Agriculture and Food in Crisis: Conflict, Resistance, and Renewal

by Fred Magdoff, Brian Tokar

Overview

The failures of “free-market” capitalism are perhaps nowhere more evident than in the production and distribution of food. Although modern human societies have attained unprecedented levels of wealth, a significant amount of the world’s population continues to suffer from hunger or food insecurity on a daily basis. In Agriculture and Food in Crisis, Fred Magdoff and Brian Tokar have assembled an exceptional collection of scholars from around the world to explore this frightening long-term trend in food production. While approaching the issue from many angles, the contributors to this volume share a focus on investigating how agricultural production is shaped by a system that is oriented around the creation of profit above all else, with food as nothing but an afterthought.
As the authors make clear, it is technically possible to feed to world’s people, but it is not possible to do so as long as capitalism exists. Toward that end, they examine what can be, and is being, done to create a human-centered and ecologically sound system of food production, from sustainable agriculture and organic farming on a large scale to movements for radical land reform and national food sovereignty. This book will serve as an indispensible guide to the years ahead, in which world politics will no doubt come to be increasingly understood as food politics.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9781583672273
Publisher:	Monthly Review Press
Publication date:	11/01/2010
Pages:	288
Product dimensions:	5.80(w) x 8.30(h) x 1.10(d)

About the Author

Fred Magdoff taught at the University of Vermont in Burlington, is a director of the Monthly Review Foundation, and has written on political economy for many years. He is most recently the author (with John Bellamy Foster) of The Great Financial Crisis: Causes and Consequences (Monthly Review Press).

Brian Tokar is a long-time activist and author, and current director of the Institute for Social Ecology based in Plainfield, Vermont. He is the author of The Green Alternative and Earth for Sale and lectures widely on a variety of environmental and political topics.

Table of Contents

Agriculture and Food in Crisis: An Overview Fred Magdoff Brian Tokar 9

Part 1 Understanding the Agrifood Crisis 31

1 Food Wars Walden Bello Mara Baviera 33

2 The World Food Crisis in Historical Perspective Philip McMichael 51

3 Sub-Saharan Africa's Vanishing Peasantries and the Specter of a Global Food Crisis Deborah Fahy Bryceson 69

4 Origins of the Food Crisis in India and Developing Countries Utsa Patnaik 85

5 Free Trade in Agriculture: A Bad Idea Whose Time is Done Sophia Murphy 103

6 Biofuels and the Global Food Crisis Brian Tokar 121

7 The New Farm Owners: Corporate Investors and the Control of Overseas Farmland Grain 139

8 The Globalization of Agribusiness and Developing World Food Systems John Wilkinson 155

Part 2 Resistance and Renewal 173

9 The Battle for Sustainable Agriculture in Paraguay April Howard 173

10 Fixing Our Global Food System: Food Sovereignty and Redistributive Land Reform Peter Rosset 189

11 From Food Crisis to Food Sovereignty: The Challenge of Social Movements Eric Holt-Giménez 207

12 Do Increased Energy Costs Offer Opportunities for a New Agriculture? Frederick Kirschenmann 225

13 Reducing Energy Inputs in the Agricultural Production System David Pimentel 241

14 Agroecology, Small Farms, and Food Sovereignty Miguel A. Altieri 253

15 The Venezuelan Effort to Build a New Food and Agriculture System Christina Schiavoni William Camacaro 267

16 Can Ecological Agriculture Feed Nine Billion People? Fules Pretty 283

About the Authors 299

Notes 303

Index 335

What People are Saying About This

From the Publisher

“A strong and timely collection . . . a compelling, historically oriented survey of the political economy of the state-supported corporate takeover of world food production.”

-Current Anthropology

Editorial Reviews

"A strong and timely collection . . . a compelling, historically oriented survey of the political economy of the state-supported corporate takeover of world food production."

Current Anthropology

A strong and timely collection . . . a compelling, historically oriented survey of the political economy of the state-supported corporate takeover of world food production.”

-Current Anthropology

From the Publisher