ABSTRACT
There are many good reasons why food sovereignty advocacy has tended to view longdistance or foreign trade of agricultural products in a negative light. The reconfiguration of land and social relations to produce commodities for export obviously has old roots in European colonialism, and in many places agro-export production continues to be predicated on and/or generative of severe land and social inequalities. Dependence on longdistance trading systems frequently amounts to a double-edged sword for smallholders and farm workers, with especially damaging impacts in many of the world’s poorest countries. On one side is the extreme volatility of tropical agricultural commodities, long subject to frequent boom-bust swings. As Martin Khor (2000, 11) puts it: ‘many developing countries still dependent on commodity exports have been trapped in a bad corner of the world trading system’. On the other side, rising imports of cheap (and frequently subsidized) surpluses from industrialized countries have glutted local markets and reshaped the nature of food provisioning, a dynamic that will inevitably be threatened by limits to fossil energy supplies at some point in the future (and in the meantime will be tied to ever-more-destructive forms of fossil energy extraction).
