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

by Brian Tokar (Editor), Fred Magdoff (Editor)

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.

Genres: Agriculture, Food, Nonfiction, Science

288 pages, Paperback

First published January 1, 2010

About the author

Brian Tokar is an activist and author, Lecturer in Environmental Studies at the University of Vermont, and a board member of 350Vermont and the Institute for Social Ecology. He is the author of The Green Alternative, Earth for Sale, and Toward Climate Justice: Perspectives on the Climate Crisis and Social Change (Revised edition, 2014). He is an editor of the 2010 book, Agriculture and Food in Crisis (with Fred Magdoff), and also edited two collections on biotechnology and GMOs: Redesigning Life? and Gene Traders. Tokar is a contributor to the Routledge Handbook of the Climate Change Movement, A Line in the Tar Sands, and other recent books. His articles on environmental issues and popular movements appear in Z Magazine and in web-based publications and sites such as CommonDreams, Counterpunch, ZNet, Popular Resistance, New Compass, Toward Freedom, and Green Social Thought. He has lectured across the US and internationally on social ecology and the links between environmental and social movements.

Reviews

[Tinea · Rating 5 out of 5]

OK, finally, this is the book I will be pushing on my friends and passing off after inquiries into "What do you do?" or "why?" It covers an explanation the financial and food crises and a historical overview of how peasant agriculture got all tied up in the global trade and finance systems; some pointed case studies on issue like land reform and biofuels; and most importantly, a serious inquiry into social movements for food sovereignty and the science of agro-ecology as practical, effective, and accessible solutions to these problems.

Thorough but not as overloaded and overwhelming as Food Rebellions. More agriculture, agro-ecology, and respect for farmer-led movements than The New Famines. More advocacy, urgency, and caustic critique than Food Policy for Developing Countries.

An anthology filled with the important voices doing this work, including Eric Holt-Gimenez, Via Campesina's biggest stateside solidarity advocate, Miguel Altieri, the father of agro-ecological science, Philip McMichael, the ... wellok, I kind of don't care about McMichael because he doesn't really ever say new stuff, but what he does say, is funny and tight, and I'm sure a bunch of authors whose names I am hoping to come to know and will seek out based on their contribution here. Particularly, Peter Rosset, April Howard, Christina Schiavoni and Willaim Camacaro.

The case studies by the latter three authors are important narratives that need to be mainstreamed-- especially the work of Venezuela to develop an independent, food secure state. Venezuela, Cuba, and Bolivia (and maybe, hopefully, Mali and other African nations soon) are the stories we as a human species need to be hearing, engaging with, critiquing, and building off. These countries' commitments to food sovereignty and agro-ecology are experimental and mired with inequalities and scientific and social flaws, but they and the work of movements like Via Campesina, PELUM, farmer field schools, and MST detailed in Holt-Gimenez's chapter are the crucial first steps toward a just world in which every person on earth can actually eat, can grow food if they choose to and have access to land on which to do it.

It is a serious problem, an urgent present-day famine and total ecological collapse kind of problem, that these flawed frameworks for food justice are the only examples of large-scale positive change extant in the world. Can we please collectively move to engage these dynamics instead of continuing to pursue neoliberal, industrial, plantation agriculture? Please? Writing about food I can say all the most dire melodramatic shit and still be factually correct, so yeah. Let's do this stuff.