Jennifer Clapp

University of Waterloo | UWaterloo · School of Environment, Resources and Sustainability

Global environmental politics is at a critical juncture as the Earth System emergency deepens. The core environmental policies and actions of governments, intergovernmental organizations, corporations, and, to a lesser extent, mainstream nongovernmental organizations are visibly failing to deescalate this emergency. In response to these failures, w...

This chapter outlines the main contours of global food security governance over the past 80 years. First, it maps the evolution of understandings of food security and traces the history of food security governance at the global level in the twentieth century. Second, it outlines the challenges to global food security governance presented by both th...

Corporate concentration has become a dominant feature of the modern industrial food system in recent decades. In nearly all stages of global food supply chains, from farm inputs, to production, to trade, to processing and food retail, a common pattern is that just a handful of firms tend to dominate. This chapter examines the key drivers of this tr...

The world has experienced three global food crises in the past 50 years. While unique triggers sparked each of these crises, they all exposed extreme concentration within the global industrial food system at multiple scales – at the field, country, and global market levels. This multi-level concentration heightens vulnerability to worldwide food cr...

Based on analysis of documentation associated with the UN Food Systems Summit process, we identify three main ways in which the Summit failed to address the problem of corporate power in food systems in a meaningful way. First, the Summit was ‘strategically silent’ on the problem of corporate power, mentioning the problem only very infrequently and...

The definition of food security has evolved and changed over the past 50 years, including the introduction of the four commonly cited pillars of food security: availability, access, utilization, and stability, which have been important in shaping policy. In this article, we make the case that it is time for a formal update to our definition of food...

This brief demonstrates that: • The calls for a new 'IPCC for Food' originated from a small group of actors whose views have been amplified by a powerful network of organizations, many of which are closely aligned with business and industry. These groups are using the UN Food Systems Summit to promote their 'game-changing' proposal. • Many of the f...

What are the potential consequences when a relatively small number of large firms come to dominate markets within the global food system? This Perspective examines the implications of corporate concentration and power in the global seed and agrochemical industry, a sector that has become more consolidated in recent years. It outlines the pathways v...

The COVID‐19 pandemic, its impact on the global economy, and current delays in the negotiation of the post‐2020 global biodiversity agenda of the Convention on Biological Diversity heighten the urgency to build back better for biodiversity, sustainability, and well‐being. In 2019, the Intergovernmental Science‐Policy Platform on Biodiversity and Ec...

The global governance of food matters profoundly for the future of humanity and the planet. Yet, more than ten years on from a major global food crisis in 2007–2008 that saw soaring food prices and rising levels of hunger, global governance frameworks to address food insecurity are fragmented and lack strong government support. Goal 2 of the United...

The growing use of chemical herbicides for weed control has become a dominant feature of modern industrial agriculture and a major environmental and health concern in agricultural systems worldwide. This paper seeks to explain how and why glyphosate-based agricultural herbicides have become so entrenched in modern agriculture. It shows that a compl...

A COVID-19 járvány világszerte drámai és soha nem látott hatást gyakorolt az egészségügyre és a gazdaságra. Sok kormány gazdasági mentőcsomagot állít össze, hogy segítse a normális működéshez való visszatérést, ám az IPBES (Biológiai Sokféleség és Ökoszisztéma-szolgáltatás Kormányközi Testület) 2019-ben elfogadott Globális Felmérése szerint a gazda...

We investigate the effects of common ownership on firms’ incentives to compete. Using a theoretical model, we illustrate how common ownership changes the nature of competition among firms in the same sector. Our empirical analysis examines these dynamics in the U.S. seed industry and shows that the rise of common ownership concentration is a signif...

Our analysis situates the current COVID-19 induced food crisis within a longer-term historical perspective on policy responses to past food crises. We argue that the legacies left by these past policies created vulnerabilities in the face of the present crisis, which is characterized by three interlocking dynamics: disruptions to global food supply...

The purpose of this issues paper, requested by the Chairperson of the Committee on World Food Security (CFS), is to provide insights in addressing the food and nutrition security implications of the COVID-19 pandemic and to inform the preparations for the 2021 UN Food Systems Summit.

The COVID-19 pandemic has caused dramatic and unprecedented impacts on both global health and economies. Many governments are now proposing recovery packages to get back to normal, but the 2019 Intergovernmental Science-Policy Platform for Biodiversity and Ecosystem Services Global Assessment indicated that business as usual has created widespread...

This article analyzes the rise of precision technologies for agriculture—specifically digital farming and plant genome editing—and their implications for the politics of environmental sustainability in the agrifood sector. We map out opposing views in the emerging debate over the environmental aspects of these technologies: while proponents see the...

Corporations have gained enormous power and influence in recent decades as mergers and acquisitions in just about every sector of the global economy have given rise to mega-sized companies that influence almost every aspect of our lives. In this contribution, we examine the rise of corporate concentration and control in two key sectors – agricultur...

