Asian Regional Food Regimes

In the past several years, one of my major research projects was to integrate social network analysis (SNA) and the political geography literature to reframe an important concept in agrarian studies: Food regimes. In recent years, human geographers have attempted to transcend the influential world‐systems theory (and the food regime approach built upon it) by emphasizing how different types of political‐economic processes operate relationally and differentially across regions in the capitalist world. Meanwhile, other geographical perspectives and approaches, such as “critical GIS,” have contributed to the reimagination of regions relationally at a range of geographical scales, operating as distinct pathways for commodities over time. Drawing on the more‐than‐qualitative relational approach supported by critical GIS and the regional and political geography literature, I conduct SNA to visualize the trade networks of high-value agricultural products in Asia and explain how regional trade agreements have influenced the formation and transformation of those trade networks since Asian countries joined the World Trade Organization (WTO). My findings show that the rise of China in the global food system has been accompanied by the emergence of certain Southeast Asian countries as central actors. Such a multipolar food regime is indicative of a regional food system, defined by clusters of states with more diffuse centrality. Furthermore, I'm collaborating with scholars in Taiwan and Asia to build a database to support my research on Asian regional food regimes:

ATD-AFC (http://140.137.37.191:9999/?fbclid=IwAR3e93PBwYRCiuZtpbjwm8r09IHPSTlbxrgP5x_jclXimhqtUX1DL_Hkkj0)