Hungry for Profit: The Agribusiness Threat to Farmers, Food, and the Environment

by Fred Magdoff (Editor), John Bellamy Foster (Editor), Frederick H. Buttel (Editor)

The agribusiness/food sector is the second most profitable industry in the United States ― following pharmaceuticals ― with annual sales over $400 billion. Contributing to its profitability are the breathtaking strides in biotechnology coupled with the growing concentration of ownership and control by food’s largest corporations. Everything, from decisions on which foods are produced, to how they are processed, distributed, and marketed is, remarkably, dictated by a select few giants wielding enormous power. More and more farmers are forced to adopt new technologies and strategies with consequences potentially harmful to the environment, our health, and the quality of our lives. The role played by trade institutions like the World Trade Organization, serves only to make matters worse.

Through it all, the paradox of capitalist agriculture ever-greater numbers remain hungry and malnourished despite an increase in world food supplies and the perpetuation of food overproduction.

Hungry for Profit presents a historical analysis and an incisive overview of the issues and debates surrounding the global commodification of agriculture. Contributors address the growing public concern over food safety and controversial developments in agricultural biotechnology including genetically engineered foods. Hungry for Profit also examines the extent to which our environmental, social, and economic problems are intertwined with the structure of global agriculture as it now exists.

Hungry for Profit demystifies the reasons why hunger proliferates in the midst of plenty and points the way toward sustainable solutions. Perhaps most important, it highlights the ways in which farmers, farmworkers, environmental and sustainable agriculture groups ― as well as consumers ― are engaged in the struggle to create a just and environmentally sound food system which, its editors argue, cannot be separated from a just and environmentally sound society.

Genres: Food, Environment

220 pages, Hardcover

First published September 1, 2000

About the author

Fred Magdoff is Emeritus Professor of Soils in the Department of Plant and Soil Science at the University of Vermont. He received his degrees from Oberlin College (BA) and from Cornell University (MS and PhD). Magdoff was Plant and Soil Science Department Chair for 8 years (1985-1993), a member of the National Small Farm Commission (1997-1999, USDA), and is the Coordinator in the 12-state Northeast Region for the U.S. Department of Agriculture's Sustainable Agriculture Research and Education Program. He is a Fellow of the American Society of Agronomy.

Magdoff's area of specialty is soil fertility and management. He has worked on problems of sodic and saline soils, acid soils, use of manures and sewage sludges, phosphorus soil tests, nutrient cycling, and he developed the first reliable soil test for nitrogen availability to corn for the humid regions of the U.S. This test, called the Pre-Sidedress Nitrate Test (PSNT) and the Spring or Late Spring Nitrate Test, is now used throughout much of the Northeast, Mid-Atlantic, and Midwestern states as well as in eastern Canada. It has also been adopted for use with a number of vegetable crops.

Magdoff has oriented his outreach activities to explaining how to apply ecological principles to agricultural production. His book, Building Soils for Better Crops (2000, Harold van Es, co-author), is an ecologically-based approach that explains how to work with and enhance the inherent built-in strengths of plant/soil systems. Magdoff is also interested in political and economic issues surrounding agriculture and was senior editor of Hungry for Profit: The Agribusiness Threat to Farmers, Food, and the Environment (2000, Monthly Review Press, NY).

Reviews

[Ana]

It's a series of academic papers on the agribusiness takeover of agriculture and how it affects food availability, quality, price, etc. The more interesting parts deal with potential future consequences of corporate "farming", biotechnology and global trade policies. First academic page-turner I've ever had the pleasure of stumbling across in an NC State professor's discard box.

[Dan Sharber · Rating 3 out of 5]

this book was just ok. as is somewhat common in a collection of essays, the book is a bit uneven. good overall but unless you are hardcore into environmental, farming, and food issues, there are better books to read about ecology etc.

[Greg Williams · Rating 5 out of 5]

Excellent set of essays, with global and longrange historical perspectives. Good essays on the historic centrality of the rise of capitalist agriculture, current growth of corporate power in agriculture, farm labor in the US, disposession of the peasantry overseas, recent developments in Cuba and China, among other things.

[Ietrio · Rating 1 out of 5]

The fallacious navel gazing of another individual who liked to bathe in the money taxed from the poor.

Otherwise the volume is a complete rehash of the Stalinist discourse: the kulaks who have to die or be emprisoned for the sin of not handinling the hoe just like the virtuous proletarians. And, helas! how sovkhozes will give food to everyone once the serfs will apply the five year plan.

[Thomas Ray]

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