ABSTRACT
Basic to human survival, and with commodities unique to location, food was one of the first products people were able to produce at a surplus for trade. The 1980s brought the theory of trade liberalization. The establishment of the World Trade Organization (WTO) in 1995 was a result of the culmination of a several decades of trade negotiations that had taken place under the General Agreement on Tariffs and Trade (GATT) and has been cited as a mark of how strongly the notion of free trade had captured the imaginations of governments. Initially conceived to protect food security during the Cold War, the Common Agricultural Policy was designed to protect European producers from cheaper products available outside the EU. These cases of ingenuity in urban agricultural policy in the global South are a stark contrast to the phenomenon of the urban food desert which exists in many relatively highly economically advanced societies.
