In Wendy Brown's brilliant book, "States of injury," she reserves her harshest criticisms against the left for abandoning the call for "freedom" in their struggles. Cowed by the anti-statism of the right proclaiming an ethnocentric and jingoistic "free" society, the left turned on the concept, emptying it of power and action.

Geoff Tansey is a freelance writer and broadcaster who has been working on food, agriculture and development issues since the mid-1970s.

http://www.tansey.org.uk/

The WTO was getting too high profile, too conspicuous for transnational corporations to do business there. So corporations had two options: stop working through nation states and invest instead in private regulatory regimes, or else begin bilateral trade deals. I don't have much to add to the excellent work that the folks at the Global Justice Ecology Project are doing. So here's an excerpt from a recent report by Aziz Choundry:

From Seattle to Doha, Cancun to Hong Kong, and all points in between, World Trade Organization (WTO) negotiations have failed to deliver as much as many of the corporations and governments which dominate the world’s economy want. So the US and a number of other governments, urged on by their big business lobbies, have increasingly turned to bilateral free trade and investment agreements. These negotiations are much less visible and can easily slip beneath the radar of NGOs and popular movements that oppose the WTO. The business coalitions that are the biggest driving force behind bilateral free trade and investment negotiations are quite open about their self-interest, and eager to keep upping the stakes and locking governments into ever tougher standards to ensure expanded profit margins and monopoly control. Through bilateral agreements, they seek to stitch up from below what they have been unable to achieve – so far - at the WTO.

Harriet Friedmann Lecture at the Havens Centre for the Study of Social Structure and Social Change

Wednesday October 11 2006 http://www.havenscenter.org/VSP/2006fall/friedmann/friedmann.html

Harriet Friedmann is Professor of Sociology and Fellow of the Centre for International Studies, University of Toronto. Her research over thirty years has explored many aspects of food and agriculture, mainly through the historical framework of “food regimes.” These include the structure of family farms, international political economy of food and agriculture, agricultural policy from local to national, regional and international, changing patterns of trade and specialization, diasporic cuisines, agronomies and food practices, and international trade rivalries and institutions. Her current research is on the politics of certification and standards both globally and locally. Globally, how do new institutions and practices use “quality” standards to contest the restructuring of transnational and local agrofood relations? Locally, how can we understand creativity in local food networks and institutions, particularly in Toronto? She was recently a Fellow of the Agrarian Studies Program at Yale University, of All Souls College Oxford, and the Rockefeller Centre in Bellagio, Italy.