Conclusion

The conclusion begins with a discussion of the significance of some recent developments in the trajectory of agricultural commodity prices. The author then draws together the key arguments developed throughout the book, and offers some final reflections on the relationship between law and the political economy of hunger. The reflections are organized around the intellectual debts schema set out in the Introduction. Using the lenses of entitlement, commodification, Institutionalist insights, and Karl Polanyi’s motif of ‘double movement’, the author concludes with a determination on whether existing legal solutions to the challenge of world hunger are likely to be effective when the role of law in constituting markets and in conditioning logics of accumulation is taken into account.

‘OTC’, ‘Financial’ Innovation, and Food Commodity Speculation

This chapter takes issue with the popular presentation of the OTC market as a ‘regulatory vacuum’. The analysis demonstrates that the OTC market did not emerge spontaneously in response to the risk management needs of commercial actors, nor was it created through financial ‘deregulation’. Governments in the UK and the US were influential in the construction of the market and in the creation of a new private law centred approach to the regulation of finance in the years leading up to the global financial crisis and the global food crisis. Subsequent parts of the chapter challenge the dominant characterization of the products traded within this market as being the result of ‘financial’ innovation. Highlighting some of the significant developments in contract law that have furnished market actors with the capacity to develop new derivative contracts, the chapter ultimately demonstrates that contract law has played an active role in the emergence of a new market logic oriented towards financial accumulation.

Regulation

Chapter 4 analyses the new regulations introduced in the US and in the EU to respond to ‘excessive’ levels of speculation in commodity derivative markets. First, the chapter recalls the events of the global financial crisis and relates how concerns about the role that derivatives played in bringing it about have motivated reform. The chapter then outlines the new US and European regulations for over-the-counter derivatives focusing on those provisions with the potential to address concerns about food commodity speculation. After discussing a number of challenges that threaten the regulatory project, the author exposes a number of deeper, structural limitations of the Dodd Frank Act and EMIR-MiFID II reforms. The regulations are revealed to be predicated on a problematic ‘Neoliberal-Neoclassical’ understanding of how financial markets function that fundamentally fails to account for dynamics of price formation in contemporary markets.

Neoliberalism and the Financialization of Agriculture

Chapter 2 explores the progressive financialization of the food system since the 1980s and relates this phenomenon to the Neoliberal policy agenda. In addition, the chapter carries out some important theoretical work that informs the analysis throughout the remainder of the book. The author argues that the financialization of the food system can only be understood in the context of broader trends in the financialization of the global economy, which has to be linked to the Neoliberal policy agenda and its relationship to Neoclassical economic theory in order to be fully appreciated. The chapter analyses three additional developments that, together with practices of food commodity speculation, are significant in the financialization of agriculture: the growing importance of finance in shaping the operations of global value chains; the global land grab that has seen financial investors gaining control over large tracts of agricultural land; and the rise of microcredit as a mechanism that is incorporating populations in the Global South into the logics of financial markets.

Human Rights, Law, and Political Economy

The final chapter of the book explores the potential of international human rights law as a means of addressing the persistence of world hunger. The chapter begins by relating the institutional development of the human right to adequate food. The analysis highlights some of the main advances that have been made in protecting the right, and it considers the emegence of two particular approaches taken to realizing socio-economic rights on the domestic level. The chapter then considers some of the limitations of human rights law as a tool to remedy complex socio-economic problems. The challenges of financialization and world hunger serve as referents for this analysis. Next, the author discusses the rise of the ‘food sovereignty’ movement and considers whether this approach overcomes some of the limitations of rights-based solutions to hunger. The chapter concludes with a two-fold argument concerning the limitations of existing international responses to hunger, which is that they simultaneously underweight the embeddedness of regulatory law in political economy, and, relatedly, that they pay insufficient attention to the operations of constitutive legal regimes that function to obstruct efforts to realize a right to adequate food.

Food Commodity Speculation

Chapter 3 explores the significance of practices of ‘food commodity speculation’ in the causation of the global food crisis. After introducing some of the main instruments and actors involved in commodity derivatives trading, the chapter examines competing claims over the role of financial speculation in the global food crisis. Seeking to break the impasse that has characterized debates on this issue, the chapter probes into claims by NGOs that commodity futures markets have been ‘financialized’ in recent decades. The author draws on a body of literature from the Social Studies of Finance to argue that there is an urgent need to reconceptualize the nature of derivatives and their contribution to processes of value formation in underlying markets. The chapter concludes by signalling the emergence of a new logic of financial accumulation that has significant implications both for attempts to use financial regulation to address ‘excessive’ levels of speculation, and, more broadly, for the political economy of hunger.

World Hunger, the Global Food System, and (International) Law

This chapter seeks to explain why it is that in spite of long-standing and concerted interventions to address world hunger the efforts of the international community have consistently fallen short. The chapter begins by locating the origins of the contemporary global food system in the period of European colonialism, and it then explores the place of law in creating conditions of food insecurity through the establishment of new market relations between colonial powers and colonized peoples. Particular attention is paid to the special role of public international law in enabling the perpetuation of colonial dynamics even after the period of decolonization through neocolonial practices of ‘economic development’. After examining the operations of regimes of international economic law and their interaction with private law norms, the chapter concludes that international law has been a key mechanism whereby the food security of populations of the Global South has been subordinated to the economic interests of wealthier market actors in the Global North.

Introduction

The Introduction provides an overview of the events of the 2007–08 global food crisis and surveys commonplace accounts of its causation. After signalling the role that commodity derivatives speculation is alleged to have played in causing the crisis, the author challenges the tendency to portray law as the solution to world hunger. The main argument of the book—that law actively contributes to the persistence of hunger in the world—is set out, and the arguments of each chapter are presented. The introduction concludes with an overview of existing scholarship that has contributed to the author’s thinking on the relationship between hunger and the legal system, including the work of Amartya Sen, Karl Marx, Institutionalist scholarship, and the work of Karl Polanyi.