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...

SWFS - Crisis of legitimacy and challenges for food policy

2025-03-19 22:03:49 | Contributor(s): Mustafa Koç | https://doi.org/10.15353/cfs-rcea.v2i2.108

Looking into the food system through the lens of food security, the first decade of the 21st Century was a period of broken promises, distrust, as well as fear and anxiety due to multiple crises in the financial markets—in the agri-food sector and in global politics. I will argue that this...

SWFS - Governing land and landscapes: Political ecology of enclosures and commons

2025-03-19 22:03:49 | Contributor(s): Harriet Friedmann | https://doi.org/10.15353/cfs-rcea.v2i2.95

Most of the world’s food is still produced by small farmers, many of whom remain organized though customary land tenure. Customary tenure is a general term for specific cultural ways in which farmers embedded in ecological contexts allocate rights and obligations to use land, including...

SWFS - SYNTHESIS - Paradigm change and power in the world food system

2025-03-19 22:03:49 | Contributor(s): Matthew Gaudreau | https://doi.org/10.15353/cfs-rcea.v2i2.114

The articles by Friedmann, Koç, and Wise draw out overarching issues in the world food system, offering complementary views of the relationship between the dominant model of the world food system and its myriad issues. This contribution uses the concept of transnational policy paradigms to...

Challenges to acquiring and utilizing food literacy: Perceptions of young Canadian adults

2025-03-19 22:03:48 | Contributor(s): Sarah Colatruglio, Joyce Slater | https://doi.org/10.15353/cfs-rcea.v3i1.72

The purpose of this qualitative, grounded theory study was to explore the concept of food literacy from the perspective of young Canadian adults who recently transitioned to independent living. Seventeen individual, in-depth interviews were conducted with Canadian university students who...

Is it hot in here, or is it just me? On being an emotional academic

2025-03-19 22:03:47 | Contributor(s): David Andrew Szanto | https://doi.org/10.15353/cfs-rcea.v3i1.148

In writing this, I feel as if I am somehow coming out as an “emotional academic.” As if it were a thing I have been trying to keep hidden (not very successfully, probably) over the years. Yet I also suspect this label is one with which many of us might self-identify. Moreover, I believe that...

Food studies scholars can no longer ignore the rise of big data

2025-03-19 22:03:47 | Contributor(s): Kelly Bronson, Irena Knezevic | https://doi.org/10.15353/cfs-rcea.v3i1.138

Our essay invites food scholars to consider how the recent technological developments are making ‘big data’ increasingly relevant to our field. We offer an overview of the how big data and related crowdsourcing of information are penetrating the production and marketing of food, and reflect on...

Food discourses in Cape Breton: Community, economy, and ecological food practices

2025-03-19 22:03:47 | Contributor(s): Erna MacLeod | https://doi.org/10.15353/cfs-rcea.v3i1.119

This project investigates ecological food practices on Cape Breton Island as legacies of traditional lifestyles and responses to the acceleration of global capitalism. I examine the multifarious discourses that frame ecological food practices such as organic gardening and farmers’ markets in...

Constituting community through food charters: A rhetorical-genre analysis

2025-03-19 22:03:47 | Contributor(s): Philippa Spoel, Colleen Derkatch | https://doi.org/10.15353/cfs-rcea.v3i1.144

Communities across Canada are increasingly developing food charters, with at least 22 regional charters published in Ontario alone. As a rhetorical genre, food charters are persuasive actions that articulate not only the kind of food system to which a community aspires, but also the kind of...