Global Markets, Risk, and Organized Irresponsibility in Regional Australia: Emergent Cosmopolitan Identities Among Local Food Producers in the Liverpool Plains☆

This paper reflects on the conditions that emerge as regional Australia becomes increasingly immersed in international markets, global and local political shifts, and changing environmental conditions. In the Liverpool Plains region, farmers are deeply reliant on global export markets. Meanwhile, global demand for Australian minerals continues to produce both economic development and environmental degradation. In this context, farmers are drawing on transnational and national social movements to collectively construct their knowledge of risk and “organized irresponsibility” and resist environmental risk by positioning themselves as a part of a cosmopolitan public. While consistently evaluating risks associated with a proposed coal mine, farmers see themselves as having an ethical responsibility as food producers to provide for increasing global populations in a precarious world. These conditions are productive of new risks, identities, as well as new forms of critical, collective practice.