expansion of food exports, especially by large corporate entities and producer marketing boards. It has also rendered the country's exporters of food products particularly sensitive to the trade and agricult ural policies of the United States, Japan, and the European Union. Some com mentators consider New Zealand's experiment in agricultural deregulation in dicative of a wider coherence in global food trade, a new stability institu tionalized in the Uruguay Round of the GATT and regulated under the auspice s of the World Trade Organization. The case of organic and low-input food e xporting from New Zealand shows that no such 'new times' exist. Rather, the se new types of food exporting are crisis experiments induced by green prot ectionism-the use of health and food safety issues as an impediment to trad e. In turn, green protectionism is a direct result of the continuing breakd own of Fordist agricultural regulation in key nations: the global trade in food products remains in crisis.