Sécurité alimentaire internationale et pluralisme juridique mondial

Food security exists'when all people, at all times, have physical and economic access to sufficient, safe and nutritious food to meet their dietary needs and food preferences for an active and healthy life'(World Food Summit, 1996). Basic decisions about food supply security and food safety today are made by many sites of governance. These sites include States, international organizations, regional organizations such as the EU, international standards bodies, transnational companies, non-governmental organizations and numerous dispersed networks. Each site has its own institutions, norms, dispute resolution processes and relations with other sites. Taken together, these sites of governance constitute a new form of global legal pluralism.

Food crises since the 1980s showed that strategic actors use the normative framework and institutional resources of global legal pluralism for their own purposes. While leading to new conceptions of food security, they also revealed fundamental disagreements about how to combat hunger, how to assess, manage or communicate food risks, or even the meaning of 'safe' food. They also show that law, including international law, often tolerates or encourages food supply insecurity and unsafe food. The essays in this book examine the connection between specific sites of governance and international food security and the development of legal strategies about food in the framework of global legal pluralism. They deal with the WTO Agreement on Agriculture, ideas about food security and the right to adequate food developed by United Nations bodies, EC development policy and the environment in African, Caribbean and Pacific (ACP) countries, public and private regulation of pesticides in the fruit and vegetable sector, the WTO and food sovereignty, EU negotiating strategies for the Biosafety Protocol, the impact of the WTO Hormones case and Euro-American conflicts about food standards in the Codex Alimentarius. They demonstrate why international food security and global legal pluralism are so important and so controversial. This bilingual volume contains revised versions of selected papers originally presented at the 2^nd International Workshop for Young Scholars (WISH) / 2^e Rencontre Internationale des Jeunes Chercheurs (RIJC), on the subject of 'Food Security in Europe and in the World'. Held in Aix-en-Provence on 26-27 September 2002, the 2^nd WISH was organized by the European Law Journal and the Centre d'Études et de Recherches Internationales et Communautaires (CERIC-CNRS-UMR 6201) of the Faculté de Droit et de Science Politique of the Université d'Aix-Marseille III. The purpose of the Workshop, as of the 1^st WISH held in 2001, was to bring together the best young scholars from the Member States of the European Union, candidate countries and other countries such as China and the United States to discuss the topic of food security in Europe and in the world. This book is the fruit of their work.