Food, famine and the free trade fallacy: the dangers of market fundamentalism in an era of climate emergency

ABSTRACT

The market fundamentalist logic underpinning WTO agricultural trade rules poses a profound threat to global food security in the context of climate change. The growing frequency of extreme weather events raises the prospect of large-scale disruption of agricultural production and distribution. A trading system oriented towards maximizing economic efficiency and reducing redundancy risks leaving the world population acutely vulnerable to food supply disruptions. Ensuring the resilience of global food systems will require considerably more, rather than less, state intervention in agricultural and food production, including cultivating agricultural surpluses to protect against supply shocks.

KEYWORDS:

• World Trade Organization (WTO)
• climate change
• food security
• agriculture
• trade
• neoliberalism
• state intervention
• stockholding

Acknowledgements

We would like to thank the three anonymous reviewers for their very helpful comments on the paper.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Notes

1 Critics challenge this projection, arguing that it could be mitigated by reversing the meatification of diets (Weis 2015).

2 While climate change may increase yields in some high-latitude regions, the overall effect on global crop yields is expected to be negative, with an average of 17% decline in yields of the four main crops accounting for 70% of global harvested crop area by 2050 (FAO 2015, xi).

3 Given the large volume of grain used to make biofuel and feed animals, there could, in theory, be scope for substitution, by shifting out of biofuels or reducing meat consumption to increase food supply in a time of shortage. However, practical and political impediments make this extremely challenging.

4 Although, of course, seemingly ‘cheap food’ always masked the high environmental and social costs of food production in the corporate food regime.

Additional information

Funding

This research was supported by a Hampton Grant, the Social Science and Humanities Research Council [grant number: #435-2021-0192], and the Canada Research Chairs program .

Notes on contributors

Matias E. Margulis

Matias E. Margulis is Assistant Professor in the Faculty of Land and Food Systems and the School of Public Policy and Global Affairs at the University of British Columbia. He is the author of Shadow Negotiators: How UN Agencies Shape the Rules of Global Trade (forthcoming with Stanford University Press), editor of The Global Political Economy of Raúl Prebisch (Routledge 2017) and co-editor of Land Grabbing and Global Governance (Routledge 2014).

Kristen Hopewell

Kristen Hopewell is the Canada Research Chair in Global Policy in the School of Public Policy and Global Affairs at the University of British Columbia. She is the author of Breaking the WTO: How Emerging Powers Disrupted the Neoliberal Project (Stanford University Press 2016) and Clash of Powers: US–China Rivalry in the Global Trading System (Cambridge University Press 2020).

Edi Qereshniku

Edi Qereshniku is a graduate student in the Master in Public Policy and Global Affairs program at the University of British Columbia.