Public Food Stockholding

The paper investigates the basics of public stockholding, exploring the objectives of such programmes, the policy instruments used to achieve them, and their possible market impacts. It also synthesizes country experiences in implementing public stockholding programmes in different regions and presents the evolution of administered and international prices over the last decade. Finally, the paper highlights the main elements of the WTO negotiations on public stockholding for food security, and some of the issues that need to be resolved to help achieve consensus in this area.

This book examines the public stockholding policies of selected developing countries from the perspective of WTO rules and assesses whether the provisions of the Agreement on Agriculture (AoA) could hamper these countries’ efforts to address the challenges of food security. Further, it highlights the need to amend the provisions of the AoA to make WTO rules just and fair for the millions of people suffering from hunger and malnutrition in developing countries. This book highlights that 12 countries namely China, Egypt, India, Indonesia, Jordan, Kenya, Morocco, Pakistan, Tunisia, Turkey, Zambia and Zimbabwe are facing or will face problems in implementing the food security policies due to the provisions under AoA. These provisions need to be amended for permitting developing countries to address hunger and undernourishment. Progress in WTO negotiations on public stockholding for food security purposes are also discussed and analysed. The findings of this study greatly benefit trade negotiators, policymakers, civil society, farmers groups, researchers, students and academics interested in issues related to the WTO, agriculture and food security.

Transnational Food Security addresses food security from an international relations, political economy and legal perspective analysing the relationship between food security and the environment and climate change, trade, finance and contracts, and the intersection between food and human rights. The topic of food concerns one of the most basic and profound aspects of human survival. Universal and equal access to food is, at the same time, ridden with problems of power, inequality, distribution and implicated in old and new geopolitical conflicts. As such, ‘food’ and food security are central to conditions of poverty and hunger, development and ‘modernisation’, transitional justice and rule of law reform around the world. As a problem of critique and scholarly inquiry, food prompts an inter-disciplinary assessment of the nature of food security in the modern world. The contributors to this book take us deep into the complexity of food and illustrate the challenges of adequately understanding and approaching questions of food security and food sovereignty in a globally interconnected world. Transnational Food Security will be of great interest to scholars of international relations, political economy, and transnational law. The chapters were originally published as a special issue of Transnational Legal Theory Journal.

This report examines how public stockholding policies related to rice in Asia can influence domestic and international markets. Following a review of the working of rice public stockholding programmes in eight Asian countries.

Climate change is perhaps the greatest threat to humanity today and plays out as a cruel engine of myriad forms of injustice, violence and destruction. The effects of climate change from human-made emissions of greenhouse gases are devastating and accelerating; yet are uncertain and uneven both in terms of geography and socio-economic impacts. Emerging from the dynamics of capitalism since the industrial revolution — as well as industrialisation under state-led socialism — the consequences of climate change are especially profound for the countryside and its inhabitants. The book interrogates the narratives and strategies that frame climate change and examines the institutionalised responses in agrarian settings, highlighting what exclusions and inclusions result. It explores how different people — in relation to class and other co-constituted axes of social difference such as gender, race, ethnicity, age and occupation — are affected by climate change, as well as the climate adaptation and mitigation responses being implemented in rural areas. The book in turn explores how climate change – and the responses to it - affect processes of social differentiation, trajectories of accumulation and in turn agrarian politics. Finally, the book examines what strategies are required to confront climate change, and the underlying political-economic dynamics that cause it, reflecting on what this means for agrarian struggles across the world. The 26 chapters in this volume explore how the relationship between capitalism and climate change plays out in the rural world and, in particular, the way agrarian struggles connect with the huge challenge of climate change. Through a huge variety of case studies alongside more conceptual chapters, the book makes the often-missing connection between climate change and critical agrarian studies. The book argues that making the connection between climate and agrarian justice is crucial. The chapters in this book were originally published in The Journal of Peasant Studies.

Shadow Negotiators is the first book to demonstrate that United Nations (UN) organizations have intervened to influence the discourse, agenda, and outcomes of international trade lawmaking at the World Trade Organization (WTO). While UN organizations lack a seat at the bargaining table at the WTO, Matias E. Margulis argues that these organizations have acted as "shadow negotiators" engaged in political actions intended to alter the trajectory and results of multilateral trade negotiations. He draws on analysis of one of the most contested issues in global trade politics, agricultural trade liberalization, to demonstrate interventions by four different UN organizations—the Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO), the World Food Programme (WFP), the Office of the High Commissioner for Human Rights (OHCHR), and the Special Rapporteur on the Right to Food (SRRTF). By identifying several novel intervention strategies used by UN actors to shape the rules of global trade, this book shows that UN organizations chose to intervene in trade lawmaking not out of competition with the WTO or ideological resistance to trade liberalization, but out of concerns that specific trade rules could have negative consequences for world food security—an outcome these organizations viewed as undermining their social purpose to reduce world hunger and protect the human right to food.

The rules and regulations governing international trade have grown at an exponential rate in the years since the Uruguay Round agreements established the WTO in 1995. These agreements continue to act as the multilateral foundation of the body of law, which is being expanded by its own committees and in new arrangements. As the international trade law system grows, it comes under increasing scrutiny from scholars, government officials, and trade law practitioners, it raises questions about the overlap with other international legal, political, and economic regimes. This Handbook considers the system of international trade law and what it means for States, for economic systems, for other international regimes, for civil society, and for human welfare. The book opens by focusing on the regulation of international trade, considering the history, economics, and sources of international trade law, as well as the possibilities for the future. It considers the intersection of international trade law with States, the economic and institutional context of the world trading system, the framework of its substantive law, and the balance of trade objectives versus ethical responsibilities. The book concludes by offering analysis of new trade law developments in the agricultural, digital, and financial sectors, as well as outlining the settlement of trade law disputes both in the WTO and bilateral/regional trade agreements. The second edition broadens the scope of analysis beyond the WTO, analysing regional trade agreements and preferential trade arrangements, including the Trans-Pacific Partnership, and Canada-EU Trade Agreement. The new edition also considers developments within the WTO such as in the area of agricultural export subsidies, and the Trade Facilitation Agreement.

Since the 2008 economic meltdown, market-driven globalization has posed new challenges for governments. This volume introduces the concept of “grey zones” of global governance, where state policy and market behaviour interact with respect to trade, the environment, food security, and investment. Grey zones allow for the bending of international rules, which both promotes uniformity in many areas of public life and facilitates diverse forms of capitalism in market societies, enabling governments to balance national and global economic benefits. This exploration of local engagement with international economic law offers an innovative way to interpret public concerns about trade, investment, food security, green energy, subsidies, and anti-dumping actions.