Agrarian changes and migrations in the Mediterranean through a food regime perspective

A reading of migration and agricultural change in the Mediterranean area – where the case studies in this volume are situated – should be placed in a broader historical frame that includes the socio-economic and political dynamics under which the conditions of mobility and the valorization of labour and capital are deined. The application of food regime theory serves this end. This theory has been developed to interpret changes in agri-food systems across space and time, by identifying different periods of capital accumulation and their corresponding transitions, interconnections and contradictions. What was once termed the ‘food system project’ has since been developed by scholars into a ‘political geography of the global food system’, which analyses changes in agri-food relations in different contexts. The chapter aims to bring the Mediterranean into critical conversation with the food regime approach and with broader debates in rural sociology and agrarian studies, in order to grasp the speciic development and dynamics of the agrarian question in this region within the historically speciic forms of global value relations.