The Oxford Farming Conference which is held in the first week of January each year in the UK provides an opportunity for UK farming leaders to discuss the ‘big issues’ affecting the industry. This year, the Conference commissioned a report Power in Agriculture from the Scottish Agricultural College to examine the dynamics and implications of global agricultural power.
The purpose of the report was to examine where the economic, political and natural resource power currently lies in world agriculture, how that might change in the future, and what it means for British farmers. But the approach and findings clearly have a broader interest.
Sources of global agricultural power
The report raises three intriguing questions. What do we mean by global agricultural power? Why might it be important? And how can we measure it?
Power can be defined as the ability to persuade, compel or influence other actors to do something which benefits the actor or country exercising power.… Read the rest