Current policies and programs to reduce consumer food waste are largely based on changing behaviours rather than addressing the underlying drivers of these behaviours. This article builds on previous structural approaches to understand underlying motivations of food waste-related behaviours. Our findings suggest that efforts to address food waste a...

Financial investment in the food and agriculture sector has grown in recent decades, including investment in equity-related funds that invest in or track the performance of a range of publicly traded transnational agrifood companies. At their height in recent years, equity-related investment funds accounted for around one third of financial investm...

SSRN link here: https://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=3338485

Zero-deforestation commitments are a type of voluntary sustainability initiative that companies adopt to signal their intention to reduce or eliminate deforestation associated with commodities that they produce, trade, and/or sell. Because each company defines its own zero-deforestation commitment goals and implementation mechanisms, commitment con...

The agricultural input industry has become more concentrated in the wake of recently announced corporate mergers in the sector. This article examines the environmental implications of corporate concentration in the agricultural input sector and outlines the challenges of establishing effective international policy and governance on this issue. The...

This special issue seeks to expand our understanding of the complex interlinkages between the politics and governance of the global environment, on one hand, and the global food system on the other. The articles in this issue explore insights that the field of global environmental politics can bring to questions of food system sustainability, while...

This article examines the rise of financialization in the agrifood sector and maps out both the way it has unfolded as well as its implications. The article argues that financialization has opened up new arenas for capital accumulation in the agrifood sector; reshaped the agrifood firms in ways that respond to demands of shareholders; and transform...

Now open access! https://practicalactionpublishing.com/book/2046/speculative-harvests In Speculative Harvests, Clapp and Isakson investigate the evolving relationship between the agrifood and financial sectors, paying particular attention to how the contemporary process of financialization is reshaping agrarian development and food systems. Unders...

The food and agriculture sector is both a major contributor to climate change and especially vulnerable to its worst impacts. This means that much is at stake in what is a complex set of contested political dynamics as new governance agendas are rolled out. On one hand, there is a strong push for ‘climate-smart agriculture’ (CSA) and related initia...

Agrifood corporations are driving industrialization along the entire global value chain, from farm to plate. Their purchasing and sales policies promote a form of agriculture that revolves around productivity. The fight for market share is achieved at the expense of the weakest links in the chain: farmers, and workers. The price pressure exerted by...

This contribution argues that the food sustainability agenda in global food governance arrangements is becoming ‘trade-ified’. It shows that international trade has become normalized in these settings not only as being compatible with, but also as a key delivery mechanism for, food system sustainability. The paper first explains the rationale for t...

This paper examines the recent rise of initiatives for responsible agricultural investment and provides a preliminary assessment of their likely success in curbing the ecological and social costs associated with the growth in private financial investment in the sector over the past decade. I argue that voluntary responsible investment initiatives f...

The contemporary process of financialization has been a major driver of the remarkable changes witnessed in global food and agricultural markets over the past decade, contributing to the rise and subsequent volatility of food and agricultural commodity prices since 2006. In the wake of these developments it has become clear that the turmoil has int...

Food self-sufficiency gained increased attention in a number of countries in the wake of the 2007–08 international food crisis, as countries sought to buffer themselves from volatility on world food markets. Food self-sufficiency is often presented in policy circles as the direct opposite of international trade in food, and is widely critiqued by e...

Big Food corporations have capitalized on nutritionism—the reduction of food’s nutritional value to its individual nutrients—as a means by which to enhance their power and position in global processed and packaged food markets. Drawing on the literatures on nutrition and corporate power, we show that Big Food companies have used nutritional positio...

In an Editorial now published in “Global Environmental Change”, 18 climate policy researchers argue that analyses of equity and justice are absolutely essential for our ability to understand climate politics and contribute to concrete efforts to achieve adequate, fair and enduring climate action for present and future generations. Climate change ac...

This forum article highlights three major research trends we have observed in the journal Global Environmental Politics since 2000. First, research has increasingly focused on specific and formal mechanisms of global environmental governance, contributing to more elaborate and refined methodologies that span more scales and levels of analysis. Seco...

Published in: journal of international law and international relations 11(2) 104-115

There is growing evidence and concern of the role of mainstream industrial agriculture in contributing to environmental degradation and global climate change. In this section we examine three different aspects of the relationship between agriculture, nature, and society.

There is growing concern about financialization in the food sector, which refers to the increasingly important role played by financial actors, markets, and motives in decisions along agrifood supply chains. Financial actors have long been intertwined in the agriculture and food sector, but their activities have intensified and have become more com...

There have been multiple and significant changes in the global food landscape when it comes to governance. The 2008 Global Food Crisis heightened attention to and action for food security; this is reflected in the expanding food security agenda across the United Nations system, the World Bank and the Group of Eight (G8) and Group of Twenty (G20) cl...

