Is there something really new about "land grab" except its extent? What is wrong with an investment contract allowing the holder to buy a farm and to export wheat to Saudi Arabia, or soybeans and maize as cattle feed to Korea, or to plant and process sugar cane and palm oil into ethanol for...

Recent data advances have opened exciting new avenues for analyzing the political economy of foreign aid. Recent papers have looked at the social, environmental or welfare implications of aid. This paper, however, combines geo-referenced data on foreign aid with a similarly coded dataset of FDI...

The article examines the food security implications of the WTO Agreement on Agriculture. It places the Agreement in historical context, examines its key provisions, and argues that the Agreement systematically favors industrialized country agricultural producers at the expense of farmers in...

The food crisis of 2008, the subsequent financial crisis, and the ongoing climate crisis have created new challenges to the attainment of global food security. This essay examines the historic and current practices that have contributed to food insecurity in developing countries, and recommends...

Biotic factors such as pests create biodiversity effects that increase production risks and decrease land productivity when agriculture becomes more specialized. We show in a Ricardian two-country trade setup that production specialization is incomplete under free trade because of the decrease...

The system of global agricultural and food trade is undergoing rapid processes of change, with important implications for economic development. In this paper we document and discuss these changes; including the rapid growth and structural change in agri-food trade, the increased consolidation in...

China's rising demand for natural resources and its growing presence in many poor and resource‐rich countries have been criticized for promoting neo‐colonialism in the 21st century. Using panel data for 135 developing countries from 1995 to 2007, the present paper empirically evaluates the...

Blockchain is increasingly viewed as the solution to many trade facilitation problems, but discussions regarding its implementation with respect to Global South raw material producers often overlook the human cost of bypassing systemic poverty issues in favor of reducing supply chain risk...