FFS - Financialization in the food system

2025-03-19 22:03:53 | Contributor(s): Jennifer Clapp, Annette Desmarais, Matias Margulis | https://doi.org/10.15353/cfs-rcea.v2i2.90

There is growing concern about financialization in the food sector, which refers to the increasingly important role played by financial actors, markets, and motives in decisions along agrifood supply chains. Financial actors have long been intertwined in the agriculture and food sector, but...

CRFA - The changing agribusiness climate: Corporate concentration, agricultural inputs, innovation, and climate change

2025-03-19 22:03:52 | Contributor(s): Pat Mooney, ETC Group | https://doi.org/10.15353/cfs-rcea.v2i2.107

For the world’s leading agribusinesses, climate change represents both a threat and an opportunity. The threat, of course, is the uncertainty of crop growing conditions and that supply chains won’t be able to adjust and deliver inputs of seeds, pesticides, and fertilizers where and when they...

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

2025-03-19 22:03:52 | Contributor(s): Jennifer Clapp | https://doi.org/10.15353/cfs-rcea.v2i2.84

The 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...

CRFA - Big Food corporations and the nutritional marketing and regulation of processed foods

2025-03-19 22:03:52 | Contributor(s): Gyorgy Scrinis | https://doi.org/10.15353/cfs-rcea.v2i2.113

“Big Food” refers to the transnational food manufacturing corporations that dominate the production and marketing of highly processed foods and beverages, with the ten largest corporations comprised of Nestlé, Pepsico, Associated British Foods (ABF), Coca-Cola, Danone, General Mills, Kellogg,...

CRFA - SYNTHESIS - The role of transnational food and agriculture corporations in creating and responding to food crises

2025-03-19 22:03:52 | Contributor(s): Caitlin Michelle Scott | https://doi.org/10.15353/cfs-rcea.v2i2.91

Transnational corporations (TNCs) have been important players in the globalization of food and agriculture. The preceding papers focused on the ways in which the modern food system is a result of the growing influence and global expansion of agrifood TNCs. Pat Mooney outlined the increasing...

FS - Food sovereignty

2025-03-19 22:03:52 | Contributor(s): Jennifer Clapp, Annette Desmarais, Matias Margulis | https://doi.org/10.15353/cfs-rcea.v2i2.125

Citizens in many countries are increasingly wary of the global industrial neoliberal food system. A number of food scares, growing awareness of human rights abuses in the countryside, a global food crisis, and climate change have all prompted many to form alternative food movements that are...

FS - The gift of food sovereignty

2025-03-19 22:03:52 | Contributor(s): Annette Desmarais | https://doi.org/10.15353/cfs-rcea.v2i2.115

In April 1996 representatives of peasants, small and medium-scale farmers, rural women, indigenous representatives, and farm workers from the global North and global South travelled to Tlaxcala, Mexico to participate in the Second International Conference of La Vía Campesina. For members of La...

GFT - Global food trade

2025-03-19 22:03:51 | Contributor(s): Jennifer Clapp, Annette Desmarais, Matias Margulis | https://doi.org/10.15353/cfs-rcea.v2i2.80

Few issues animate debate about the global food system as much as the role of international trade and, in particular, that of the World Trade Organization (WTO). Indeed, the WTO is a subject that polarizes debate among food scholars and activists. Some scholars see the WTO as imperfect but...

GFT - Food fight: What the debate about food security means at the WTO

2025-03-19 22:03:51 | Contributor(s): Gawain Kripke | https://doi.org/10.15353/cfs-rcea.v2i2.118

Although still experiencing significant levels of hunger and malnutrition, India has recently taken historic measures to improve food security, namely through the expansion of domestic food assistance programs. Under the Obama Administration, the U.S. has prioritized improving global food...

GFT - Food security and international trade: Risk, trust and rules

2025-03-19 22:03:51 | Contributor(s): Sophia Murphy | https://doi.org/10.15353/cfs-rcea.v2i2.133

The multilateral trade system today shapes the economy of almost every country of the world. The World Trade Organization (WTO) now has 160 members, and even the non-members must deal with the rules the WTO has established when they trade. The system is ubiquitous yet faces serious challenges....

