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Although still experiencing significant levels of hunger and malnutrition, India has recently taken historic measures to improve food security, namely through the expansion of domestic food assistance programs. Under the Obama Administration, the U.S. has prioritized improving global food security and promoting agriculture development within the foreign policy agenda. President Obama has helped to lead the international community in reviving funding and attention to these issues. Yet, the U.S. has opposed the Indian food security program in negotiations at the World Trade Organization (WTO) by rejecting India’s proposals to shield the program from possible WTO enforcement. The disagreement came to a head in the WTO Ministerial Conference in Bali, Indonesia in December 2013 and more recently at a senior-level WTO meeting in July 2014 where negotiations collapsed. The conflict is emblematic of disjointed policy debates and development theories around food security, agriculture, and trade.

China’s opening to the world and economic reforms began in 1978 and resulted in remarkable economic growth. Food transition then occurred for part of Chinese citizens, meaning more meat consumption and less grain consumption. Many factors explained this transition. As China’s economy grew rapidly, peoples’ average income have been rising and cities have been growing at a rapid pace. Foreign investments in retail also have played a major role. But some gaps remain throughout the country: income inequality between rural and urban, between people living on the coast and in-land people, among generations. . . Food transition is not over yet for an important part of the Chinese population. China was able to feed its population until the beginning of the 21st century. But the imports of soybean and milk products have widened its food trade deficit since 2004. The crisis that has been affecting the global economy for the past 4 years might force the Chinese authorities to boost home consumption to be able to maintain the economic growth. This move would mean more imports and might have big consequences on food international trade in the years to come.

Durante o Segundo Reinado, a regulamentação e a fiscalização do comércio de gêneros na cidade do Rio de Janeiro foram marcadas por intensos conflitos envolvendo a Câmara Municipal, a Secretaria de Polícia e a Junta Central de Higiene, cujas atribuições se sobrepunham no tocante a essa questão. O artigo analisa os enfrentamentos entre esses órgãos, considerando as confusões de competências e as disputas de autoridade e enfatizando o esforço da instituição camarária em manter suas antigas atribuições quanto à saúde pública, aspecto fundamental para a preservação de sua capacidade de intervenção governativa.During the Second Reign, the regulation and inspection of food trade in the city of Rio de Janeiro were characterized by heated clashes between three agencies that had overlapping powers in the matter: the Câmara Municipal (Municipal Chambers), the Secretaria de Polícia (Police Department), and the Junta Central de Higiene Pública (Central Public Hygiene Board). The article analyzes the conflicts between these agencies, while taking into account their coincidental duties and power disputes and also underscoring the Chamber's effort to preserve its former public health responsibilities, essential to protecting its governmental capacities.

The article analyses the short term and structural causes of the explosion and collapse of agricultural prices. It exempts China and India and underlines the U.S. and EU responsibilities: agrofuels, financial speculation, lower ending stocks of cereals, their food trade deficit and the EU deficit in cereal trade in 2007-08. The article reminds the structural mechanisms having undermined the agricultural economies of developing countries, victims of food riots, following the progressive liberalization of agricultural trade.

How to explain the recent developments in the prices of agricultural raw materials? This article tries to trace the chronology of events and identify the mechanisms by which factors of change in agricultural prices act. From this analysis of temporal and causal effects an important lesson emerges, namely the difficulty if not the impossibility to isolate the responsibility of a particular determinant, even more to quantify it. Hence also the need to develop the economic analysis of agricultural prices, of their trends and determinants, including through the use of quantitative structural models, i.e., models that explicitly derived suplly and demand functions from behaviours of private and public actors.

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In a context of rising food insecurity and undermining of food policies in Brazil, large-scale retailers continue to grow and are capturing a larger proportion of market share. The article reviews these recent trends and then proposes a characterization of the dynamics of mass distribution of food in two national metropolises, Rio de Janeiro and Brasilia, important consumption centers and hotbeds of the breakthrough of multinational retail groups. These case studies shed light on the profiles of the main groups involved, their localization strategies and marketing segmentation related to the socio-economic characteristics of the population, and food and nutrition security.