Agriculture Reference
In-Depth Information
gards to the ways it is understood and advanced by the FAO and the Special Rap-
porteur. he third major section of the hapter details the disconnection between
these two combative approahes and the global politics of food. Finally, the hapter
asks whether - and how - the current set of arrangements can, and should, be
altered. The point is that the world deserves a more inclusive, high-level conversa-
tion (across disciplines, civil society, governments and the private sector) on this top-
ic, connected to a new institutional arhitecture of international rule-seting around
food. he crude certainties that typify so muh of (what passes for) international de-
bate on trade and food security in the WTO era (a set of blak-and-white perspect-
ives arguing that trade is good/bad for food security) warrant replacement by a more
contextualized approah that calibrates trade rules and policy to understandings of
how exposure to international trade generates resilience and/or vulnerability among
members of food-insecure populations.
International food trade and the World Trade Organization
The WTO is an unusual international organization. It is constituted by a series of
Agreements established in the mid-1990s that specify limits to whih members can
intervene in global trade. Yet at the same time, its mandate is to renounce those same
Agreements by working towards newer ones whih further liberalize world trade.
This contradiction in the WTO (as upholding existing Agreements yet working to
replace them) fundamentally shapes its relationship to the debate on international
food security.
The goal of having a worldwide set of rules to govern trade can be traced to
1941, when Winston Churhill and Franklin D. Roosevelt established the Atlantic
Charter: a statement of economic and political principles on whih their two coun-
tries would base their ongoing relations. Principle four of the Charter specified that
the two countries would 'endeavour, with due respect for their existing obligations,
to further the enjoyment by all states, great or small, victor or vanquished, of access,
on equal terms, to the trade and to the raw materials of the world whih are needed
for their economic prosperity'. These innocuous sounding commitments provided
the foundation for the following 65 years of government-to-government regulation
of international economic activity. Initially, they provided the basis for the General
Agreement on Tariffs and Trade (GATT), the agreement penned over the course of
meetings in 1945-47 for the ultimate purpose of providing a constitution for a pro-
posed International Trade Organization (ITO). Intended to be part of the United Na-
