The Guardian, Wednesday 8 June 2011
Food security should indeed be a priority. But your preferred solution – to regulate the global food trade – is too conventional (Editorial, 1 June). The World Trade Organisation has been trying to rewrite the rules of that game for a decade, without success.

So a radically different solution is emerging in both the developing and developed worlds – to circumvent rather than reform international commodity markets. Key initiatives by poor food-importing countries include: raising domestic food production targets to at least meet minimum nutritional needs; conserving national supplies by stopping speculators from exporting in times of scarcity; negotiating preferential bilateral food supply agreements with food-exporting nations; increasing food reserves, for both emergency feeding and speculation control; and improving the nutritional quality of staple foods.

Rich importing nations seek the same end by different means. The "land grabs", whose exploitative terms you rightly condemn, are also effectively bilateral production-and-trade deals that try to guarantee food supplies outside volatile commodity markets.

Taken together, these initiatives by poor and rich alike point to a different system of global food trade. It may not suffice. But it is an understandable and realistic response to the repeated failures of the great and the good to regulate international financial speculation, in commodities or anything else.

Professor Jack Winkler

London Metropolitan University