The Promise of New Agricultural Markets: Addressing Contemporary Challenges in Domestic and International Agricultural Policy

This book explores the nature of challenges facing agriculture, emphasizing the need to rethink how markets are organized in food production. Describing markets as institutions, Anthony Pahnke investigates the meaning and nature of the dynamic overlap of politics with production. He explores how past policies in the US and Europe concerning food production can be updated to meet the various challenges that stakeholders face on both sides of the Atlantic, such as racial inequity, ongoing deterioration of economic conditions for farmers and workers, and environmental devastation. He also addresses the theorists of degrowth and socialist markets, focusing particularly on the economics and politics of food production, circulation, and distribution. In response, Pahnke proposes democratizing and internationalizing supply management, a system of production quotas for producers, import controls, and institutions meant to connect the different players in supply chains. He sketches the framework for such changes and shows how the political shifts currently taking place in Europe and the United States make these changes feasible. The Promise of New Agricultural Markets provides thoughtful and hopeful answers for policymakers, researchers, and activists to difficult questions about what the future of our food system will hold.

Anthony Pahnke is Associate Professor of International Relations at San Francisco State University. He is the author of Brazil’s Long Revolution: Radical Achievements of the Landless Workers Movement (2018) and Agrarian Crisis in the United States: Pathways for Reform (2023).