Can Rural Voices Effect Rural Choices? Contesting Deregulation in New Zealand’s Apple Industry

Abstract

Recurrent themes in agrifood literature examine the shifting relationships between globalization,regulation and locality. Drawing on lessons from New Zealand’s pipfruit sector and the activities of the rural lobby group United Fruit,this paper evaluates the relative success of local contestation of the terms of neoliberalism and globalization. Arguments are made for reconceptualizing rural phenomena as inexorably linked to wider socio‐economic processes of transformation in New Zealand and elsewhere.