García-Salmones: Food Security and International Organisations: Why Not Global? Why Not Now?

Mónica García-Salmones (Univ. of Helsinki - Law) has posted Food Security and International Organisations: Why Not Global? Why Not Now? (in Cambridge Companion to International Organisations Law, Jan Klabbers ed., forthcoming). Here's the abstract:

This article reviews the history and legacy of the nutrition approach in the law of International Organisations. The first promoters of international organisations working with food security shared the realist insight that food was a fundamental commodity in national and international economies. Therefore, they understood that the goal of greater distribution of food required massive structural economic reforms and truly global collaboration, starting with trade relations. Their nutrition approach was fundamentally a movement for free trade, advocating a single world economy and a single international organisation devoted to the economy, combined with the wish to secure a certain structural hierarchy among countries, articulated in turn as a programme for the (gradual) development of poorer economies. Their political realism was apparent in their wish for a hierarchical organisation of countries; and their utopianism in the idea that this hierarchy would eventually disappear. The nutrition approach also entailed a vision for a common economy and for growing political unity among countries, either on a regional or global basis, although sovereign nations resisted it and it never materialised. The failure to establish an international organisation with authority to adopt economic decisions for the world with regard to food security has cemented the position of private international corporations as free riders, contributing to precariousness.