ABSTRACT
Over the past decade, the agriculture and food sector has emerged at the forefront of prevailing processes of economic, political, and cultural globalization as well as proliferating alternative globalization efforts. Transformations in this sector illuminate changing Global North/South relations. Agriculture and food products represent some of the earliest and the most important internationally traded commodities and some of the first to experience the widening and deepening of market ties that define globalization today. The agrofood sector lies at the heart of current efforts to regulate international trade under the auspices of the World Trade Organization (WTO) and other multilateral agencies. Yet at the same time, the agrofood sector forms a central terrain for contesting globalization within the World Social Forum and various other alternative globalization initiatives (Delgado and Romano 2005). In recent years, Fair Trade has emerged as one of the key challenges promoted by alternative globalization efforts within and beyond the agrofood sector.
