This advanced level textbook offers students an engaging platform to understand the economic impact of agricultural policies on global food markets. Rather than focus on specific policies in separate chapters, it is organized by the most pressing and emerging issues facing global food markets and uses these issues to motivate an analysis of how policies are used to influence prices, production, consumption, and trade of food products.


The book provides a more stimulating, relevant and modern approach for today's students interested in food policy and food markets from an international perspective and allows readers to conceptualize more generic agricultural policies with analysis that can then be used to study a wide range of issues and problems around the world. Thus topics such as obesity, food waste, biofuels and climate change are the focal point of chapters, rather than policies themselves.


The emphasis is on the economic analysis of policies addressing each of the major issues and their impacts on producers, consumers and taxpayers, but little background in economics is assumed. Up to date methodologies are used with empirical examples, some of which are elaborated further on a Companion Website.