World Food Policy • Vol. 3, No. 2 / Vol. 4, No. 1 • Fall 2016 / Spring 2017
Editorial Note
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n this second issue, partly from the international conference “Future Faces of
Food and Farming; Regional Challenges, World Food Policy (WFP) covers
articles on topics ranging from food policy challenges in integrating food and
nutrition security to food policy-related matters on aquaculture, dairy value chain,
land policies and geographical indications system.
Tremendous changes both in food policy and in food systems are here con-
sidered in three articles. Two of them provide us with case studies in the red river
delta in Viet Nam: while Van Huong et al. analyze the present changes in food sys-
tem affected by rapidly developing freshwater aquaculture in a province of the Red
River Delta, Nguyen et al.—based on the case study of Ba-Vi district, a “milkshed”,
analyze the transition from state-owned concentrated production to smallholder
farms. In the case of Thailand as a middle income, globalized, food-exporting na-
tion, Kelly et al. consider Thai enmeshment in the global food trade and impacts
on food and nutrition security for farmers and urban consumers.
Food policy-related matters are illustrated by two articles. Regarding geo-
graphical indications, Marie-Vivien and Vagneron analyze the challenges faced
in building an efficient yet appropriate system of controls in four Southeast Asian
countries—Thailand, Vietnam, Cambodia, and Laos. Regarding Land policy, Pe-
tit’s ethnographic case studies in Laos illustrate how the state has become an in-
escapable mediator between people and land, transforming the social fabric and
reshaping people’s agency.
While the majority of articles in this issue cover Asia, Lallau’s article looks
to West Africa and discusses the notion of resilience as fashionable notion, its rel-
evance to the Sahelian context, and the way policies may “operationalize” it.
WFP will continue under a multi-disciplinary approach to welcome re-
search-based papers on food-related topics as well as those policies with notice-
able impact on the world food sector. Its scope also remains to include compara-
tive national food policies as well as issues pertaining to food policy at the global,
regional and transnational levels.
A subsequent issue will bring to you papers selected from the 2017 interna-
tional conference on world food policy, where the main theme is agricultural and
food policy transformation. In the meantime, the materials on the conference has
been made available on the WFP website.
Véronique Ancey
CIRAD, UMR ART-DEV, Montpellier, France, currently FAO, 00153 Roma, Italy
Keokam Kraisoraphong
Chulalongkorn University, Bangkok; Thailand
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doi: 10.18278/wfp.3.2.4.1.1