Advancing Food Integrity: GMO Regulation, Agroecology, and Urban Agriculture

by Gabriela Steier

Overview

Key features:

Presents summaries of key points after each chapter and includes color graphs to visualize the big-picture concepts

Demonstrates how urban rooftop farms (URFs) can contribute to city greening and climate change mitigation worldwide while providing fresh locally-sourced produce for growing urban populations

Provides cutting-edge ideas from the the emerging field of food law and places international and comparative legal concepts into an accessible context for non-lawyers

Examines major disputes surrounding food products that have been brought before the World Trade Organization (WTO) to illustrate how trade trends have pushed toward GMO proliferation

Uses examples of food labeling, pollinator protection, pesticide permitting, invasive species control, and GMO regulatory policy in the US and the EU to illustrate various methods of bringing public law to the forefront in the struggle toward achieving food integrity

The proliferation of Genetically Modified Organisms (GMOs) in our increasingly globalized food system is trivializing the inherent risks to a sustainable world. Responding to the realities of climate change, urbanization, and a GMO-dominated industrialized food system, Gabriela Steier's seminal work addresses the interrelationship of these cutting-edge topics within a scholarly, legal context. In Advancing Food Integrity: GMO Regulation, Agroecology, and Urban Agriculture, Steier defines food integrity as the optimal measure of environmental sustainability and climate change resilience combined with food safety, security, and sovereignty for the farm-to-fork production and distribution of any food product.

The book starts with a discussion of the food system and explores whether private law has sufficiently protected food or whether public law control is needed to safeguard food integrity. It proceeds to show how the proliferation of GMOs creates food insecurity by denying people’s access to food through food system centralization. Steier discusses how current industrial agricultural policy downplays the dangers of GMO monocultures to crop diversity and biodiversity, thereby weakening food production systems.

Striving to promote agroecology by providing a fresh and compelling narrative of interdisciplinary questions, Steier explores how farming can be geared toward more sustainable and environmentally friendly practices worldwide in the future. This book belongs in the libraries of all those interested in food law, environmental law, agroecology, sustainable agriculture, and urban living practices.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9781351395540
Publisher:	CRC Press
Publication date:	11/28/2017
Sold by:	Barnes & Noble
Format:	eBook
Pages:	250
File size:	11 MB
Note:	This product may take a few minutes to download.

About the Author

Gabriela Steier is co-founder of Food Law International (FLI) and editor of the textbooks International Food Law and Policy and International Farm Animal, Wildlife & Food Safety Law. She is a barred attorney and focuses on food safety, food law and policy, animal welfare and issues involving sustainable agriculture domestically and in the European Union. Gabriela has lectured on these topics and continues her research. She joined the Duquesne University School of Law in 2015 as an adjunct professor teaching a breakthrough new course, Food Law and Policy. She holds a B.A. from Tufts University, a J.D. from Duquesne University and is pursuing a doctorate in comparative law at the University of Cologne in Germany. Gabriela has published widely on international food law, policy and trade and has earned several awards for her work. As an experienced scholar and editor, and with her numerous publications ranging from peer-reviewed articles in international medical journals to law reviews, Gabriela has gained wide-spread interdisciplinary interest and some of her articles have been on the top ten list on SSRN for several months.

Table of Contents

Introduction: GMOs versus Agroecology. Looking over One's Shoulder: The Comparativist Method to Seek Solutions. Food Dependence: GMOs Fail to Feed the World. Agrobiodiversity: Contextualizing GMO Regulation. The Regulation of GMOs in International Trade. EU–US disputes over GMOs and the WTO biotech cases. Drawing Conclusions and the Path Forward.

Editorial Reviews

"Advancing Food Integrity" provides a comprehensive and analytical overview of the contemporary challenges faced by the government, industry, and civil society in an increasingly globalized world troubled with issues of climate change, urbanization, scientific advancement, and food security and safety. It offers not only a scholarly account to map such systematic, cutting-edge food integrity problems, but also optimal and innovative ways to solve them. This fascinating and timely book will be of great interest to researchers and practitioners of food law, environmental law, and agriculture and sustainability.

Ching-Fu Lin, Assistant Professor of Law at National Tsing Hua University (NTHU)

There are provocative and controversial ideas in this book, chief among them, the very concept of food integrity and the role of GMOs. Whether or not you agree, this book deserves your attention. The food system is inherently provocative, inherently controversial, because food, the environment, human and animal wellbeing are at the same time essential and complex, evading easy answers at every turn. This book will expose you to perspectives that will help you navigate this intricate system.

Joshua Ulan Galperin, Yale University

Gabriella Steier covers the issues of food safety, food sovereignty, food security, environmental sustainability and climate change in relation to GMOs from the perspective of a well-versed Food Lawyer, in order to demonstrate where private, public and international are at fault. Her approach gives new insights to the divide between the USA and the EU food regulatory regimes whether over hormone-raised beef, chlorinated chicken or GMOs. These food regulatory issues were one of the main reasons why the EU-US TTIP negotiations failed last year. This book is pertinent at this time in order to highlight the need for a more systematic look at why private, public and international

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