Conventional farming destroys the complex soil ecosystem and ultimately the soil itself, so the risk of not changing it is too great. (Free book available for download)
Author Focus
Archive | Food and Farming
Reading matters
Ecosocialist Bookshelf, April 2018
Six new books for reds and greens … climate change and disease … capitalist power and the planet’s future … brain, body, and environment … oceanic art and science … essential fungi and life … the political economy of water.
Low-impact fishers demand
Electrical pulse fishing: Switch it off now!
Will the EU ban technology that electro-shocks fish into nets before bottom-dwelling fish in the North Sea are driven to extinction?
Reading, red and green
Ecosocialist Bookshelf, February 2018
Five important books on famines and world hunger, on Ebola and other deadly epidemics that spread from animals to people, and on the pesticide poisons in our food.
Agadir Declaration
ATTAC: For food sovereignty, against ‘free trade’ agreements
“The so called free trade agreements are new colonial agreements that serve the interests of multinationals, favouring the pillage of lands, indigenous peoples’ communal areas, their water resources, their fish and their food”
Food sovereignty
Who will feed a changing world — industrial agriculture or peasant food webs?
Industrial agriculture uses 75% of farm land but delivers only 30% of the world’s food. Peasant farmers feed 70% of the world’s people using just 25% of the land
Jena Experiment
Major study shows species loss destroys essential ecosystems
Long term research by German ecologists proves that loss of biodiversity has “direct, unpleasant consequences for mankind.”
Food sovereignty now!
At global climate talks, La Via Campesina calls for peasant agroecology
“Our call for system change is urgent because the damage is growing. Commons, including land, forests and water, must be protected and restored to the people. We need to work together with our allies to be prepared for climate change.”
Book Review
Sustainable agriculture versus corporate greed
Fred Magdoff reviews a new book in which Australian activists explain what’s wrong with corporate profit-centred agriculture and propose a manifesto for a people-centred alternative.
Thoughts on wild strawberries
What we sow is what we eat
The failure of modern food production derives from the nature of our economic system, which considers everything and everyone a commodity. It doesn’t have to be this way.
Agriculture in crisis
Growing food in the post-truth era
Agribusiness giants cause food insecurity and environmental degradation, while promoting the myth that industrial agriculture can feed the world better than small-scale, family farms.
An 1862 eco-critique
Les Misérables: Metabolic rift in the sewers of Paris
Victor Hugo’s masterpiece includes a powerful attack on the urban wastefulness that steals nutrients from the land. Like Marx and Engels, he based his critique on the work of the chemist Justus von Liebig.
Capitalism and pathogens
Ten Theses on Farming and Disease
The corporate business model helps pathogens and pests to spread across the world. The only way to stop the next deadly pandemic is to end capitalist agribusiness as we know it.
Book Review
Dead Zone: Where the Wild Things Were
Martin Empson reviews an important book for activists, a frightening examination of the impact of industrial agriculture on the environment, and particularly biodiversity.
Humanitarian crisis
Famine looms as millions go hungry in East Africa
Failed harvests, disease, deteriorating water and pasture conditions, and animal deaths mean 12 million need food aid now, and the situation is fast deteriorating
Movement Building
Food Sovereignty: A Strategy for Environmental Justice
Food sovereignty offers a strategy for social mobilization that confronts rural disintegration while addressing environmental crises.
Interview
Hannah Holleman on environmental justice and ecological imperialism
“The pace and scale of ecological degradation we confront today is unfathomable without understanding the legacy and persistent realities of ecological imperialism.”
New books
Ecosocialist Bookshelf, August 2016
Five new books for green lefts and left greens. Cuban science fiction … the birth of the Anthropocene … agribusiness and disease … surviving catastrophe … rising seas … private plunder of public assets.
Marxist Ecology
Colonialism, Racism and the Global Dust Bowl of the 1930s
An important new paper challenges prevalent conceptions of the Dust Bowl, in which colonial and racial-domination aspects of the crisis are invisible, and affirms the necessity of deeper conceptions of environmental (in)justice.
Farming in crisis
Millions face drought and famine in Southern Africa
Worst drought in 35 years causes crop failures, widespread malnutrition in 10 countries. More than 640,000 drought-related livestock deaths have been reported due to lack of pasture, lack of water and disease outbreaks.