Niek Koning - Böcker

Agriculture is a highly sensitive industry. Throughout their history, national governments have intervened in and protected their agricultural sectors. The problems of competition in agriculture have been continually illustrated by disagreement over the European Community's Common Agricultural Policy (CAP) and, more recently, by attempts to reform farming policy in the last round of the GATT negotiations. The Failure of Agrarian Capitalism presents a comparative analysis of in agarian policies in the UK, Germany, the Netherlands and the USA from 1846-1919.

Using a political-economic approach supplemented with insights from human ecology, this volume analyzes the long-term dynamics of food security and economic growth. The book begins by discussing the nature of preindustrial food crises and the changes that have occurred since the 19th century with the ascent of technical science and the fossil fuel revolution. It explains how these changes improved living standards but that the realization of this improvement was usually dependent on government support for smallholder modernization. The author sets out how the evolution of food security in different regions has been influenced by farm policy choices and how these choices were shaped by local societal characteristics, international relations and changing configurations in metropolitan countries. Separate chapters are devoted to the interaction of this evolution with debates on food security and economic growth and with international economic policies. The final chapters highlight the new challenges for global food security that will arise as traditional sources of biomass production and the more easily extractable reserves of fossil biomass become depleted or can no longer be used. Overall, the book emphasizes the inadequacy of current explanations with regard to these challenges. It explores what is needed to ensure a sustainable future and calls for a rethinking of these issues; a necessary reflection in today's unstable global political situation.

Using a political-economic approach supplemented with insights from human ecology, this volume analyzes the long-term dynamics of food security and economic growth. The book begins by discussing the nature of preindustrial food crises and the changes that have occurred since the 19th century with the ascent of technical science and the fossil fuel revolution. It explains how these changes improved living standards but that the realization of this improvement was usually dependent on government support for smallholder modernization. The author sets out how the evolution of food security in different regions has been influenced by farm policy choices and how these choices were shaped by local societal characteristics, international relations and changing configurations in metropolitan countries. Separate chapters are devoted to the interaction of this evolution with debates on food security and economic growth and with international economic policies. The final chapters highlight the new challenges for global food security that will arise as traditional sources of biomass production and the more easily extractable reserves of fossil biomass become depleted or can no longer be used. Overall, the book emphasizes the inadequacy of current explanations with regard to these challenges. It explores what is needed to ensure a sustainable future and calls for a rethinking of these issues; a necessary reflection in today's unstable global political situation.

Agriculture is a highly sensitive industry. Throughout their history, national governments have intervened in and protected their agricultural sectors. The problems of competition in agriculture have been continually illustrated by disagreement over the European Community's Common Agricultural Policy (CAP) and, more recently, by attempts to reform farming policy in the last round of the GATT negotiations. The Failure of Agrarian Capitalism presents a comparative analysis of in agarian policies in the UK, Germany, the Netherlands and the USA from 1846-1919.

Although the current round of international trade negotiations was called a ‘Development Round’, very little was accomplished before the negotiations stalled in mid-2006. Developing countries as a group stand to gain very substantially from trade reform in agricultural commodities. It is less clear how the 50 countries identified by the United Nations as the ‘Least Developed Countries’ (LDCs), which have been subject to special consideration in international trade negotiations, would fare. Would they lose their preferential trade access to the OECD markets and, if so, would these losses exceed the potential gains from liberalized trade? Or would low-income countries that currently receive high prices for commodities such as sugar in some OECD-country markets be out-competed by countries such as Brazil in a liberalized market? More generally, would any benefits from liberalized agricultural trade be captured by middle-income countries with good domestic infrastructure and well-functioning markets, leaving few or no economic benefits to the LDCs? How should the LDCs prepare for multilateral reform of agricultural trade, and should they take policy action now in response to the continuation of the trade-distorting agricultural policies pursued by the OECD countries? To what extent do the LDCs and the middle-income developing countries have common interests with respect to the desired outcomes of the trade round? Are the LDCs well represented by the Group of 21, which consists primarily of middle-income countries with strong export potential in agriculture, or should they pursue a different set of goals in future negotiations? In this book, several experts on international trade and development address these and related questions.