ABSTRACT
This chapter traces how states and other actors have used legal rules and institutions to govern the provisioning of agriculture-based food and to shape national and global power since Second World War. From the 1950s to around the 1980s, governments used law to stabilize and protect domestic markets. From the 1950s until 2008, development planners largely neglected agricultural development. Third World governments and international institutions alike shifted resources away from agriculture towards industrialization. In the 1980s and 1990s, powerful states, international organizations, and agribusiness corporations used some international institutions to reconfigure agriculture as a question of trade liberalization. In 1986, the United States, the European Community, and other wheat exporting countries began negotiations to include agriculture within formal legal trade agreements that culminated in 1994 with the World Trade Organization Agreement on Agriculture. Food security, the United States argued in these negotiations, is ‘best provided through a smooth-functioning world market’.
