There is growing popular fear over possible pesticide contamination of food and the microbiological safety of the food supply. This work explains why corporate agribusiness is a rising threat to farmers, the environment, and consumers. Ranging in subject from the politics of hunger to the new agricultural biotechnologies, the book addresses the reasons for the expansion of hunger despite the increase of world food supplies, and points the way toward organic, sustainable solutions to the problems of food supply and distribution.
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). John Bellamy Foster is an editor of Monthly Review and a professor of sociology at the University of Oregon. His previous books on ecology include: The Vulnerable Planet, Marx's Ecology, Hungry for Profit (edited with Fred Magdoff and Frederick Buttel), Ecology Against Capitalism, The Ecological Revolution, The Ecological Rift (with Brett Clark and Richard York), What Every Environmentalist Needs to Know About Capitalism (with Fred Magdoff), Marx and the Earth (with Paul Burkett), and The Robbery of Nature (with Brett Clark). Frederick Buttel is Professor of Rural Sociology and Environmental Studies at the University of Wisconsin-Madison and the author or editor of several books, including Environment and Modernity (1999).
The agrarian origins of capitalism, Ellen Meiksins Wood; Liebig, Marx, and the depletion of soil fertility - relevance for today's agriculture, John Bellamy Foster, Fred Magdoff; agriculture and monopoly capital, William D. Heffernan; ecological impacts of industrial agriculture and the possibilities for sustainable farming, Miguel A. Altiery; the maturing of capitalist agriculture - farmer as proletarian, R.C. Lewontin; new agricultural biotechnologies - the struggle for democratic choice, Gerard Middendorf et al; global food politics, Philip McMichael; rebuilding local food systems from the grassroots up, Elizabeth Henderson; want amid plenty - from hunger to inequality, Janet Poppendieck, alternative agriculture works - the case of Cuba, Peter M. Rosset; the importance of land reform in the reconstruction of China, Willima Hinton; the great global enclosure of our times - peasants and the agrarian question at the beginning of the 21st century; farmworkers in the United States - from unionization to immigration, Linda C. Majka, Theo J. Majka
