represented through voices who take issue with problems connected to various obstacles that stand in the way of achieving these efforts. Scholars and activists such as Clapp and Fuchs have devoted much of their careers to investigating the multivariate causes of the growth of agrifood corporations and the ways in which global governance has evolved over time. The emergence of what might be called cutthroat capitalism that privileges the wealthy to the detriment of the poor has in many ways intensified problems for impoverished nations as well as specific sectors of society such as those working in agriculture. For scholars such as Clapp and Fuchs, we address the issue of the corporate food system and its in- fluence on both the public and private sector. Clapp’s work incisively examines the intricacy of how corporate food businesses have immense influence on the process. She writes, Fundamental changes have taken place in food systems around the world over the past century. We now have a globally integrated food system that affects all regions of the world. Clapp continues to write, The international governance of the food system is geared toward providing some degree of regulation to put in place safeguards from potential negative socioeconomic and ecological consequences of a globalized food system.5 Most importantly, the authors state that “at the same time, these corpo- rations play a key role in the establishment of the very rules that seek to govern their activities.”6 To return to another iteration of “food security,” we read, The World Food Summit of 1996 set as a target the halving of the number of undernourished people in the world by 2015. This goal was also adopted by the Millennium Summit in 2000. The progress made so far towards meeting this target was reviewed at the “World Food Summit Five Years Later” conference in Rome in June 2002. The latest analysis by FAO indicated that if current trends at the national and international levels continue, it is unlikely that this target will be met.7 As noted in one of the first iterations of the concept of food security, we see that the original World Food Summit as well as the Millennium Sum- mit had ambitious goals. While the Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO) originally admitted that the target goals would not be met, this does not mean that the summit’s goals were misguided, rather that they were just too difficult to achieve. As we proceed with this book, we will see that many of the themes of food sovereignty, while not necessarily Globalization, Development, Food Security 3
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