Agriculture and Food in Crisis

Conflict, Resistance and Renewal

Fred Magdoff, Brian Tokar

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 indispensable guide to the years ahead, in which world politics will no doubt come to be increasingly understood as food politic
 

Contents

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

PART ONE: UNDERSTANDING THE AGRIFOOD CRISIS
1. Food Wars
Walden Bello and Mara Baviera

2. The World Food Crisis in Historical Perspective
Philip McMichael

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

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

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

6. Biofuels and the Global Food Crisis
Brian Tokar

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

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

PART TWO: RESISTANCE AND RENEWAL
9. The Battle for Sustainable Agriculture in Paraguay
April Howard

10. Fixing our Global Food System: Food Sovereignty and Redistributive Land Reform
Peter Rosset

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

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

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

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

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

16. Can Ecological Agriculture Feed Nine Billion People?
Jules Pretty

About the Authors
Notes
Index
 

About the Authors

Fred Magdoff is professor emeritus of plant and soil science at the University of Vermont. His most recent books include Agriculture and Food in Crisis (edited with Brian Tokar), The ABCs of the Economic Crisis (with Michael Yates), and The Great Financial Crisis (with John Bellamy Foster).

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 Toward Climate Justice, The Green Alternative, and Earth for Sale and lectures widely on a variety of environmental and political topics.