This volume explores agricultural commercialization from a gender equality and right to food perspective. Agricultural commercialization, involving not only the shift to selling crops and buying inputs but also the commodification of land and labour, has always been controversial. Strategies for commercialization have often reinforced and exacerbated inequalities, been blind to gender differences and given rise to violations of the human rights to food, land, work and social security. While there is a body of evidence to trace these developments globally, impacts vary considerably in local contexts. This book systematically considers these dynamics in two countries, Cambodia and Ghana. Profoundly different in terms of their history and location, they provide the basis for fruitful comparisons because they both transitioned to democracy in the early 1990s, made agricultural development a priority, and adopted orthodox policies of commercialization to develop the sector. Chapters illustrate how commercialization processes are gendered, highlighting distinctive gender, ethnic and class dynamics in rural Ghana and Cambodia and the different outcomes these generate. They also show the ways in which food cultures are changing and the often-problematic impact of these changes on the safety and quality of food. Specific policies and legal norms are examined, with chapters addressing the development and implementation of frameworks on the right to food and land administration. Overall, the volume brings into relief multiple dimensions shaping the outcomes of processes of commercialization, including gender orders, food cultures, policy translation, national and sub-national policies, corporate investments and programmes, and formal and informal legal norms. In doing so, it offers insight not only on our case countries, but also provides proposals to advance rights-based research on food security. This book will be of great interest to students and scholars of food security, agricultural development and economics, gender, human rights and sustainable development.

Human Rights Tectonics: Global Dynamics of Integration and Fragmentation is a collaborative effort of internationally renowned human rights experts to analyse the effectiveness of legal protection in a highly fragmented and multi-layered human rights system.Bringing together international, European and national perspectives and focusing on select subject areas such as non-discrimination, accommodation of cultural identity and socio-economic rights, the book examines the difficulties faced by human rights lawyers in their day-to-day work. Through the implementation of a methodology applying both theoretical inquiry and case study examples, the book analyses the impact of the fragmentation of international and regional human rights and how this can cause failures in effective legal protection or, on certain occasions, strengthen it. The imagery of plate tectonics aims to portray the extent to which human rights law is in perpetual construction and constant renewal with lines of convergence and divergence. Entangled into battles, shocks, jolts or clashes, human rights find themselves today 'on trial'. Against this backdrop, the book addresses the case for an increased integration of human rights law, comprehensively and critically, with a focus on concrete and contemporary issues.