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industrial agriculture

CLIMATE CRISIS

The Avocados of Wrath

7th May 2023

Per capita consumption of avocados has kept on growing in the importing countries, driven by intense marketing campaigns promoting the nutritional benefits of this food. GRAIN reports on how the industrial agribusiness model exploits small- and medium-sized growers, forces them to take on all the risk and also bear the burden of environmental externalities. Meanwhile, big agribusiness companies and their investors are largely shielded from the public health and environmental impacts.

Bookshelf

Big Farms make Big Flu: The deadly connection between industrial farming and pandemics

17th March 2020

From Climate and Capitalism: Evolutionary biologist Rob Wallace explains the tight links between new viruses, the epidemiologically dangerous methods of industrial food production, and corporate profits. “To understand why viruses are becoming more dangerous, we must investigate industrial models of agriculture and livestock production. But, few governments, and few scientists, are prepared to do so.”…

ECOCIDE/EXTINCTION

It’s not just about the bees – earthworms need love, too

14th September 2019

From The Guardian: A recent scientific study has found that 42% of fields in Britain surveyed by farmers were seriously deficient in earthworms; in some fields they were missing altogether. Particularly hard-hit were deep-burrowing worms, which are valuable in helping soil collect and store rainwater, but were absent from 16% of fields in the study. Jules…

Subhash Palekar receives the Padma Shri in 2016

The Indian Express

ALTERNATIVES

Budget & Zero Budget Farming: A response to Subhash Palekar

15th August 2019

Influential natural farming advocate Subhash Palekar recently approved the use of Genetically Modified crops in his well-known “Zero Budget Natural Farming-ZBNF” method. In an equally startling interview, he described organic farming as “worse than the atom bomb.” Here, two veteran practitioners respond to Palekar, while reviewing the history of the Organic/Natural Farming movement in India….

ALTERNATIVES

Eating for a better world: Some questions and a guide

25th July 2019

From Trophic Tales: The focus on the welfare of individual domesticated animals might be an extension of the modernist tendency to simplify and discriminate. The morality of living, eating, and dying is more complex than two-word slogans can prescribe. If we care about animals —wild or domesticated— we’ve to think in terms of entire ecosystems….

Food/Farming

Poisoned earth, poisoned people: The unravelling of Punjab

10th July 2019

From The Guardian: Cancer rates are the highest in the country, drug addiction is rife, and 900 farmers have killed themselves in two years. How did Punjab turn toxic? A new film explores the roots of its problems; ‘Toxification’ tells the moving stories of farmers at the sharp end of the chemical epidemic engulfing Punjab….

Bookshelf

Growing a Revolution: Bringing Our Soil Back to Life

19th June 2019

David R. Montgomery writes: Conventional wisdom says that fertile soil is not renewable. That’s not really true. Fertility can be improved quickly through cover cropping and returning organic matter to the land. Soil-building is about getting the biology, mineral availability, and organic-matter balance right, rolling with the wheel of life instead of pushing against it….

ALTERNATIVES

The Insect Apocalypse: What does it mean for the rest of life on Earth?

2nd March 2019

The most disquieting thing wasn’t the disappearance of certain insect species; it was the deeper worry that a whole insect world might be quietly going missing, a loss of abundance that could alter the planet in unknowable ways. “We notice the losses,” says David Wagner. “It’s the diminishment that we don’t see.” (New York Times)…

ALTERNATIVES

After Sri Lanka passed bans on lethal varieties of pesticide, suicides fell by half

21st December 2018

From Vox.com: Sri Lanka is perhaps the most famous case of suicides falling after a selective pesticide ban. One study estimated that the suicide rate in the country fell by half after it banned certain pesticides in 1995. According to the World Health Organization, at least 110,000 people commit suicide by consuming pesticides each year….

