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

Magdoff, Fred; Tokar, Brian

Softcover

ISBN 10: 1583672265 ISBN 13: 9781583672266

Publisher: Monthly Review Press, 2010

Synopsis

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.

About this title

About the Author:

Fred Magdoff taught at the University of Vermont in Burlington, is a director of the Monthly Review Foundation, and has written on political economy for many years. He is most recently the author (with John Bellamy Foster) of The Great Financial Crisis: Causes and Consequences (Monthly Review Press).

Review:

“A strong and timely collection . . . a compelling, historically oriented survey of the political economy of the state-supported corporate takeover of world food production.”

-Current Anthropology

About this edition

• Publisher: Monthly Review Press
• Publication date: 2010
• ISBN 10: 1583672265
• ISBN 13: 9781583672266
• Binding: Paperback
• Number of pages: 288