Anti-meat campaigns ignore the essential role that grazing animals play in genuinely sustainable agriculture. Livestock production must be reformed, but eliminating it would do more harm than good.
Sustainable farming needs livestock
Archive | Food and Farming
Agroecology and the fight against deadly capitalist agriculture
Agroecology can free farmers from dependency, manipulated commodity markets, unfair subsidies and inherent food insecurity. It is resisted by giant corporations that profit from the status quo.
Capitalism fouls things up
What the Monsanto Papers tell us about corporate science
Internal documents released in a lawsuit by cancer victims show how the chemical giant actively subverts science to promote its products and profits.
Book Review
Hugo Blanco on the indigenous struggle for land in Peru
“I have taken the term ‘Indian’ as the title of the book. It is the pejorative term used against us. The whip they use to hit our faces. I have picked up the whip. I find it more appropriate than using terms that soften or diminish the oppression.”—Hugo Blanco
Resilience
Project Life: Cuba’s action plan prepares for climate change
As an island nation, Cuba is particularly vulnerable to climate change. Project Life (Tarea Vida), now being implemented across the country, aims to increase the country’s resilience and minimize future damage
Author Focus
Sustainable Food Systems: An interview with Robert Biel
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)
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