Sugar and the Making of International Trade Law

Abstract

This book traces the changing meanings of free trade over the past century through three sugar treaties and their concomitant institutions. The 1902 Brussels Convention is an example of how free trade buttressed the British Empire. The 1937 International Sugar Agreement is a story of how a group of Cubans renegotiated their state's colonial relationship with the US through free trade doctrine and the League of Nations. And the study of the 1977 International Sugar Agreement maps the world of international trade law through a plethora of institutions such as the ITO, UNCTAD, GATT and international commodity agreements - all against the backdrop of competing Third World agendas. Through a legal study of free trade ideas, interests and institutions, this book highlights how the line between the state and market, domestic and international, and public and private is always a matter of contest.

Phantasmal commodities: law, violence and the juris-diction of drugs

“…65 Drugs contain within themselves the same world-making histories that can be read in the turning of the sugar cane plant or the coffee leaf into a tradable goods to be sold across borders. 66 But what the histories of coca, opium or marijuana also open up is what Benjamin would describe as the phantasmagoria of such commodity fetishism, the ability for the products we consume to upturn our perceptions and experiences of everyday life. Following Benjamin and Taussig, we come to suspect that only those who were attentive to the phantasmal nature of commodities, like proponent of opium use Charles Baudelaire, could adequately portray the experience of high capitalism.…”

Constitutional Theories of International Organisations: Beyond the West

“…147 Moreover, the complete relegation of the welfare task to the nation States did not work for at least three reasons: First, already in the immediate post World War II world, the goals of full employment and social stability could not have been approximated without the international organisations and bodies such as the ILO, the ECOSOC, the projected International Trade Organisation and later UNCTAD, and the international commodity agreements with their managing bodies. 148 Second, many States (mostly the global South) were not able to create social security programmes for their populations. Third, when the political preferences of the Northern States changed in a "neo-laissez faire direction", 149 they were no longer willing to cushion the social hardships created by trade liberalisation.…”

Food Safety and Contract Edamame: The Geopolitics of the Vegetable Trade in East Asia

“…He argues that the earliest free trade agreement—the 1902 Brussels Convention on sugar—helped to buttress the power of the British Empire over global trade. Today, contract farming is commonly aligned with the state‐territorial system to legitimize the consensual standards of food production under the WTO agricultural regulations (such as the quota system, Codex Alimentarius, and TRIPS) (Fakhri ). As such, contract farming can simultaneously be seen as an international food trade agreement and as a key mechanism for capitalist states to utilize modern knowledge and discourse in the territorialization of nature (Parenti ).…”