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
Food sovereignty
Archive | Food and Farming
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.
Movie Review
Is there a vast cowspiracy about climate change?
Cowspiracy’s argument is based on badly flawed and almost unanimously rejected interpretations of science. Actual science and scientists are hard to find among the many talking heads in the film.
Book Review
Why changing our diets won’t save the Earth
Received wisdom says that to save the planet we have to change our eating habits. Elaine Graham-Leigh explains why the received wisdom isn’t just wrong, it blames working people for a crisis they didn’t cause.
Via Campesina
Food sovereignty and climate change
Industrial agriculture is grounded in the use of fossil fuel and high energy consumption. Campesino agriculture with an agro-ecological basis is the only force capable of achieving food sovereignty and responding to climate change.
Too Many People?
Population and food sovereignty: An exchange
Ian Angus replies to a reader. If ‘overpopulation’ is not a primary cause of global environmental problems, what about island nations with limited space and resources?
Book Review
Fishers and plunderers: The tragedy of the commodity
Overfishing, pollution and warming water have pushed the world’s oceans into crisis. If nothing is done the results will be catastrophic for marine systems and the billions of humans who rely on them. To stop this destruction our society has to be organized in a completely different way.