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

by Fold,Niels; Fold,Niels

• ISBN13: 9780415337939
• ISBN10: 0415337933
• Edition: 1st
• Format: Hardcover
• Copyright: 2005-06-06
• Publisher: Routledge

Summary

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.

Table of Contents

List of figures	p. viii
List of tables	p. x
Notes on contributors	p. xi
Acknowledgements	p. xiii
Abbreviations	p. xiv
Introduction	p. 1
Mapping the terminologies, concepts and directions for the analysis of cross-continental food chains	p. 23
Commodity systems: forward to comparative analysis	p. 25
Trading on health: cross-continental production and consumption tensions and the governance of international food standards	p. 39
Reconstituting New Zealand's agri-food chains for international competition	p. 52
Contesting biotechnology: cross-continental concerns about genetically modified crops	p. 66
The local impacts of cross-continental food chains	p. 79
The cross-Pacific chicken: tourism, migration and chicken consumption in the Cook Islands	p. 81
Interpreting the Australian-Philippines food trade in the context of debates on food security	p. 94
Inscribed bodies within commodity chains: global wheat and local insecurity	p. 109
The local cultures of contract farming: the export of fresh asparagus from the Philippines to Japan	p. 125
Lead firms and the organization of cross-continental food chains	p. 139
Responsible retailers? Ethical trade and the strategic re-regulation of cross-continental food supply chains	p. 141
The penetration of lead firms in regional agri-food chains: evidence from the Argentinian fresh fruit and vegetable sector	p. 155
Production, consumption and trade in poultry: corporate linkages and North-South supply chains	p. 166
The difficulties of 'emerging markets': cross-continental investment in the South African dairy sector	p. 179
Multi-scalar politics and the restructuring of cross-continental food chains	p. 191
The politics of place: geographical identities along the coffee supply chain from Toraja to Tokyo	p. 193
Globalization, the WTO and the Australia-Philippines 'banana war'	p. 207
Global cocoa sourcing patterns	p. 223
The world steer revisited: Australian cattle production and the Pacific Basin beef complex	p. 239
Index	p. 255
Table of Contents provided by Ingram. All Rights Reserved.