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

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