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

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.

In 2008 global food prices began to skyrocket, doubling in cost from 2007. This event has become a continuing trend and has caused increased hunger and uprisings in the developing world. Why did this happen? This collection of essays edited by Magdoff (emeritus U. of Vermont) et al. investigates the conduct of big business food production and points the finger of blame at corporate mono-crops. Huge corporations like Monsanto have been changing the way humans conduct agriculture. This fact, in conjunction with a number of other factors like the developing world's increase in protein consumption, has caused this global crisis. This important volume exposes the damaging nature of our current "free market" approach to agriculture. Annotation ©2011 Book News, Inc., Portland, OR (booknews.com)

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).

Brian Tokar is a long-time activist and author, and current director of the Institute for Social Ecology based in Plainfield, Vermont. He is the author of The Green Alternative and Earth for Sale and lectures widely on a variety of environmental and political topics.