Cross-Continental Agro-Food Chains: Structures, Actors and Dynamics in the Global Food System

We live in a world of global food. The daily meals of people in both the developed and developing worlds are being transformed by the increasing ease with which food is being traded across continents. Affluent consumers' supermarket trolleys increasingly are being filled with an array of food products from developing countries while, at the same time, food exports from the developed world are supplanting and transforming dietary systems in developing countries. Some experts suggest that the enhanced tradability of food ushers in an era of increasing choice and affluence. Others point to problems of dependency, inequality and social dislocation accompanying these developments. Cross-continental Food Systems represents a collective effort to document and understand these issues. Containing the contributions of twenty-six leading international social scientists from eleven countries, the book presents recent case study research on how and why the food system is being globalized, and what this means forpeople and communities in different parts of the world. The book covers debates on new structures and food products, as well as detailed accounts of fresh horticulture, tropical crops and livestock. This book fills a major gap in contemporary scholarship on food and globalization. Its emphasis on case study accounts of the connections between trade and restructuring provides texture and context to these complex and important debates. Written and researched at a time in which national governments are seeking to negotiate new rules of global agricultural trade, this book is timely and relevant. It will interest researchers in geography, development studies, agricultural economics and political science, as well as professionals in the fields of trade and food policy.