Food security and contested agricultural trade norms

This article is provided, with permission, from Munk School of Global Affairs: Faculty of Law © 2015Just as it is important to uncover the historical origins of specific norms that shape the trade regime, it is also helpful to examine how those norms are then translated into policy through contemporary rules and agreements. In this commentary, I argue that the articulation of agricultural trade norms into policy is an ongoing and messy process, complicated by multiple and competing norms that are mediated by power and politics. In making this argument, I advance three interrelated points. First, politics and power differentials among competing interests help to explain why the “free trade” norm has been only partially and unevenly applied in the agricultural sector. Second, recognition of the unbalanced agricultural trade regime in recent decades has provided an opening for the expression of alternative agricultural trade norms, in particular the idea of special and differential treatment for food security in developing countries. Third, the recent political battle at the WTO over food security demonstrates that multiple trade norms for food and agriculture continue to collide and shift through political processes and remain deeply contested

Food security and food sovereignty: Getting past the binary

http://dx.doi.org/10.1177/2043820614537159, The final, definitive version of this paper has been published in Dialogues in Human Geography, 4(2), June 2014 published by SAGE Publishing, All rights reservedThe terms food security and food sovereignty originally emerged as separate terms to describe different things. The former is a concept that describes a condition regarding access to adequate food, while the latter is more explicitly a political agenda for how to address inadequate access to food and land rights. Over the past decade, the critical food studies literature has increasingly referred to these terms as being oppositional to each rather than relational to one another. This commentary reflects on the emergence and rationale behind this binary and argues that the current oppositional frame within the literature is problematic in several ways. First, critics of food security have inserted a rival normative agenda into what was originally a much more open-ended concept. Second, the grounds on which that normative agenda is assigned to food security are shaky on several points. Given these problems, the commentary argues that the juxtaposition of food security and food sovereignty as competing terms is in many ways more confusing than helpful to policy dialogue on questions of hunger and the global food system

Responsibility to the rescue? Governing private financial investment in global agriculture

The final publication is available at Springer via http://dx.doi.org/10.1007/s10460-015-9678-8This paper examines the recent rise of initiatives for responsible agricultural investment and provides a preliminary assessment of their likely success in curbing the ecological and social costs associated with the growth in private financial investment in the sector over the past decade. I argue that voluntary responsible investment initiatives for agriculture are likely to face similar weaknesses to those experienced in responsible investment initiatives more generally. These include vague and difficult to enforce guidelines, low participation rates, an uneven business case, and confusion arising from multiple and competing initiatives. In addition, the large diversity of investors and high degree of complexity of financial investments further complicate efforts to discern who bears the burden of responsibility in practice. As a result, there is a strong likelihood that voluntary governance initiatives for responsible agricultural investment will shift discourse more than they will change practice.The Trudeau Foundation || Social Sciences and Humanities Research Counci

Financialization, distance and global food politics

This is an Accepted Manuscript of an article published by Taylor & Francis in The Journal of Peasant Studies on 2014-01-15, available online: http://www.tandfonline.com/10.1080/03066150.2013.875536This paper provides a new perspective on the political implications of intensified financialization in the global food system. There has been a growing recognition of the role of finance in the global food system, in particular the way in which financial markets have become a mode of accumulation for large transnational agribusiness players within the current food regime. This paper highlights a further political implication of agrifood system financialization, namely how it fosters ‘distancing’ in the food system and how that distance shapes the broader context of global food politics. Specifically, the paper advances two interrelated arguments. First, a new kind of distancing has emerged within the global food system as a result of financialization that has (a) increased the number of the number and type of actors involved in global agrifood commodity chains and (b) abstracted food from its physical form into highly complex agricultural commodity derivatives. Second, this distancing has obscured the links between financial actors and food system outcomes in ways that make the political context for opposition to financialization especially challenging

ABCD and beyond: From grain merchants to agricultural value chain managers

This work is made available under a Creative Commons attribution license. The final publication, first published by Canadian Food Studies is available at: http://dx.doi.org/10.15353/cfs-rcea.v2i2.84The world of agricultural commodity trading firms has changed over the years, although corporate concentration has long been a defining feature of this sector. The four dominant agricultural trading firms—the ABCDs (ADM, Bunge, Cargill and Louis-Dreyfus)—have a long history dating back to the 1800s and early 1900s. First established as private, family-owned grain merchant companies with specific geographical specialties, these firms have since evolved to be quite complex companies. They buy and sell grain as well as a host of other agricultural and non-agricultural commodities, while they also undertake a range of activities from finance to production to processing and distribution. New entrants into this space have also taken on complex structures and activities in a bid to stay competitive. In many ways the world’s major grain trading firms now operate more like cross-sectoral “value chain managers” on a truly global scale compared to their grain trade origins. High degrees of concentration combined with control over a vast array of activities give these firms enormous power to shape key aspects of the global food landscape. As a result, the agricultural commodity-trading sector has important implications for farmer livelihoods, hunger and the environment. Following a brief snapshot of the main firms that dominate global grain trading today, I examine the major trends that have reshaped the sector in the past decade. I then outline the main challenges that these changes present for the food system, and suggest possible research directions moving forward

