Over the decades, my colleagues David Goodman and Bernardo Sorj and I have thought several times about resuming the analysis developed in the book we wrote in 1987, From Farming to Biotechnology: A Theory of Agro-industrial Development (FFtB), which was published in Brazil in 1990 under the title Da lavoura às biotecnologias. In research for the OECD and for ActionAid in Brazil, I continued to follow how the big agrochemical groups took control over the advances in genetic engineering by absorbing innovative start-ups both in Northern countries and in Brazil, and weakened the historical role of public research through their control of patents on this technology.

In this research, I aligned the notion of the exceptionality of innovation in agriculture that had guided our analysis in FFtB with neo-Schumpeterian contributions on innovation. What emerged as most surprising, however, was the strength of social movements in the countryside and the diverse urban interests mobilized around the rejection of transgenics, which led to restrictive measures by retailers and public policies that limited their use, especially in the European Union. I saw this as the reflection of a fundamental change in the dynamics of the agri-food system expressed in a decline of traditional commodity markets and the emergence of social movements to promote new markets – organic, fair trade, artisanal, natural products.

Our French colleagues understood this to be part of a shift to ‘a quality economy’ signalling an end to the expansion of the large commodity markets that had characterized what they called ‘the 30 glorious years’ since the Second World War. In the 1990s and the first decade of the 2000s, I devoted myself to the study of these transformations, including two periods of residence in French institutions. It was in this context that I deepened my studies in economic sociology and the French approach called ‘convention theory’, focusing on the way markets are porous to the interests and values expressed in society and cannot be analysed only on the basis of their internal dynamics. In the book that I present here, I use this view to identify how changes in values in society can promote transformations and ruptures in the organization of the food industry.