FS - SYNTHESIS - The hefty challenges of food sovereignty’s adulthood

2025-03-19 22:03:53 | Article | Contributor(s): Andrés García Trujillo | https://doi.org/10.15353/cfs-rcea.v2i2.111

The three articles in this section reflect a broader shift that is taking place in the debate on food sovereignty. After almost two decades since its inception, the term—which is also a “counter-narrative”, a “mobilizing tactic”, and a “political agenda” (Desmarais, this issue)—has gained...

GRAB - Genetic resources and agricultural biotechnology

2025-03-19 22:03:53 | Article | Contributor(s): Jennifer Clapp, Annette Desmarais, Matias Margulis | https://doi.org/10.15353/cfs-rcea.v2i2.89

Genetically modified crops have been a lightning rod in debates over the future of food and agriculture over the past two decades. The debate has sparked critical questions about the potential role for science in addressing hunger and in rural development. Corporate actors, with a strong...

GRAB - Plant genetic resources in an age of global capitalism

2025-03-19 22:03:53 | Article | Contributor(s): Noah Zerbe | https://doi.org/10.15353/cfs-rcea.v2i2.117

Early in the 20th century, a scramble for the world’s genetic resources was sparked by Nikolai Vavilov’s articulation of the geographic centers of origin for major cereals and other crops. European and American governments sent expeditions to remote corners of the world, all in an effort to...

GRAB - GMO 2.0: Genetically modified crops and the push for Africa’s green revolution

2025-03-19 22:03:53 | Article | Contributor(s): Matthew A. Schnurr | https://doi.org/10.15353/cfs-rcea.v2i2.97

Genetically modified (GM) crops are plants in which the DNA has been engineered using laboratory techniques to express a beneficial trait. Their reception across the globe has been mixed: they form a dominant part of North American agriculture, they have been met with widespread disapproval in...

GRAB - Persistent narratives, persistent failures: Why GM crops do not—and will not—“feed the world”

2025-03-19 22:03:53 | Article | Contributor(s): Taarini Chopra | https://doi.org/10.15353/cfs-rcea.v2i2.123

It has been almost two decades since genetically modified (GM; also called genetically engineered or GE) crops were first commercialized in North America, and anywhere from five to ten years since they have been grown in various countries in the Global South. Though short, their entire history...

GRAB - SYNTHESIS The valorization of GMOs and the de-valorization of farmers’ contributions to biodiversity—Synthesis paper

2025-03-19 22:03:53 | Article | Contributor(s): Wesley Tourangeau, Chelsea Smith | https://doi.org/10.15353/cfs-rcea.v2i2.131

Genetically modified organisms (GMOs)are deeply contested with respect to their implications for food security and environmental sustainability. The three papers in this section effectively capture the present-day focal points of the debates over the undeniably vast topic area of genetic...

LGAR - Land grabs and agrarian reform

2025-03-19 22:03:53 | Article | Contributor(s): Jennifer Clapp, Annette Desmarais, Matias Margulis | https://doi.org/10.15353/cfs-rcea.v2i2.126

One of the key responses to the global food crisis that hit the headlines in 2008 was a significant change in land ownership in many countries as a result of large-scale land acquisitions carried out by governments, investors, and corporations. This global land grab, or what some refer to as...

LGAR - Fixing the land: The role of knowledge in building new models for rural development

2025-03-19 22:03:53 | Article | Contributor(s): Wendy Wolford | https://doi.org/10.15353/cfs-rcea.v2i2.128

Over the past five years, the term “land grab” has made international headlines. First coined by activists documenting the rise in media reports about displacements caused by the sale or transfer of land, land grabbing quickly became an object of academic research and debate. Although the...

LGAR - Land grabs, the agrarian question and the corporate food regime

2025-03-19 22:03:53 | Article | Contributor(s): A. Haroon Akram-Lodhi | https://doi.org/10.15353/cfs-rcea.v2i2.94

Over the last decade civil society organizations and activist-scholars have pointed to “land grabbing” as one of the central issues to have emerged in the world food system. In particular, land grabbing was identified as a new and immediate international development issue by the...

LGAR - Territorial restructuring and resistance in the Americas

2025-03-19 22:03:53 | Article | Contributor(s): Zoe Brent | https://doi.org/10.15353/cfs-rcea.v2i2.121

Over the last thirty years, social movements for agrarian reform have struggled to keep up with the profound changes in the structures of land and agricultural production sweeping the continent. In Latin America, what once was a struggle for redistribution, dignity, and social justice in the...

LGAR - SYNTHESIS - Land grabbing: New actors in a longstanding process

2025-03-19 22:03:53 | Article | Contributor(s): Isaac Lawther | https://doi.org/10.15353/cfs-rcea.v2i2.124

Land is a complex component of the global food system. There is no one definitive function of land; we can stand on it, build on it, grow food on it, extract from it, divide it, and identify with it. Not surprisingly, rising investment in farmland in the wake of the 2007–08 food...

FFS - Financialization in the food system

2025-03-19 22:03:53 | Article | 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 | Article | 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 | Article | 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 | Article | 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 | Article | 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 | Article | 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 | Article | 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 | Article | 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 | Article | 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...