Authors: Fred Magdoff (Editor), John Bellamy Foster, Frederick Buttel
ISBN-13: 9781583670163, ISBN-10: 1583670165
Format: Paperback
Publisher: Monthly Review Press
Date Published: September 2000
Edition: (Non-applicable)
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 editor of Monthly Review. He is professor of sociology at the University of Oregon and author of Naked Imperialism, Ecology Against Capitalism, Marx's Ecology, and The Vulnerable Planet.
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).
Millions go hungry every year in both poor and rich nations, yet hundreds of thousands of peasants and farmers continue to be pushed off the land. Applied in increasing volumes, chemical pesticides and synthetic fertilizers deplete the soil, pollute our food and water, and leave crops more vulnerable to pest outbreaks. The new and expanding use of genetically engineered seeds threatens species diversity.
This penetrating set of essays 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, and in time and place from early modern Europe to contemporary Cuba, the contributions to Hungry for Profit examine the changes underway in world agriculture today and point the way toward organic, sustainable solutions to problems of food supply.
An Overview | 7 | |
1 | The Agrarian Origins of Capitalism | 23 |
2 | Liebig, Marx, and the Depletion of Soil Fertility: Relevance for Today's Agriculture | 43 |
3 | Concentration of Ownership and Control in Agriculture | 61 |
4 | Ecological Impacts of Industrial Agriculture and the Possibilities for Truly Sustainable Farming | 77 |
5 | The Maturing of Capitalist Agriculture: Farmer as Proletarian | 93 |
6 | New Agricultural Biotechnologies: The Struggle for Democratic Choice | 107 |
7 | Global Food Politics | 125 |
8 | The Great Global Enclosure of our Times: Peasants and the Agrarian Question at the End of the Twentieth Century | 145 |
9 | Organizing U.S. Farm Workers: A Continuous Struggle | 161 |
10 | Rebuilding Local Food Systems from the Grassroots Up | 175 |
11 | Want Amid Plenty: From Hunger to Inequality | 189 |
12 | Cuba: A Successful Case Study of Sustainable Agriculture | 203 |
13 | The Importance of Land Reform in the Reconstruction of China | 215 |
Appendix | 231 | |
Contributors | 235 | |
Index | 239 |