Recipe for disaster: The IMF and World Bank's role in the financialisation of food and agriculture
Past and present World Bank and IMF policies have provided key support for the financialisation of food and agriculture. This has resulted in land-grabs, exposure of small-holder farmers to high price volatility, the concentration of power in agriculture business and the expansion of climate-damaging industrial agriculture.
In Recipe for disaster: The IMF and World Bank's role in the financialisation of food and agriculture, written for the Bretton Woods Project Spring Observer 2020, SID's policy researcher, Flora Sonkin, discusses how the process of financialisation has profoundly affected food systems in recent decades, as financial actors and markets;expanded their role in society and across all sectors of the economy.
The Bretton Woods Project's Observer is a quarterly critical review of developments at the World Bank and IMF.
Rising inequalities between the global North and South, the economically privileged and the marginalized, between different genders and racial identities, have been historically reproduced and intensified across generations, and are defining features of our times.