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Food aid has become a contentious issue in recent decades, with sharp disagreements over genetically modified crops, agricultural subsidies, and ways of guaranteeing food security in the face of successive global food crises. In Hunger in the Balance, Jennifer Clapp provides a timely and comprehensive account of the contemporary politics of food aid, explaining the origins and outcomes of recent clashes between donor nations-and between donors and recipients.She identifies fundamental disputes between donors over "tied" food aid, which requires that food be sourced in the donor country, versus "untied" aid, which provides cash to purchase food closer to the source of hunger. These debates have been especially intense between the major food aid donors, particularly the European Union and the United States. Similarly, the EU's rejection of GMO agricultural imports has raised concerns among recipients about accepting GMO foodstuffs from the United States. For the several hundred million people who at present have little choice but to rely on food aid for their daily survival, Clapp concludes, the consequences of these political differences are profound.

The agricultural input industry has become more concentrated in the wake of recently announced corporate mergers in the sector. This article examines the environmental implications of corporate concentration in the agricultural input sector and outlines the challenges of establishing effective international policy and governance on this issue. The article makes two arguments. First, corporate concentration matters for food system sustainability. Consolidation in the global seed and agro-chemical industries has been deeply entwined with the rise of industrial agriculture, which has been associated with a host of environmental problems including an increase in agro-chemical use and the loss of agricultural biodiversity. Second, although corporate concentration has important sustainability implications, there is little recognition of the potential connection between these issues in international governance measures. The article outlines a number of factors that discourage the development of policy and governance on these issues, including the lack of a clear scientific consensus on how best to promote sustainable agriculture; the weak and fragmented nature of regulatory frameworks and institutions that oversee competition policy and food system sustainability; the power of agribusiness firms to influence policy outcomes; and the complex and distanced nature of the underlying drivers of corporate concentration in the sector.

© 2016 The Author. Published by Elsevier Ltd. This is an open access article under the CC BY-NC-ND license (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/4.0/). http://dx.doi.org/10.1016/j.foodpol.2016.12.001 ; Food self-sufficiency gained increased attention in a number of countries in the wake of the 2007–08 international food crisis, as countries sought to buffer themselves from volatility on world food markets. Food self-sufficiency is often presented in policy circles as the direct opposite of international trade in food, and is widely critiqued by economists as a misguided approach to food security that places political priorities ahead of economic efficiency. This paper takes a closer look at the concept of food self-sufficiency and makes the case that policy choice on this issue is far from a straightforward binary choice between the extremes of relying solely on homegrown food and a fully open trade policy for foodstuffs. It shows that in practice, food self-sufficiency is defined and measured in a number of different ways, and argues that a broader understanding of the concept opens up space for considering food self-sufficiency policy in relative terms, rather than as an either/or policy choice. Conceptualizing food self-sufficiency along a continuum may help to move the debate in a more productive direction, allowing for greater consideration of instances when the pursuit of policies to increase domestic food production may make sense both politically and economically. ; Research support for this article was provided by the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada || Pierre Elliott Trudeau Foundation.

History holds important insights for political scientists concerned with contemporary international development issues. Michael E. Latham and Nick Cullather's recent historical accounts of US foreign policy toward developing countries provide excellent examples of the significance of understanding the past in order to interpret the present. Both books highlight the ways in which strategic concerns of the US government during the Cold War shaped its international aid policies.