For food and agriculture, the end of the Cold War opens questions about the past no less than the present. The dramatic changes now underway have roots in the first economic breaches of the Cold War dam. Although they were anticipated by smaller transactions in the late 1960s, the Soviet—US grain deals of 1972—73 were so large that they precipitated a prolonged, still unresolved, crisis of the postwar food regime.

The first outbreak of the food crisis in the early 1970s was as devastating for the Third World as the energy crisis. Since the Soviet—US grain deals were the economic expression of detente, it is now clear that the stable, if unequal, relations of the postwar food regime were bound up with the mutually exclusive trading blocs of the Cold War. The blocs provided the framework for the decolonisation and building of national economies, including food and agriculture, in the Third World. The crisis of the food regime has been bound up with a restructuring of the framework of rival blocs, which began not in 1989, but two decades earlier. The postwar food regime consisted of distinct complexes. The most important changes in the food regime can be traced through the wheat complex, the durable food complex, and the livestock complex. Each complex is defined as a chain (or web) of production and consumption relations, linking farmers and farm workers to consuming individuals, households and communities. Within each web are private and state institutions which buy, sell, provide inputs, process, transport, distribute and finance each link. Each complex includes many class, gender and cultural relations, within a specific (changing) international division of labour. Each evolved within the politically bounded economic space of the west, until the major transactions of the early 1970s irrevocably linked the Cold War blocs, leading finally to the dissolution of the bloc structure itself. 1 Over the past 15 years, the implosive merging of the blocs has coincided with a greater intertwining of the complexes.