| Date | Time | Location |
|---|---|---|
| Friday, March 15, 2013 | 4:00PM - 6:00PM | Seminar Room 208N, Munk School of Global Affairs 1 Devonshire Place |
Through an ethnographic study of agricultural producers, traders, and policymakers in West Bengal, this article examines the role of law in market transformation and, more specifically, the kinds of legal and regulatory shifts that occur when food markets are rescaled from local or regional to national or transnational regimes. It compares wholesale markets for fresh fruits and vegetables with the food supply chains created by rapidly globalizing corporate supermarkets, and it suggests that existing market transactions in West Bengal more closely approximate competitive exchange than the standardized, centralized, large-scale contractual transactions required to support a supermarket. The article thus argues that what we are presently witnessing in India is not, as policy analysts describe it, a shift from state-regulated to privately-governed food supply chains, but rather an effort to reallocate power in a marketplace mediated by new legal and extralegal rules.
Amy J. Cohen is an associate professor at the Ohio State University Moritz College of Law. Her scholarship examines dispute resolution and economic and social development, often from a transnational perspective. Professor Cohen has been a Visiting Professor at the University of Turin, Faculty of Law, the Kathmandu School of Law, and a Fulbright-Nehru Visiting Professor at the West Bengal National University of Juridical Sciences. At Ohio State, she is affiliated faculty at the Mershon Center for International Security Studies and the Food Innovation Center. She is a magna cum laude graduate of Harvard Law School where she was a Hewlett Fellow in the Program on Negotiation.
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