Food Is Different: Why We Must Get the WTO Out of Agriculture

Why does our global food system gives us expensive, unhealthy and bad-tasting food, where we pay more for packaging and long-distance shipping than we do for the food itself? Why do farmers and peasants from around the world lead massive protests each and every time the World Trade Organization meets?

Peter Rosset explains how the runaway free trade policies and neoliberal economics of the WTO, American government and European Union kill farmers, and give us a food system that nobody outside of a small corporate elite wants. This essential guide sets out an alternative vision for agricultural policy, taking it completely out of the WTO's ambit. Food is not just another commodity, to be bought and sold like a microchip, but something which goes to the heart of human livelihood, culture and society.

Peter Rosset is a food rights activist and agro-ecologist. He is based in Oaxaca, Mexico, where he is a researcher at the Centro de Estudios para el Cambio en el Campo Mexicano (Center for Studies of Rural Change in Mexico), and co-coordinator of the Land Research Action Network. He is also Global Alternatives Associate of the Center for the Study of the Americas and is a Visiting Scholar in the Department of Environmental Science, Policy & Management of the University of California.

His previous books include: The Case for GM-Free Sustainable World (2003); Sustainable Agriculture and Resistance: Transforming Food Production in Cuba (2002); and America Needs Human Rights (1999).