The Global Governance of Food

Food provides a particularly exciting and grounded research site for understanding the mechanisms governing global transactions in the 21st century. While food is intimately and fundamentally related to ecological and human well-being, food products now travel far flung trade routes to reach us. International trade in food has tripled in value and quadrupled in volume since 1960 and tracing the production, movement, transformation, and consumption of food necessitates research that situates localities within global networks and facilitates our capacity to "see the trees and the forest" by zooming from the global to the local and back to the global.

Our need for food is a constant; how we acquire food is a variable; and the production, commercialization, and consumption of food therefore offer an invaluable window onto the globalization of the world we inhabit. Food provides an ideal site for answering the fundamental questions of governance of central concern to globalization debates. This book presents recent and interdisciplinary scholarship about the variety of mechanisms governing global food systems and their impacts on human and environmental well-being

This book was previously published as a special issue of Globalizations

Sara R. Curran is an Associate Professor of International Studies & Public Affairs at the Henry M. Jackson School of International Studies and the Daniel J. Evans School of Public Affairs at the University of Washington. Dr. Curran has written Shifting Boundaries, Transforming Lives: Globalization, gender, and family dynamics in Thailand (forthcoming, Princeton University Press) and with Ellen Perecman edited A Handbook for Social Science Field Research: Essays & Bibliographic Sources on Research Design and Methods (Sage Publications, 2006).

April Linton is an Assistant Professor of Sociology and University of California at San Diego. Her work addresses many aspects of globalization including international migration, translational social movements, and the ethics of consumption. Currently Dr. Linton is researching the development impacts of Fair Trade in the global South.

Abigail Cooke is a graduate student in Geography at the University of California at Los Angeles. She studies food systems, food security and local effects of global transactions. She has conducted research on laughing records, T.V. medical personnel, and cassava export industry in Thailand.

Andrew Schrank is an Assistant Professor of Sociology at the University of New Mexico. He works on the organization, regulation, and performance of industry―especially in developing countries―and is currently studying the social origins and consequences of export diversification in Central America and the Caribbean.