The Global Restructuring of Agro-Food Systems

Abstract

Contemporary geographic, political, and economic power relations, which are partly institutionalized through the WTO, involve the globalization of relationships between food production and consumption. The political decision to take international market prices as the yardstick, even though those prices are lowered by export subsidies from some countries, and the political choice of economic liberalization together lead to a major recombination of agricultural productions around the world and to a new dominant way of thinking about food security, food dependency for numerous poor countries, the destruction of peasant farming, and the enhancement of the power of multinational agribusiness.