Alternative Trade: Legacies for the Future by Gavin Fridell

A long, long time ago, in a world where ‘free trade’ market fundamentalism was not the only economic religion, I helped start a journal called Food Policy—economics, planning and politics of food and agriculture. Well, actually, not that long ago, in the mid 1970s. It just seems a world away. The journal’s sub-title betrays the fact that it was a different world. Governments had a role in planning for food and agriculture—what Fridell calls ‘the social regulation of agri-food commodities’. Issues to do with the most fundamental aspect of human well-being—the ability of everyone to eat a safe, secure, sufficient, nutritious diet—were not seen as something left to the mythical abstraction of ‘The Market’, but a matter of politics and power that shaped political economies and market structures.