Philip McMichael grew up in Adelaide, South Australia, and is an International Professor of Development Sociology at Cornell University. His book Settlers and The Agrarian Question: Foundations of Capitalism in Colonial Australia (Cambridge University Press, (c)1984) won the 1995 Social Science History Association's Allan Sharlin Memorial Award. He has also edited The Global Restructuring of Agro-Food Systems (Cornell University Press, (c)1994), Food and Agrarian Orders in the World Economy (Praeger, (c)1995), New Directions in the Sociology of Global Development (Emerald, (c)2005), and Contesting Development: Critical Struggles for Social Change (Routledge, (c)2010). He has served as Director of Cornell University's International Political Economy Program, as Chair of the American Sociological Association's Political Economy of the World-System Section, and President of the Research Committee on the Sociology of Agriculture and Food for the International Sociological Association. And he has recently worked with the FAO, IATP and UNRISD, the International Planning Committee for Food Sovereignty, and the international peasant coalition, La Via Campesina.