Global food politics

Monthly Review, July-August, 1998 by Philip McMichael

Conclusion

Agribusiness liberalization is deeply symbolic of the attempt to legitimize world-economic integration, precisely because of agriculture's historic identification with place and nation. While greater integration transforms all states through economic liberalization, it also reinforces global power relations - in this case the relations of agribusiness imperialism. That is, what are presented as universal trade rules (to which states individually commit) really serve to reinforce extant geopolitical and corporate interests.

Within global agriculture, the institutionally driven process of liberalization undermines the ability of weaker, food importing states to protect local farmers, and transforms food into a new frontier of commodification. Global regulatory agencies like the WTO threaten to entrench (Northern) agribusiness power at the expense of farmers across the world, to intensify the destabilization of rural communities, and to further compromise local food security. How far this process will go remains unresolved, especially as citizens and workers and farmers and peasants and indigenous movements are sensing that globalization is not so much a foregone conclusion as a political project delivering highly selective benefits to small fractions of the world's population.

Philip McMichael, professor of Rural and Development Sociology is Director of the International Political Economy Program at Cornell University.