Regulation versus Deregulation of Agricultural Markets: The Social Construction of an Economic

The return to price volatility, the structural crisis that the dairy sector undergoes and the consequences of the economic and financial crisis strongly contradicted the economists who encouraged a smooth but general deregulation of the economies in the past. Except in the case of the US, agricultural policies were the target of reformers in favor of liberal policies. Nevertheless the notion of regulation is now being rehabilitated in the field of agriculture. To understand why this return to regulating our economies, it was first necessary to put the social context from which deregulation originated into an historical perspective and disclose the inertia of contemporary economic analysis so to contrast it with the American everlasting will to preserve its agricultural policy.