Globalization, sustainability, and apple orcharding, Hawke's Bay, New Zealand

The political economy of agriculture literature increasingly focuses research on production-consumption relations of different agro-food systems. This paper examines contextual pressures facing orchardists in the globally oriented apple complex of Hawke's Bay, New Zealand. The paper details the emerging political economy of orcharding in the crisis conditions of the 1990s under the joint influences of globalization forces, interest in sustainability principles, and disruptive natural hazard events. New regulatory politics embracing apples is implicated in attempts to reinsert the regional apple complex into the global fresh fruit industry. Developments in Hawke's Bay are shown to be embedded in wider processes (including those of regulation) stretching across nations and are affected by conflicting spatialities of operational geographies of agents. Accommodating the risk of the apple sector appears to be closely tied to supportive networking in which investors are gradually refashioning the apple sector into a buyer- or consumer-driven production complex.