Jennifer Clapp

Navigating the Anthropocene: Improving Earth System Governance

The United Nations conference in Rio de Janeiro in June is an important opportunity to improve the institutional framework for sustainable development. Science assessments indicate that human activities are moving several of Earths sub-systems outside the range of natural variability typical for the previous 500,000 years (1, 2). Human societies must now change course and steer away from critical tipping points in the Earth system that might lead to rapid and irreversible change (3). This requires fundamental reorientation and restructuring of national and international institutions toward more effective Earth system governance and planetary stewardship.

Financialization, distance and global food politics

This paper provides a new perspective on the political implications of intensified financialization in the global food system. There has been a growing recognition of the role of finance in the global food system, in particular the way in which financial markets have become a mode of accumulation for large transnational agribusiness players within the current food regime. This paper highlights a further political implication of agrifood system financialization, namely how it fosters ‘distancing’ in the food system and how that distance shapes the broader context of global food politics. Specifically, the paper advances two interrelated arguments. First, a new kind of distancing has emerged within the global food system as a result of financialization that has (a) increased the number of the number and type of actors involved in global agrifood commodity chains and (b) abstracted food from its physical form into highly complex agricultural commodity derivatives. Second, this distancing has obscured the links between financial actors and food system outcomes in ways that make the political context for opposition to financialization especially challenging.

Troubled futures? The global food crisis and the politics of agricultural derivatives regulation

ABSTRACT The global food crisis of 2007–08 triggered an important US-led initiative to tighten regulations over agricultural derivatives markets. The lead role of the US reflected its structural power in global finance and the influence of societal interests within the US concerned about the rapid growth of financial investment in agricultural derivatives markets over the past decade. Encouraged by market developments and deregulation in the United States, these investments represented a “financialization” of agriculture that was blamed for contributing for global food price volatility. In their push for tighter regulation, US domestic groups were able to boost their influence by allying with other domestic actors concerned about volatile energy prices and by linking their cause to the broader politics of financial reform in the wake of the 2008 financial crisis. This episode has important lessons for the literatures analyzing the IPE of both food and finance.

Food price volatility and vulnerability in the global south: considering the global economic context.

Abstract Most official analyses of the recent food price crisis have focused on the market fundamentals of supply and demand for food as key explanatory factors. As a result, most of the policy recommendations emanating from the major international institutions include measures to boost supply and temper demand. In this paper I argue that international macroeconomic factors played a key role in fostering both price volatility and vulnerability, and as such they need to be recognised. With respect to the recent price volatility, the weak US dollar and speculation on agricultural commodities futures markets greatly influenced agricultural prices. With respect to price vulnerability, global economic forces played an important role in dampening production incentives in the worlds poorest countries over the past 30 years, leading to a situation of food import dependence. Policy responses to the food crisis must consider the role of these broader international macroeconomic forces—both in the immediate context and their longer term impact.

Transnational corporate interests and global environmental governance: negotiating rules for agricultural biotechnology and chemicals

This essay examines the role of the agricultural input industry in the negotiation of two environmental treaties: the Cartegena Protocol on Biosafety and the Stockholm Convention on Persistent Organic Pollutants. It seeks to explain why industry players were willing to accept a phase-out of POPs chemicals but were reluctant to accept strict regulation of the trade in genetically modified organisms. This comparison is an important one to consider, as the line that once divided the agricultural chemicals and agricultural biotechnology industries has become more blurred, such that many of the same firms now are involved in both pesticide production and agricultural biotechnology. The essay argues that in order to fully understand industry positions on these two treaties, economic factors facing these industries must be examined. The shifting profitability of the pesticides and seeds industries over the past two decades goes a long way to explaining not only the positions industry players took in these two environmental treaty negotiations, but also the merger of the two sectors in recent years.

Foreign direct investment in hazardous industries in developing countries: Rethinking the debate

It is often asserted that the debate over industry location and the environment is closed. It is argued MNCs do not invest in highly polluting industries in developing countries in order to take advantage of weaker environmental regulations, as environmental costs are not sufficient to warrant industry relocation. This article argues that this assertion may not always hold for foreign direct investment in the most highly hazardous industries in developing countries, and that there is reason to revisit this debate. In addition, there has been a growing incidence of FDI and double standards practised by MNCs in hazardous industries in the South in the past decade, while at the same time very little has been done to transfer clean production technologies. Recent voluntary environmental initiatives on the part of global industry do not seem to have changed the situation. Instead, there seems to be growing concentration of so‐called ‘green’ investment in clean‐up, rather than clean technologies. Though such te...

WTO Agriculture Negotiations: implications for the Global South

Abstract The Doha ‘Development’ Round of trade negotiations at the wto has featured agricultural trade liberalisation as one of its key aims. But developing countries were frustrated with both the process and the content of the agricultural agreement negotiations early on in the round. This prompted these countries, through a number of developing country groupings such as the G-20 and others, to call for changes in the talks to ensure that developing country voices and concerns were heard. Although developing countries were in many ways successful in registering their concerns in the latter half of the negotiations, and have maintained a fairly high degree of cohesion across the Global South, it remains unclear whether this cohesion will last as the uneven impacts of agricultural trade liberalisation become apparent.

What the Pollution Havens Debate Overlooks

Whether or not pollution havens exist in poor countries has been the subject of a great deal of debate in recent decades. This concern is warranted, as the intensity of dirty industry is rising in the developing world just as it is falling in the industrialized world. But identifying pollution havens is extremely difficult in practice. Part of the reason for this is that there are important flaws with the methods and measures used in the pollution havens literature which results in an overly narrow debate. It may be time to abandon the narrowly constructed pollution havens debate in favor of a more open-ended analysis of the linkages between global trade and investment and environmental regulation.

Food security and food sovereignty Getting past the binary

The terms food security and food sovereignty originally emerged as separate terms to describe different things. The former is a concept that describes a condition regarding access to adequate food, while the latter is more explicitly a political agenda for how to address inadequate access to food and land rights. Over the past decade, the critical food studies literature has increasingly referred to these terms as being oppositional to each rather than relational to one another. This commentary reflects on the emergence and rationale behind this binary and argues that the current oppositional frame within the literature is problematic in several ways. First, critics of food security have inserted a rival normative agenda into what was originally a much more open-ended concept. Second, the grounds on which that normative agenda is assigned to food security are shaky on several points. Given these problems, the commentary argues that the juxtaposition of food security and food sovereignty as competing terms is in many ways more confusing than helpful to policy dialogue on questions of hunger and the global food system.

Unplanned Exposure to Genetically Modified Organisms Divergent Responses in the Global South

This article examines the divergent political responses to unplanned exposure to genetically modified organisms (GMOs) in the Global South. Although scientific and domestic political considerations have some relevance to explaining different positions among developing countries, trade considerations appear to be a principal driver of GMO policy. This consideration is strikingly clear when we compare the different responses to unplanned GMO imports in Mexico/Central America with that in Africa. When trade and environment interests converge, as was the case in Africa, the strong policy stance, in this case against the import of GMOs, was clear and swift. In the cases of Mexico and Central America, the trade and environment interests did not overlap, and this has resulted in a weak government response and incremental policy shifts, in this case toward a pro-GMO stance.