The Global Food Economy The Battle for the Future of Farming

This book sets out some answers to the question: how can we build an ecologically sustainable and humane system of food production and distribution? The modern food economy is a paradox. Surplus 'food mountains' sit alongside global malnutrition and the developed world subsidizes its own agriculture while pressurizing the developing world to liberalize at all costs. Export competition is increasingly aggressive whilst the reliance on imports in many countries has worrying implications for food security. Family farms go out of business and dispossessed peasant farmers are driven into urban slums. The WTO's uneven application of neoliberal economics to food production is relatively new, and the consequences of mounting deficits, rising 'food miles', and social upheaval, are untested but ominous.

Tony Weis is Assistant Professor of Geography, University of Western Ontario, Canada.