Globalization and Agriculture

The creation of the Bretton Woods institutions following the war laid the foundations for the current era of globalization. This latest phase christened “globalization” in the mid-1980s when it became evident that the unprecedented advances in information technology coupled with the decline in transaction costs and resultant rapid international flows of capital, labor, and technology had made the world a much smaller and qualitatively different place. According researchers, what distinguishes this current phase of globalization from the earlier “partial” ones is the rapid incorporation of most of the developing and post-communist countries—the so-called “new globalizes” or “emerging market economies”—into the global economic system. The speed and intensity of global integration has provoked fierce debates about the consequences, implications, and future trajectory of globalization. Drawing on a vast and growing body of research, the following sections elucidate the complexity of the phenomenon called globalization.

These analysts agree that the current process of global economic integration driven fundamentally by dramatic cross-border trade and capital and investment flows. International trade has seen a 16-fold expansion over the past 50 years. Foreign direct investment and capital flows totaling around $160 billion in 1991 soared to over $1.1 trillion in 2000 and accelerated to $2 trillion in 2005 (World Bank, 2002, 2006), while cross-border capital flows—including debt, portfolio equity, and direct investment-based financing—topped $6 trillion in 2005. These huge volumes of funds can move instantaneously across countries. Today, almost all national economies, integrated into a single global marketplace through trade, finance, production networks, and a dense web of international treaties and institutions Mare, 11).

Although Fair Trade is generally considered to have emerged at the end of World War II, more recent scholarship has suggested that in some countries, such as the United Kingdom, the movement only really began in the 1970s. Irrespective of the time ...