World hunger and the global economy: strong linkages, weak action

This article, posted with permission, was originally published by the Journal of International Affairs © Columbia UniversityThis paper probes some of the global economic forces that have contributed to the ongoing precarious global food security situation, especially in the years since the 2007 to 2008 food crisis. Since the crisis hit at a time when global food production per capita was rising, it is important that policies addressing hunger incorporate dimensions beyond food production. There has been some acknowledgement of the role of global economic forces in the food crisis by global policymakers, but global food security initiatives still largely emphasize increased food production over other measures. The paper concludes that more needs to be done to ensure that the rules that govern the global economy--especially those regarding international trade, finance, and investment--do not work against the goal of food security

Food self-sufficiency: Making sense of it, and when it makes sense

© 2016 The Author. Published by Elsevier Ltd. This is an open access article under the CC BY-NC-ND license (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/4.0/). http://dx.doi.org/10.1016/j.foodpol.2016.12.001Food self-sufficiency gained increased attention in a number of countries in the wake of the 2007–08 international food crisis, as countries sought to buffer themselves from volatility on world food markets. Food self-sufficiency is often presented in policy circles as the direct opposite of international trade in food, and is widely critiqued by economists as a misguided approach to food security that places political priorities ahead of economic efficiency. This paper takes a closer look at the concept of food self-sufficiency and makes the case that policy choice on this issue is far from a straightforward binary choice between the extremes of relying solely on homegrown food and a fully open trade policy for foodstuffs. It shows that in practice, food self-sufficiency is defined and measured in a number of different ways, and argues that a broader understanding of the concept opens up space for considering food self-sufficiency policy in relative terms, rather than as an either/or policy choice. Conceptualizing food self-sufficiency along a continuum may help to move the debate in a more productive direction, allowing for greater consideration of instances when the pursuit of policies to increase domestic food production may make sense both politically and economically.Research support for this article was provided by the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada || Pierre Elliott Trudeau Foundation

The Cross Beyond the Wall: Protestant Christianity in Communist China

Before the days of Communist China, religions were widely accepted. This is how many religions like; Christianity, Buddhism, Hinduism, and Islam became present in China. Unfortunately the strong Chinese culture and dedication to Confucian principals halted this; Chinese Christians were cut off from the rest of the Christian world. This was an ongoing change and different leaders took control of China. Yet through it all Christianity hung on by a thread. When Communism was established fully, a few Protestant-Christian leaders works closely with the government leaders to establish the Three Self church and strict laws were put in place to government the Christian religion. Now, in China, the practice of Christianity is only legal if sponsored by the government. Three Self Patriotic church is an example of a sponsored Christian church. On the flip side, people still risk being caught to practice Christianity in their own way. They normally do this under the cover of night where they won’t be seen. While you would think that just the secret church would be raided if discovered, the Chinese government will still raid their sponsored church to make sure there isn’t anything going on that they don’t want happening. As a student I was able to go, and witness this first hand. At first we though we brought on the raids, because the two churches (one legal and one underground) we visited were raided within days of each other. The locals told us this was not the case, these raids are apparently common. The underground pastor was arrested and deported before a trial could even happen. The house that it took place was searched for any excessive Christian material. The legal church was raided for any practices or contraband that was not allowed by the government. While it seems like there would be many differences between the two practices, there are some similarities between them

Researching Global Environmental Politics in the 21st Century

Dauvergne, P., & Clapp, J. (2016). Researching Global Environmental Politics in the 21st Century. Global Environmental Politics, 16(1), 1–12. https://doi.org/10.1162/GLEP_e_00333 © MIT Press, http://www.mitpressjournals.org/loi/glepThis forum article highlights three major research trends we have observed in the journal Global Environmental Politics since 2000. First, research has increasingly focused on specific and formal mechanisms of global environmental governance, contributing to more elaborate and refined methodologies that span more scales and levels of analysis. Second, research increasingly has concentrated on the rise of market-based governance mechanisms and the influence of private actors, reflecting a broader shift among policymakers toward liberal approaches to governance. Third, over this time empirical research has shifted significantly toward analyzing issues through a lens of climate change, providing valuable insights into environmental change, but narrowing the journal’s empirical focus. These trends, which overlap in complex ways, arise partly from shifts in real-world politics, partly from broader shifts in the overall field of global environmental politics (GEP), and partly from the advancing capacity of GEP theories and methodologies to investigate the full complexity of local to global governance. This maturing of GEP scholarship does present challenges for the field, however, including the ability of field-defining journals such as Global Environmental Politics to engage a diversity of critical scholarly voices and to influence policy and activism

Finance for Agriculture or Agriculture for Finance?

This is the peer reviewed version of the following article: Martin, S. J. and Clapp, J. (2015), Finance for Agriculture or Agriculture for Finance?. Journal of Agrarian Change, 15: 549–559. doi:10.1111/joac.12110, which has been published in final form at https://doi.org/10.1111/joac.12110.. This article may be used for non-commercial purposes in accordance with Wiley Terms and Conditions for Self-Archiving.Food studies scholars have paid increasing attention to ‘financialization’ within the food system as private financial actors have played a growing role in various facets of the sector in recent years. While there has been much attention paid to the implications of the greater role for financial actors in the food system, there has been relatively less attention paid to the ways in which these actors have historically interacted with it; in particular, in relation to the role of the state in mediating agricultural finance. This paper examines the long association between agriculture, finance and the state. Historically, private capital has been reluctant to invest in agriculture without assurances and support from the state, and states have practiced varying degrees of regulation on private financiers in the sector. These trends have shaped the practices of contemporary financialization. Although we recognize the systematic political project to reduce the role of the state in agriculture since the 1970s, these patterns persist and we ultimately argue that to understand the financialization of agriculture, it is important to understand how the state has been a long-standing coupler between finance and agriculture