Cover

Contents

Preface

Different worlds of food and farming

Aim and outline of this book

1: The global food economy: contradictions and crises

Uneven bounty

The industrial grain-livestock complex

A snapshot of global agro-food trade

The great agrarian question of the twenty-first century

Assessing the ecological footprint of industrial agriculture

Conclusions

Notes

2: The temperate grain-livestock complex

Speeding agrarian revolutions

Managing a state of chronic surplus

Agro-giants: the ascendancy of transnational corporations

The polarity of production in industrial agriculture

Conclusions

Notes

3: From colonialism to global market integration in the South

Land and the colonial inheritance

Struggles for (and against) land reform

The marginals: the construction of food import dependencies

The powerhouses i: prioritizing domestic food self-sufficiency

The powerhouses ii: building competitive agro-exportplatforms

Structural adjustment and agriculture

Conclusions

Notes

4: Entrenching an uneven playing field: the multilateral regulation of agriculture

The rise and imbalances of the WTO

The push to regulate global agricultural trade under the WTO

The new ‘discipline’ for the global food economy

Unpacking the imbalances: from contestation to a crisis of legitimacy

Moving from impasse to impasse

Beyond Cancún: which way forward?

The uncertain future of the WTO

Conclusions

Notes

5: The battle for the future of farming

The (resistible) trajectory of the global food economy

Battling for what?

The multiple scales of resistance and change

Notes

Bibliography

Index