Although the potential causes and consequences of recent increases in international food prices have attracted widespread attention, many existing appraisals are superficial and/or piecemeal. This paper attempts to provide a more comprehensive review of these issues based on the best and most recent research, and includes fresh theoretical and empirical analysis. We first analyze the causes of the current crisis by considering how well standard explanations hold up against relevant economic theory and important stylized facts. Some explanations, especially rising oil prices, the depreciation of the US dollar, biofuel demand, and some commodity-specific explanations, hold up much better than some others. We then provide an appraisal of the likely macro- and microeconomic impacts of the crisis in developing countries. We observe a large gap in the effects of macro and micro factors, and note that when these factors are used to identify the most vulnerable countries, the results often point in different directions. We conclude with a brief discussion of what ought to be learned from this crisis.

Food is one of the most basic resources that humans need for daily survival. Forty percent of the world’s population gains a livelihood from agriculture and we all consume food. Yet control over this fundamental resource is concentrated in relatively few hands. The 2008 food price crisis illustrated both the volatility and vulnerability built into the current global food system; at the height of the crisis, the number of hungry people on the planet climbed to over 1 billion. At the same time, there are serious ecological consequences that stem from an increasingly industrial model of agriculture that has spread worldwide. This book aims to contribute to a fuller understanding of the forces that influence and shape the current global food system. Author Jennifer Clapp explores how corporate control, inequitable international agricultural trade rules, and the financialization of farm commodities have each had a fundamental influence on the practices that dominate today’s global food system. By contrast, farmers and consumers, particularly in the developing world, have had little voice to change the rules of the game. But movements are emerging to challenge the dominant global system. The extent to which these alternative movements can displace it, however, remains to be seen.

The global financial and economic shock of 2007-09 is the third major economic crisis to have buffeted Cambodia in its post-conflict period, coming in the wake of the food crisis of 2007-08 and just a decade after the Asian financial crisis of 1997-98 (the "triple crises"). Cambodia's post-conflict history can be divided into two periods: 1991-98, referred to as the early phase of transition during which the first of the triple crises, the Asian financial crisis, occurred; and 1998 to the present, the late phase of transition during which the food and economic shocks transpired. A stocktake of the developments in Cambodia's post-conflict history suggests that the country has come a long way in reinstituting the foundations of a capitalist economic and procedural democracy but has yet to make significant headway in economic sophistication and substantive democracy. The triple crises were different, yet had similar characteristics. They were all exogenously-driven shocks with their own specific causes but their effects were shaped by the country's situation at the time. In terms of magnitude of impact, the global financial and economic downturn was the worst of the three crises. That it caused the first ever growth contraction in the post-conflict period was sufficient rationale for the series of studies that substantiate this book. Like the two shocks that preceded it however, the way it impacted on Cambodia cannot be understood in isolation from the overall post-conflict milieu. The thesis here is not that endogenous factors caused the crisis. It is simply that endogenous factors shaped the impact of the crisis and a historical, as opposed to a static, analysis better illuminates the nature of the impact. This book is an in-depth comprehensive examination of the impact of the global financial and economic crisis on Cambodia. It probes into the effects of the shock at macro, sectoral and micro levels using qualitative and quantitative techniques.

This book is an inquiry into the role of law in the contemporary political economy of hunger. In the work of many international institutions, governments, and NGOs, law is represented as a solution to the persistence of hunger. This presentation is evident in the efforts to realize a human right to adequate food, as well as in the positioning of law, in the form of regulation, as a tool to protect society from 'unruly' markets. In this monograph, Anna Chadwick draws on theoretical work from a range of disciplines to challenge accounts that portray law's role in the context of hunger as exclusively remedial. The book takes as its starting point claims that financial traders 'caused' the 2007-8 global food crisis by speculating in financial instruments linked to the prices of staple grains. The introduction of new regulations to curb the 'excesses' of the financial sector in order to protect the food insecure reinforces the dominant perception that law can solve the problem. Chadwick investigates a number of different legal regimes spanning public international law, international economic law, transnational governance, private law, and human rights law to gather evidence for a counterclaim: law is part of the problem. The character of the contemporary global food system-a food system that is being progressively 'financialized'-owes everything to law. If world hunger is to be eradicated, Chadwick argues, then greater attention needs to be paid to how different legal regimes operate to consistently privilege the interests of the wealthy few over the needs of poor and the hungry.