Anne Saab, Review of Matias E. Margulis, Shadow Negotiators: How UN Organizations Shape the Rules of World Trade for Food Security
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Globalization has made the world highly interdependent, and this applies unequivocally to food and agriculture.The first World Food Conference was held in 1974, and it defined food security as the 'availability at all times of adequate world supplies of basic food-stuffs'. 1 The focus was on the global availability of food and food security.At the 1996 World Food Summit, the definition of food security included not only availability of but also 'physical and economic access' to food. 2 The rules of the World Trade Organization (WTO) have become central in regulating the physical and economic access to food at the global level, and the WTO plays a key role in global food security policies.Whereas food and agriculture had previously been considered different from other industries, with the creation of the WTO and especially the Agreement on Agriculture in 1995, agriculture became a principal subject of global trade. 3 Matias Margulis in his book Shadow Negotiators: How UN Organizations Shape the Rules of World Trade for Food Security challenges the perception of the WTO's unequivocal domination on shaping global food security policies.Margulis demonstrates convincingly that several United Nations (UN) organizations -namely, the Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO), the World Food Programme (WFP), the Office of the High Commissioner for Human Rights (OHCHR) and the special rapporteur on the right to food (SRRTF) -regularly intervene in WTO decision-making when such an organization 'expects that an anticipated decision at [the WTO] will have negative consequences for the goals it has been charged by the international community to uphold' (at 10).Margulis is an international relations scholar with a particular interest and expertise in food governance.He also has extensive experience in international policymaking, having worked as a Canadian representative to the WTO, the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development and the FAO.Margulis has moreover served as an advisor to the UN SRRTF.This combination of his academic research and policy experience gives him unique skills, connections and insights that have proved enormously valuable for this book.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame distilled prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.
Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.002 | 0.001 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one teacher head, not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".