Trade rules are the architecture of an unequal and extractive food system. We need an overhaul of our laws, regulations and multilateral institutions to produce new blueprints, which subordinate trade to food security and phase out dysfunctional global commodity chains. Let’s start by winding down the World Trade Organization (WTO) Agreement on Agriculture and bringing civil society to the negotiating table.1
Industrial agri-food giants exert outsized control over production, distribution and trade policy. Break up huge conglomerates, whose net-worth is bigger than the GDPs of many countries in Africa, with anti-trust legislation.. Cut subsidies to input-intensive commodity agriculture and industrial fishing, bring in new tax agreements and remove pro-agribusiness investor dispute clauses from trade deals. Make famine, malnutrition and hunger – at heart, political choices – into crimes that are punishable at the International Criminal Court.2