GFT - Regulating food-based agrofuels: The prospects and challenges of international trade rules

2025-03-19 22:03:51 | Contributor(s): Matias Margulis | https://doi.org/10.15353/cfs-rcea.v2i2.82

This article considers the potential for strategic and selective use of World Trade Organization (WTO) rules to regulate, and potentially curb, the expansion of food-based agrofuels. Since 2008, a global agrofuel complex has emerged that is characterized by government-led mandates and...

GFT - SYNTHESIS - The uneasy relationship between international trade and agriculture

2025-03-19 22:03:51 | Contributor(s): Kim Burnett | https://doi.org/10.15353/cfs-rcea.v2i2.137

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....

CRFA - Corporate role in food and agriculture

2025-03-19 22:03:51 | Contributor(s): Jennifer Clapp, Annette Desmarais, Matias Margulis | https://doi.org/10.15353/cfs-rcea.v2i2.87

Transnational corporations are powerful agents on the global food landscape. They have been able to shift and adapt their activities in a global food economy that has been constantly in flux in recent decades, while at the same time shaping it in ways that serve their interests. The papers in...

PRF - Progress on the right to food

2025-03-19 22:03:50 | Contributor(s): Jennifer Clapp, Annette Desmarais, Matias Margulis | https://doi.org/10.15353/cfs-rcea.v2i2.79

The idea of the human right to food as a legal framework to address inequalities in the global food system has become increasingly mainstreamed at the level of political discourse and public policy. Indeed, claiming the right to food on the part of individuals and collectives is now firmly...

PRF - The right to food: Progress and pitfalls

2025-03-19 22:03:50 | Contributor(s): Smita Narula | https://doi.org/10.15353/cfs-rcea.v2i2.130

Over the course of the past decade the human right to adequate food has definitively emerged as a normative response to widespread food insecurity, global food crises, and to the related phenomenon of agricultural “land grabbing.” This article considers both the progress and pitfalls in using...

PRF - The right to food and politics of knowledge

2025-03-19 22:03:50 | Contributor(s): Philip McMichael | https://doi.org/10.15353/cfs-rcea.v2i2.101

This article concerns a particular struggle over the right to food, as played out recently in the Committee on World Food Security (CFS), within the UN’s Food and Agricultural Organization (FAO). As a relatively new participant in the CFS, the Civil Society Mechanism (CSM), representing...

PRF - The right to food: Many developments, more challenges

2025-03-19 22:03:50 | Contributor(s): Priscilla Claeys | https://doi.org/10.15353/cfs-rcea.v2i2.100

The right to food (RTF)1has enjoyed growing recognition in the last decade. It has achieved legitimacy and visibility in international governance debates, where it is increasingly perceived as a useful “policy guide” (DeSchutter, 2009). The realization of the right to food is recognized as a...

PRF - SYNTHESIS - The right to food: Reflecting on the past and future possibilities

2025-03-19 22:03:50 | Contributor(s): Nadia Lambek | https://doi.org/10.15353/cfs-rcea.v2i2.112

As scholars and activists met in Waterloo, Canada in September 2014 to discuss progress and obstacles in adopting the right to food, similar discussions were being held by the Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations (FAO), and among civil society organizations (CSOs),...

SWFS - State of the world food system

2025-03-19 22:03:49 | Contributor(s): Jennifer Clapp, Annette Desmarais, Matias Margulis | https://doi.org/10.15353/cfs-rcea.v2i2.88

The world food system has seen enormous change across a range of issue areas in recent years, as witnessed by the 2007–08 food crisis and subsequent period of volatility and uncertainty in a context of shifting ecological conditions. Closer examination of the specifics of those myriad changes...

SWFS - Two roads diverged in the food crisis: Global policy takes the one more travelled

2025-03-19 22:03:49 | Contributor(s): Timothy A Wise | https://doi.org/10.15353/cfs-rcea.v2i2.98

The 2007-08 food price crisis provoked renewed policy debate on a wide range of important matters long sidelined from mainstream consideration—the role and value of smallholder agriculture, the need for public investment in the sector, the importance of public agricultural research, the value...