Law and the Political Economy of Hunger

Abstract This book offers the first in-depth analysis of the significance of law in the context of world hunger. The book takes as its starting point the global food crisis in 2007–08—a crisis said to have been exacerbated by financial speculators ‘gambling’ on the price of food via commodity derivatives. Challenging the tendency to attribute the highly differentiated impact of the crisis to an underlying condition of ‘food insecurity’, the author relates the role that international law has played in making some populations ‘food insecure’ in the first instance. The book then examines recent developments in the financialization of agriculture and links these developments to structural changes in the global economy since the 1980s. Food commodity speculation—the practice linked to the causation of the global food crisis—is used as a case study to explore the interaction of regimes of law that attempt to regulate market conduct and legal regimes that create markets and enable them to operate. The tension between efforts to regulate speculative market behaviour and bodies of private law that anticipate and operationalize that same behaviour is exposed. The book concludes with a critical analysis of the potential of a human right to adequate food to address the problem of world hunger. Far from being the result of a lack of regulation, or even unrealized human rights, the book argues that prevalence of hunger in the contemporary period is a product of capitalist political economy and the legal structures that underpin it.