Transnational corporations are powerful agents on the global food landscape. They have been able to shift and adapt their activities in a global food economy that has been constantly in flux in recent decades, while at the same time shaping it in ways that serve their interests. The papers in this section highlight the strategies corporations have...

The idea of the human right to food as a legal framework to address inequalities in the global food system has become increasingly mainstreamed at the level of political discourse and public policy. Indeed, claiming the right to food on the part of individuals and collectives is now firmly entrenched in struggles for food security and food justice...

One of the key responses to the global food crisis that hit the headlines in 2008 was a significant change in land ownership in many countries as a result of large-scale land acquisitions carried out by governments, investors, and corporations. This global land grab, or what some refer to as agricultural investment, is leading to fundamental shifts...

Genetically modified crops have been a lightning rod in debates over the future of food and agriculture over the past two decades. The debate has sparked critical questions about the potential role for science in addressing hunger and in rural development. Corporate actors, with a strong interest in this debate, have actively sought to secure their...

Citizens in many countries are increasingly wary of the global industrial neoliberal food system. A number of food scares, growing awareness of human rights abuses in the countryside, a global food crisis, and climate change have all prompted many to form alternative food movements that are intent on building sustainable, just, safe and healthy foo...

The global food landscape is changing rapidly. In 2007–08 food prices soared and remained volatile in the following years, effectively leading to a world food crisis that drove tens of millions of people into poverty and hunger. A phenomenal increase in large-scale farmland acquisitions in developing countries by a range of investors is leaving lan...

The world food system has seen enormous change across a range of issue areas in recent years, as witnessed by the 2007–08 food crisis and subsequent period of volatility and uncertainty in a context of shifting ecological conditions. Closer examination of the specifics of those myriad changes first requires a step back to take stock of the broader...

The world of agricultural commodity trading firms has changed over the years, although corporate concentration has long been a defining feature of this sector. The four dominant agricultural trading firms—the ABCDs (ADM, Bunge, Cargill and Louis-Dreyfus)—have a long history dating back to the 1800s and early 1900s. First established as private, fam...

Few issues animate debate about the global food system as much as the role of international trade and, in particular, that of the World Trade Organization (WTO). Indeed, the WTO is a subject that polarizes debate among food scholars and activists. Some scholars see the WTO as imperfect but necessary to ensure a transparent and rule-based system to...

This symposium introduction brings together two debates; the debate on global food prices and speculation, and the debate on so-called global ‘land investment’ or ‘land grabbing’. Both debates are examining two sides of the same phenomenon – the growing role of private financial investors in the global agri-food value chains and the myriad conseque...

Food studies scholars have paid increasing attention to ‘financialization’ within the food system as private financial actors have played a growing role in various facets of the sector in recent years. While there has been much attention paid to the implications of the greater role for financial actors in the food system, there has been relatively...

This paper provides a new perspective on the political implications of intensified financialization in the global food system. There has been a growing recognition of the role of finance in the global food system, in particular the way in which financial markets have become a mode of accumulation for large transnational agribusiness players within...

The terms food security and food sovereignty originally emerged as separate terms to describe different things. The former is a concept that describes a condition regarding access to adequate food, while the latter is more explicitly a political agenda for how to address inadequate access to food and land rights. Over the past decade, the critical...

This paper examines the relationship between the development of the dominant industrial food system and its associated global economic drivers and the environmental sustainability of agricultural landscapes. It makes the case that the growth of the global industrial food system has encouraged increasingly complex forms of “distance” that separate f...

La performance du secteur agricole Guinéen depuis l'adoption d'un programme d'ajustement structural de l'économie de marché est mitigée. Ce papier, envisage diverses explications possibles. Il découvre que la perspective des "forces en faveur du marché" qui insiste sur la nécessité de l'effort des fermiers en vue d'améliorer au maximum leurs revenu...

This paper probes some of the global economic forces that have contributed to the oitgoing precarious global food security situation, especially in the years since the 2007 to 2008 food crisis. Since the crisis hit at a time when global food production per capita was rising, it is important that policies addressing hunger incorporate dimensions bey...

In this era of economic globalization, there has been remarkable growth in the volume and value of global trade, investment, and finance. These international economic relationships have important implications for the natural environment, as all have been identified as having some linkage to environmental quality. The extent to which these internati...

History holds important insights for political scientists concerned with contemporary international development issues. Michael E. Latham and Nick Cullather's recent historical accounts of US foreign policy toward developing countries provide excellent examples of the significance of understanding the past in order to interpret the present. Both bo...

When the G20 took up food security in 2010, many were optimistic that it could bring about positive change by addressing structural problems in commodity markets that were contributing to high and volatile food prices and exacerbating hunger. Its members could tighten the regulation of agricultural commodity futures markets, support multilateral tr...