The World Trade Organisation and the Global Structuring of the Agrifood System

This chapter attempts to locate the WTO in the vortex of the discourse surrounding the problems and prospects for food security in connection with the relationship between (multilateral) trade and development. In this regard, the opportunities, and constraints which the international political economy poses are examined from the standpoint of both mainstream and alternative perspectives. The market’s putative capacity for efficiency, predicated on the logic of comparative advantage, growth, poverty alleviation and the spatial redistribution of food is noted. The chapter however shows that, contra this, there is the fact of wealth and power, which, though excluded from the technicist analysis of free market paradigms, clearly function as key determinants of food access and entitlements.