Farming In A Global Economy

This book describes how Dutch immigrants became commercial farmers in the Canadian province of Ontario. It addresses the broader question of why the Dutch have an international reputation as successful farmers, and the critical implications of such positive stereotyping.

Illustrating contemporary policy debates using both theoretical perspectives and empirical evidence, this book will appeal to academics, researchers and students specialising in political science, environmental studies, agricultural economics, management and food policy. The book will also be of interest to government practitioners in agriculture and environment departments as well as international organisations such as the EU, FAO and WTO.

This important book explores alternative strategies in agriculturaland rural development to address the impacts of globalizationprocesses on smallholder agriculturalists and marginalized ruralpeople. Its goal is twofold: (1) to identify and assess the keyprocesses by which globalization is affecting the smallholderagricultural and rural sectors; and (2) to identify and propose bothmicro- and macro-level policies and other strategies to deal with theproblems that arise.

This book brings together analysis on the conditions of agricultural sectors in countries and regions of the world’s peripheries, from a wide variety of international contributors. The contributors to this volume proffer an understanding of the processes of agricultural transformations and their interaction with the overall economies of Africa, Asia and Latin America. Looking at the nineteenth and twentieth centuries – the onset of modern economic growth – the book studies the relationship between agriculture and other economic sectors, exploring the use of resources (land, labour, capital) and the influence of institutional and technological factors in the long-run performance of agricultural activities. Pinilla and Willebald challenge the notion that agriculture played a negligible role in promoting economic development in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, when the impulse towards industrialization in the developing world was more impactful.

The Farm War of the early 1980s was rooted in the political economy of agriculture, but it was a crisis for the international trading system. The war was evident in disruptions on the farm and in world markets, in conflicts among major governments, and in disagreements in international organizations. Wolfe shows how and why battles over agricultural protectionism were largely resolved through the Uruguay Round of GATT negotiations, demonstrating that the global economy is not self-regulating: it needs institutions if it is to be stable.