In his 2006 book, Food is Different, Peter Rosset posited we “get agriculture out of the [World Trade Organization] WTO”. This contention, which is the rallying cry for the Food Sovereignty movement, is that the WTO should not have any purview over agriculture and by extension food systems. Getting the WTO out of agriculture encompasses not only dismantling the 1994 Agreement on Agriculture, which governs both global food trade and extends to national food policies, but also nullifying the entire suite of WTO agreements that apply to various aspects of agriculture, including the Agreement on Trade-Related Intellectual Property Rights (TRIPS), and the Agreement on Trade-Related Investment Measures (TRIMS) (see Burnett & Murphy, 2014). For activists, policymakers, and scholars who take a firm stance of resistance to the WTO, there is no room for compromise with the institution. From this standpoint, the WTO cannot be transformed into a legitimate space to govern international food trade. The underlying concerns motivating much global civil society resistance to agriculture being governed under the WTO are well documented in the papers in this collection and were discussed at length by participants at the workshop in Waterloo.

Researchers should cite this work as follows:

• Burnett, K., (2025), "GFT - SYNTHESIS - The uneasy relationship between international trade and agriculture", HSSCommons: (DOI: 10.15353/cfs-rcea.v2i2.137)

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1. agriculture
2. international trade

Original publication: Burnett, Kim. "GFT - SYNTHESIS - The uneasy relationship between international trade and agriculture." Canadian Food Studies / La Revue canadienne des études sur l'alimentation, vol. 2, no. 2, 2015, pp. 107-114. DOI: 10.15353/cfs-rcea.v2i2.137. This material has been re-published in an unmodified form on the Canadian HSS Commons with the permission of Canadian Food Studies / La Revue canadienne des études sur l'alimentation. Copyright © the author(s). Work published in CFS/RCÉA prior to and including Vol. 8, No. 3 (2021) is licensed under the Creative Commons CC BY license. Work published in Vol. 8, No. 4 (2021) and after is licensed under the Creative Commons CC BY-SA license. For details, see creativecommons.org/licenses/.