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[Best Student Paper] China and India rapidly increased imports of palm oil, and of soybean in case of China, since the mid-1990s, and they transformed from mostly self-sufficient countries of vegetable oil into the global leading importers. It is commonly suggested that these rapid increase, and the concurrent change in diet, are caused by increase...
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Out of the two dozen countries that constitute what is generally called “Asia”, some are
the largest in the world while others are islands with smaller populations. When looking
at oilseeds and vegetable oils in the region, one is faced with the same huge diversity
which makes it complex to analyze, all the more that statistics are not easily avail...
Citations
... Growing acceptance of oil from 'nowhere' (McMichael, 2009) led to a shrinkage of diversity of cooking practices, recipes and tastes, further reducing the demand for traditional oils (Hiraga, 2015). Farmers found it unremunerative to grow mustard, sesame, linseed, coconut, and groundnut and they disappeared from farms and plates across India (Dohlman et al., 2003;Dorin, 2004). ...
This article argues that the repeal of the farm laws and even meeting the demand of the protestors to reduce corporatisation of agriculture and enhance the role of the state through expansion of guaranteed procurement is unlikely to bring significant positive transformation for farmers or consumers. Indian agriculture was remade through an industrial logic by harnessing science and technology, not by corporations but by the might of the state in the 1960s during the Green Revolution. Beyond its well-known negative environmental and livelihood impacts, I show how this logic also transformed diets and damaged the health of people. Challenging the tropes of food security, modernisation, efficiency and quality that have been used to justify the perpetuation of this logic, I argue that only by tracing the relationships that have led to the present, can we begin to unravel them and reimagine a healthier and more sustainable agrarian future.
By tracing specific moments in the history of the more‐than‐human landscape constituting the food geography of western Avadh, a long settled agricultural heartland in the Indo‐Gangetic plains, this paper challenges the neat formulations of the Anthropocene laying out decisive global impacts of humans on the environment. Building upon the concept of the ‘patchy Anthropocene’, we show how outcomes are shaped by an imbrication of humans and non‐humans—where powerful human actors seek to coerce people and corral the environment into their projects of remaking the landscape, but also where recalcitrant ecologies and resistant people thwart these intentions, especially during the colonial encounter. Contestations across power hierarchies and unintended outcomes litter the wake of the Anthropocene—as we show, efforts to save the nonhuman cow in the last decade have intensified processes associated with the Great Acceleration. Instead of treating the trajectory of food geographies like western Avadh as outliers and marginal to the normative process of defining change, we argue for treating it as constitutive of the norm. Only through such a process of decolonisation, by ‘provincialising the Anthropocene’, can we hope to push for epistemic justice, ecological sustainability and a more equitable world.
Commodities are well known to act anti-cyclical to stocks and are therefore used for portfolio diversification. However, various banks, asset managers and hedge funds were inculpated to speculate with agricultural commodities, especially after the food price bubble in 2007/08. This paper aims to investigate whether there is a diversification effect between equity- and commodity markets in the period from 1990 until 2014. We found evidence for a significant relationship between these two asset classes after the financial crisis using a cointegration framework.
