Security or Sovereignty? Institutional and Critical Approaches to the Global Food Crisis

Concerns over rising food costs and lack of access to food loom at the forefront of discussions of climate change, sociopolitical unrest, and population growth for the coming decades. How far can technological fixes and stopgap aid programs take us in ensuring the availability, sustainability, and biodiversity of food resources for future generations? What are the long-term consequences of increasing the productivity of industrial agriculture systems to be developed under vastly different economic and ecological conditions than those faced by contemporary producers and consumers? Will policies that regulate the current food regime be sufficient to avert future food crises, or is a more comprehensive change—one that fosters the development of smaller-scale, local food economies in place of transnational corporate agriculture—a viable option for building a more sustainable and just global food system? The books reviewed in this essay take varied approaches in addressing these questions about food production, access, and...