Speculative Harvests now available as open access text

[Jennifer Clapp]

Dear Gep-Ed folks,

Just sharing around the notice that my book with Ryan Isakson on financialization in the food system has been recently republished as an open access text, in case it is of interest to anyone on the list.

Best wishes,

Jennifer

 

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Speculative Harvests by Jennifer Clapp and Ryan Isakson has been republished in 2021 in Open Access ebook edition! Download your free copy here.

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. Understood as the growing prevalence of financial actors, markets, motives and profits in an economy, financialization is a defining feature of modern-day capitalism that is reconfiguring the distribution of wealth and economic power in a variety of contexts across the globe. In a clear and accessible manner, Clapp and Isakson explain the character and ramifications of these changes for the world food economy and systematically detail how different elements of agrifood provisioning — including commodity trading, farmland tenure, the management of agricultural risk, and food trading, processing, and retailing — have been reconfigured for financial purposes. Clapp and Isakson highlight the importance of confronting the financialization of food and agriculture, identify the challenges of conventional approaches to food system reform and consider innovative alternatives. Speculative Harvests is essential reading for food scholars and activists who not only seek a better understanding of the problems inherent to the contemporary food system but also are also in search of effective interventions towards its positive transformation.

This book is a must-read account of the power and pernicious impact of the financialization of agriculture and food, and how this relates to the food on your plate. – Annette Aurélie Desmarais, University of Manitoba

Speculative Harvests is essential reading about financial infiltration and reorganization of the contours, objectives and outcomes of the contemporary agri-food order, to the detriment of social and ecological goals. – Phillip McMichael, Cornell University

Financialization in general, and speculation on food markets in particular, have generally escaped scrutiny, largely because the public was poorly equipped to understand what their implications were and how they could be addressed. In fact, the only ‘experts’ parliaments and regulators could consult on how to tackle these phenomena have generally come from the financial services industry itself, and their ‘solutions’ have been those preferred by the banks and investment funds. Jennifer Clapp and Ryan Isakson therefore not only provide a remarkably clear exposition of a complex topic, they are also serving democracy. – Olivier De Schutter, former UN Special Rapporteur on the right to food (2008–2014)

 

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Jennifer Clapp

Professor and Canada Research Chair
School of Environment, Resources and Sustainability

University of Waterloo

200 University Ave West

Waterloo, ON N2L 1K2

CANADA

 

Member, Steering Committee of the High Level Panel of Experts on Food Security and Nutrition (UN Committee on World Food Security) http://www.fao.org/cfs/cfs-hlpe/en/

Member, International Panel of Experts on Sustainable Food Systems (IPES-Food) http://www.ipes-food.org/