Globalising Food

In an increasingly global world, societies are being provisioned from a bewildering array of sources as new countries and new food commodities are drawn into international markets. Globalising Food provides an innovative contribution to the area of political economy of agriculture, food and consumption through a revealing investigation of the globalisation and restructuring of localised agricultural sectors and food systems. The book draws on new theoretical perspectives and wide-ranging case studies from Britain, the USA, India, South Africa, New Zealand and Latin America. The key themes addresses range from giant multinational food corporations, rural industrialisation and World Bank policies, to the regulation of pollution, labour relations, urban food politics and environmental sustainability. Globalising Food offers important insights into the problems, consequences and limits of the industrialisation of agriculture and the provisioning of food in a global world as we approach the new millenium.

David Goodman, Michael Watts

1: Agrarian Questions; I: Institutions, Embeddedness and Agrarian Trajectories; 2: Regional Integration and the Family Farm in the Mercosul Countries; 3: Multiple Trajectories of Rural Industrialisation; 4: Agrarian Questions in the Making of the Knitwear Industry in Tirupur, India; I: Commentary On Part I; II: Restructuring, Industry and Regional Dynamics; 5: Restructuring National Agriculture, Agro-Food Trade, and Agrarian Livelihoods in the Caribbean; 6: Restructuring Pork Production, Remaking Rural Iowa; II: Commentary On Part II; III: Globalisation, Value and Regulation in the Commodity System; 7: Creating Space For Food; 8: Agro-Industrial Just-In-Time; III: Commentary On Part III; IV: Discourse and Class, Networks and Accumulation; 9: Legal Discourse and the Restructuring of Californian Agriculture; 10: Field-Level Bureaucrats And The Making Of New Moral Discourses In Agri-Environmental Controversies; IV: Commentary On Part IV; V: Transnational Capital and Local Responses; 11: Nourishing Networks; 12: Reopening Totalities; V: Commentary On Part V; VI: Nature, Sustainability and the Agrarian Question; 13: Sustainability And Theory; 14: Some Observations on Agro-Food Change and the Future of Agricultural Sustainability Movements; VI: Commentary On Part VI