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The globalization of commodity sourcing, food production, and retail sales has expanded over the last forty years, and it has sparked debates about the distributive fairness and human rights implications of the way the global political economy is structured. The centerpiece of the debate is the set of interrelated challenges involved in sustainably feeding the world by midcentury. Multiple reports prepared by governments, academic researchers, and international organizations have inventoried these challenges.1 The Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO), for example, warns that “degradation and deepening scarcity of land and water resources . . . pos[es] a profound challenge to the task of feeding a world population expected to reach 9 billion people by 2050.”2 Nearly all of the assessments conclude that the response to these challenges will require more than a portfolio of technological solutions.
The U.K. government's Foresight report The Future of Food and Farming, for example, defines the challenges as ones requiring institutional solutions to the “interacting drivers” affecting the global food system over the next forty years. Issues that it suggests need to be addressed include:
“Governance of the food system at both national and international levels”
“The globalisation of markets” and “the emergence and continued growth of new food superpowers”
“A trend for consolidation in the private sector with the emergence of a limited number of very large transnational companies in agribusiness, in the fisheries sector, and in the food processing, distribution and retail sectors”
“Production subsidies, trade restrictions and other market interventions”; and
“The control of increasing areas of land for food production (such as in Africa) . . . influenced by both past and future land-purchase and leasing agreements—involving both sovereign wealth funds and business”3
The global political economy, as Robert Gilpin defines it, focuses on “the interaction of the market and powerful actors such as states, multinational firms, and international organizations.”4 His widely influential definition goes beyond an older emphasis on the relation between markets and the legal and political institutions of the individual states within which those markets are...