The World Trade Organization and Food Security After the Global Food Crises

Abstract

This chapter examines the emergent global policy space for food security and its implications for understanding the World Trade Organization (WTO) in a changing global landscape. Despite the collapse of Doha Round negotiations in July 2008, the debate over food security and international trade has intensified at the WTO since 2008. This debate has significant implications for the WTO's role as an international institution as it takes on new governance duties such as participating in new global food security governance institutions. We can also observe shifts in the content of inter-state deliberations on food security at the WTO and the appearance of non-traditional policy actors in these deliberations. This includes for example the growing prominence of the human right to food in the new global food security policy consensus and the political contests between the UN Special Rapporteur on the Right to Food and the WTO. These developments illustrate conflicting visions about the role of international trade in addressing world hunger that are emblematic of the political contests driving the global policy space for food security.