Episodes
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Agroecology in action demonstrates its capacity to feed people, cool the climate, and produce a living wage.
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The principals of agroecology are reviewed and the ways in which it meets the challenges that need to be met by contemporary agriculture are established.
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Episodes manquant?
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The multiple crises of the corporate food regime suggest that an alternative food system needs to be developed. However, the rapid growth of transnational organic suggests that organic agricultural systems are not necessarily the basis by which an alternative food system might be envisaged. As a food production system, a rural development programme and a political movement agroecology has the potential to feed the world, cool the planet, and generate a living wage for all.
An agro-food complex constructed upon the basis of organic agriculture need not be sustainable. -
The ways in which emerging constraints upon the production of food might impact upon food prices is reviewed, before evaluating the relative merits of both demand- and supply-side explanations of rising food prices.
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The ways in which changing patterns in the demand for food might impact upon food prices is reviewed.
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The challenges produced by the corporate food regime have been amply demonstrated in the 21st century by rising food price inflation since 2007 and the COVID-19 pandemic of 2020. Food price inflation reflects a combination of demand dynamics and supply constraints that are unique to the corporate food regime, while the marked rise in zoonotic disease reflects the prevalence of industrialized agriculture and the marginalization of small-scale farming in the corporate food regime.
Food price increases in the 21st century have been greater than at any time since the 1970s and have dramatic implications of the living standards of those most marginalized by the world food system. -
The contemporary world food system has seen the entrance of global finance in an historically-unprecedented way. Since the deregulation of financial contracts in the United States in the 1990s and the rise in global food prices following 2007, global finance has been using a range of financial instruments to seek to make profits from the food system on the basis of speculative investment, while asset management companies discipline the activities of agri-food corporations in order to realize shareholder value.
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The corporate food regime has witnessed a remarkable and historically unprecedented concentration and centralization of agro-food transnational corporations.
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In the last 50 years the human diet has undergone the most profound shift in its history, as meat assumes an ever-greater role.
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The contemporary world food system has been labelled by many observers as the “corporate food regime”. By unpacking the key characteristics of the corporate food regime it is possible to better understand why a food system that is so productive continues to produce widespread hunger. Most notably, transnational supermarkets and the ongoing spread of meatification results in a food system that is a reverse protein-calorie machine, in that fewer calories emerge from the food system than go into it.
By summarizing the critical components of the corporate food regime it is immediately possible to grasp some of the contradictions that it engenders. -
Since 1994 the North American Free Trade Agreement has played a central role in governing the international trade of food and agricultural products between the United States, Mexico and Canada, in ways that have not brought benefits to small- and medium-scale farms in any of the three countries.
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Since 1995 the Agreement on Agriculture has played a crucial role in organizing the terms and conditions governing the international trade of food and agricultural products.
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Agri-food commodity chains that operate across national borders are regulated by agreements monitored and enforced by the World Trade Organization.
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The world food system witnesses unprecedented flows of food and agricultural products across national frontiers. International food and agricultural trade has been integral to the world food system since the first food regime was established, but has only grown more important over time. Yet such trade takes place on the basis of a set of rules that have been agreed by states and which need to be understood if the implications of food regime dynamics for the world food system are to be recognized.
One way of thinking about the international trade of food and agricultural products is as a series of stages that sequentially add value to the product being traded. -
As the second food regime unravelled it set in motion a series of economic changes in the developing countries that laid the basis for the emergence of global agriculture.
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The second food regime set in motion a number of fundamental changes in the global production and consumption of food that reverberate to this day.
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Farm subsidies and food aid were pivotal in establishing the second food regime, which reconfigured food production and diets around the world.
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