The Long History of Food Globalization

Kym Anderson

Chapter Chapter 3 in Agricultural Trade, Policy Reforms, and Global Food Security, 2016, pp 39-60 from Palgrave Macmillan

Abstract: Abstract Long-distance agricultural trade has contributed to global economic growth and poverty reduction for millennia, but only in recent centuries via international trade in major foods. Its predominant contribution in earlier periods was through trade in crop seeds or cuttings, breeding animals, and farm production technologies. Since 1800, the ever-lowering cost of international commerce gradually allowed trade in farm outputs in raw or processed form. That has led to the prices of farm and other products converging across countries and indeed continents and, hence, to relative factor prices also converging. But trade restrictions at national borders have limited trade between relatively lightly populated economies that are well-endowed with agricultural land and those that are densely populated—as have sectoral and exchange rate policies.

Keywords: Comparative Advantage; World Trade Organization; Trade Cost; Much Favored Nation; Agricultural Trade (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2016
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Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:pal:psachp:978-1-137-46925-0_3

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DOI: 10.1057/978-1-137-46925-0_3

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