Posts Tagged ‘industrial agriculture’
Unpacking the Word “Peasant”
Today is the International Day of Peasant Struggle. We dedicate this article to the many agrarian movements we work with and are inspired by, in their fight for food sovereignty around the world. * * * When we refer to “the global food system”, we tend to picture an elaborate and complex supply chain that…
Read MoreThe Well is Running Dry on Irrigated Agriculture
Too much rain, but not enough water. That’s the title of a recent article about the massive rainstorms that hit California last December. The US state got a lot of badly needed rain, but, as pointed out in the article, this was nowhere near enough to save it from the severe drought the region is…
Read MoreGetting out of the food-energy-climate crisis
On 11 October 2022, the International Monetary Fund’s head of research, Pierre-Olivier Gourinchas, warned that today’s high energy prices were not going away any time soon. The “energy crisis”, he cautioned, “is not a transitory shock”. The same could be said for what he called the “food crisis”. As Gourinchas noted, today’s high prices for…
Read MoreAn agribusiness greenwashing glossary
The global food system is broken. It is responsible for a third of global greenhouse gas emissions, and it is the leading driver behind the collapse of the world’s biodiversity. Meanwhile, 1 in 10 people around the world go to bed hungry, while hundreds of millions more suffer from diabetes, obesity, cancers and other health…
Read MoreCan small-scale farmers feed the world?
One of the things I wondered about a lot during my first months of work in the food system was productivity. Growing up in a Minority World country, practically all of my food came from large-scale, industrial farms. As a result, I – like many others – believed for a long time that industrial agriculture…
Read MoreOf George Monbiot, mathematical modernism and the case for agrarian localism
When you read a book with which you profoundly disagree, I guess it’s usually best just to shrug, put it back on the shelf and get on with your work. The hatchet job review is a popular but ignoble genre. Having been the object of one myself I can attest the outcomes are rarely positive,…
Read MoreLurching from Food Crisis to Food Crisis
When will those occupying spaces of ‘power’ ever get the message right? As the world faces a worsening food crisis – the third in 15 years, experts say – one would think that a convening of so many governments as we saw at the “Uniting for global food security” conference in Berlin in late June…
Read MoreThe Radical Roots of Community Supported Agriculture
Community-Supported Agriculture (CSA) is one of those rare ideas which combine transformative potential with an elegant simplicity. The CSA model of funding and sustaining locally-rooted agriculture has grown exponentially around the globe over the past four decades. Since the first formal CSA at Robyn Van En’s Indian Line Farm in South Egremont, Massachusetts in the…
Read MoreBig farms don’t feed the world
A controversy has erupted over who feeds the world. It has been general accepted knowledge that small-scale farmers, fisherfolk and pastoralists feed the vast majority of the people on earth. This was recognized by the UN Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO) and many other international agencies. But now the FAO has come up with a…
Read MoreThe World’s Food Systems are in Crisis: Big Agribusiness is to Blame
In 2017, the people of Zagora, Morocco, took to the streets in what became known as the ‘thirst revolution’. They were demanding safe drinking water and an end to the excessive use of water by big agricultural companies. In an already arid area experiencing frequent droughts and heatwaves due to climate change, much of the…
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