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The Water Business
Corporations Versus People
Ann-Christin Sjolander Holland
Privatization of water supplies began in England in 1989 under Margaret Thatcher; in the next 10 years, nearly £10 billion went in profits to the new water companies. Today, two giant corporations, Veolia and Suez, control 80% of the international private water market and have some 300 million customers. Protests have broken out in country after country and the water giants are switching to new markets in China, North America and Europe. Meanwhile well over a billion people still lack access… (more information)
The Global Food Economy
The Battle for the Future of Farming
Tony Weis
The modern food industry is a paradox: surplus “food mountains” sit alongside global malnutrition; the developed world subsidized its own agriculture while pressurizing the developing to liberalize at any cost; and an increasingly aggressive export competition is accompanied by a growing reliance on imports in many countries. The WTO’s uneven application of neoliberal economics to food production is relatively new, and the consequences of mounting deficits, rising “food miles… (more information)
Stolen Fruit
The Tropical Commodities Disaster
Peter Robbins
Many countries in the South have been encouraged to grow coffee, sugar, cotton and other crops, but small farmers get only a tiny share of the final price of these commodities in the North. As prices collapse, the terms of trade between North and South have widened. This investigation, by one of the leading authorities on commodity trading, analyzes the current trading arrangements and their disastrous effect on foreign exchange earnings, tax revenues and economic growth in developing countries.… (more information)
Recipes for Success
A Celebration of Food Security Work in Canada
Edited by Anna Maria Kirbyson
Recipes for Success is a review and celebration of the unfolding story of the food security movement in Canada. Food banks and the growth in food security initiatives are a community-based response to a growing food crisis in our country. This book is a place to take stock of the breadth and depth of food security activity in Canada and to recognize the role we all play in responding to social needs. (more information)
La Vía Campesina
Globalization and the Power of Peasants
Annette Aurélie Desmarais
In 1993, 46 farm leaders from various countries met in Mons, Belgium, determined to develop a strategy to challenge the devastation caused to their communities by a neoliberal international economic agenda. Over the next decade they and millions of peasants and small-scale farmers around the world used La Vía Campesina to forge a powerful and radical force of opposition. Where did they find the capacity and strength to challenge multinational agribusiness corporations and international institutions… (more information)
Food Sovereignty in Canada
Creating Just and Sustainable Food Systems
Edited by Annette Aurélie Desmarais, Nettie Wiebe, Hannah Wittman
Contemporary Canadian agricultural and food policies are contributing to the current global food crisis: the industrialized, high-input, export-driven agricultural production sector, coupled with concentrated corporate processing and retailing, are ecologically unsustainable, increasingly unaffordable, unhealthy and socially unjust. Employing an interdisciplinary and multi-sectoral approach, Food Sovereignty in Canada explores how communities all over the country are actively engaged in implementing… (more information)
Food Sovereignty
Reconnecting Food, Nature and Community
Edited by Annette Aurélie Desmarais, Nettie Wiebe, Hannah Wittman
Advocating a practical, radical change to the way much of our food system currently operates, this book argues that food sovereignty is the means to achieving a system that will provide for the food needs of all people while respecting the principles of environmental sustainability, local empowerment and agrarian citizenship. The current high input, industrialized, market-driven food system fails on all these counts. The UN-endorsed goal of food security is becoming increasingly distant as indicated… (more information)
Food is Different
Why we Must Get the WTO out of Agriculture
Peter M. Rosset
This book explains what is happening to the world’s agricultural systems and farmers under the impact of neoliberal economics. What is at stake is the very future of our global food system and each country’s agricultural and farming systems. The livelihoods of rural people in both industrial and developing countries are under threat. The book explains what is happening to agriculture in the World Trade Organisation (WTO) negotiating context, and unravels the complex ways in which agriculture… (more information)
Edible Action
Food Activism and Alternative Economics
Sally Miller
Hunger is up, obesity is up, food-borne illness is up, farms are lost to debt and despair; the food system fails growing numbers of people across the world every day. Yet if we adjust our lens, we see ubiquitous commitments to change: food movements and enterprises dedicated to making the world a better place to eat and to live. Food initiatives—from farmers’ markets to fair trade coffee—offer a pattern of powerful alternatives to conventional food economics, which benefit only… (more information)
Cultivating Utopia
Organic Farmers in a Conventional Landscape
Kregg Hetherington
This study begins with the questions “what draws people to become organic farmers?” and “why do so many leave farming in short order?” Organic farmers speak of a “wake-up call” or a moment, usually several years after buying and moving onto a farm, in which they question what they are doing and why. By most reports, most organic farmers then quit the field, or at least quit trying to farm commercially. The book examines what causes this wake-up call. One central… (more information)
Class Dynamics of Agrarian Change
Henry Bernstein
Agrarian political economy investigates the social relations of production and reproduction, property and power in agrarian formations, and how they change. Using Marx’s theory of capitalism the book argues that class dynamics should be the starting point of any analysis of agrarian change. As an introduction to agrarian political economy, this book includes explanations and applications of its key concepts, a glossary of analytical terms, and a historical approach and framework for examining… (more information)