The article introduces the Forum on Commercializing Agriculture/Reorganizing Gender, which reports findings from DEMETER project, a collaboration of scholars from Cambodia, Ghana and Switzerland. The project examines how agriculture and food security policies have advanced or hindered gender equality and the right to food; analyzes the role of human rights-based accountability mechanisms in this; and maps gendered changes in livelihoods in situated contexts. We offer a literature review on governance of the international food system from a gender and rights perspective, and on the gendered political economy of agrarian change. We relate the contributions of the Forum to existing literature and preview their findings.