The theme for this year’s African Green Revolution Forum (AGRF) to be held in Nairobi from September 6-10 is ‘Pathways to Recovery and Resilient Food Systems’. Yet 15 years after its convener, the Alliance for a Green Revolution in Africa […]
Why we are boycotting the UN Food Systems Summit
In September this year, the United Nations will host a Global Food Systems Summit in New York. The organisers of this summit are pitching it as a crucial debate of the decade which is to define the future of agriculture. […]
Bill Gates has radical plans to change our food. What’s on the menu?
If Bill Gates has his way, the food in our future will little resemble what’s on our plates today. Gates and his agribusiness industry partners are proposing to transform our food and how it is produced. To the techno-food industrialists, […]
Why is the Food Systems Summit silent on corporate land grabs?
Peasant movements in Asia marked March 29 as the Day of the Landless. The day pays tribute to the founding of the Asia Peasant Coalition (APC). About 15-million strong, the APC was established in 2003 by more than 20 organizations […]
Net zero and ‘nature-based’ solutions: corporate greenwashing
Corporations are, without a doubt, the number one obstacle to meaningful action on the climate crisis. These almighty actors have spent the past two decades undermining scientific consensus, blocking meaningful legislation and greenwashing their own responsibility. Even the last ditch […]
Co-opting Regenerative Agriculture
There’s one skill that Big Food and Big Ag corporations have in abundance: taking control of every situation and corrupting it into an opportunity for profit. For example, as consumer interest in the terms “natural” and “sustainable” increased, industrial agribusiness […]
The changing nature of milk
When I was a child, my Dad and I had regular arguments about whose turn it was to have the “top of the milk” – that thick yellow head of cream on the daily pint that we both coveted for […]
How the World Bank helped re-establish colonial plantations
In October 2020, a group of 79 Kenyans filed a lawsuit in a UK court against one of the world’s largest plantation companies, Camelia Plc. They say the company is responsible for the killings, rapes and other abuses that its […]
Making the Case for a Small Farm Future
For a good stretch of the last 20 years, I’ve tried as best I can to be a small-scale farmer. The results have varied from the worthwhile to the hapless, always constrained by a world geared to treating the efforts […]
How Industrial Food Makes Us More Vulnerable to COVID-19
When I finished working on my book, “Formerly Known As Food: How the Industrial Food System is Changing Our Minds, Bodies, and Culture,” in 2018 — after 10 years of research and writing — I was certain of two things: […]