Food/Farming

Toxic legacy: New research confirms pesticide link to birth defects

8th September 2018

From Non-gmoreport.com: The most disturbing finding of the study was the epigenetic effects of atrazine; which means its not just those who are exposed to it that faced health risks, but also their descendants. Dr. Winchester calls the discovery of this link between pesticides and epigenetic changes “the most important next discovery in all medicine.”…

ALTERNATIVES

Tribute: Masanobu Fukuoka, the ‘one-straw revolutionary’ of agriculture

15th August 2018

August 16th marks ten years since the passing of the legendary Japanese farmer and author Masanobu Fukuoka, who initiated the natural farming movement. Here’s a documentary on his life and work, along with notes by Larry Korn, Fukuoka’s American student and the translator of his book, ‘One Straw Revolution,’ considered the ‘bible’ of natural farming….

Economy

Monsanto and Bayer: Agriculture just took a turn for the worse

4th June 2018

Bayer’s $66 billion takeover of Monsanto represents another big click on the ratchet of corporate power over farming and food. With the ‘Big-Six’ of global agribusiness now set to turn into the ‘even bigger three’, farmers and consumers face more GMOs and pesticides, less choice, and deeper price gouging. Agroecology has never looked more attractive….

Conflict/Dispossession

A disaster for the whole world: Anuradha Mittal on agribusiness in Africa

6th January 2018

Displacing pastoralists, displacing smallholder farmers, arresting and charging them as terrorists if they protest–and the land is given away to foreign investors to grow what? Sugar and cotton. Imagine trucks full of food aid coming into Ethiopia, while trucks full of cotton and sugar are leaving the country. Hunger in Africa is a political problem….

Education/Awareness

Tribute: Nikolai Vavilov, persecuted Soviet geneticist who foresaw our present crisis

24th December 2017

From McSweeney’s: Nikolay Ivanovich Vavilov collected more seeds from around the world than any other person in history. Yet the plant explorer, who endeavoured to end famine, starved to death in one of Stalin’s gulags. A tribute to a scientific pioneer who foresaw the need for preserving the world’s seed heritage almost a century ago….

A documentary on Mali, where agribusiness is turning local farmers into labourers

ALTERNATIVES

Who feeds us? The Peasant Food Web vs. the Industrial Food Chain

20th October 2017

Industrial farming, which gets all the attention (and most of the land), accounts for more than 80% of fossil fuel emissions and uses over 70% of the water supply in agriculture, actually produces only about 30% of the world’s food. It’s the diverse network of small-scale producers-the ‘Peasant Food Web’-that feeds 70% of the world….

Bookshelf

How ‘Silent Spring’ ignited the modern environmental movement

12th October 2017

As much as any book can, Rachel Carson’s “Silent Spring” changed the world, by describing it. An immediate best-seller, this classic book launched the modern environmental movement, which, in turn, led to the creation of the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency, and a host of green laws. On the 55th year of its publication, a tribute….

Economy

This corporate merger threatens food supplies worldwide. Who’ll stop it?

29th August 2017

From The Guardian: Chemicals and agribusiness giant Bayer has approached the European Union to approve its $65bn takeover of Monsanto, eliminating direct competition between two of the biggest players in the industry. If approved, the merger would be an extremely risky consolidation of corporate power, and a serious threat to food supplies and farmers worldwide….

ALTERNATIVES

How to grow a food forest that will feed you everyday

22nd August 2017

From Down to Earth Magazine: What does it take to design a permaculture kitchen garden? In this video, permaculture practitioners Rosie and Peter Fernandes, based in Assagaon, Goa, recount their experience of growing a food forest designed to meet their cooking needs round the year. They are now taking their model to the wider community….

Development/Growth

Indian Independence: Made in U.S.A.?

15th August 2017

Colin Todhunter writes: At a time when India commemorates the end of British rule, it finds itself under siege from international capital. Its not only on course to become an even weaker and more hobbled state permanently beholden to US state-corporate interests, but it is heading towards environmental catastrophe much faster than many may think….

ALTERNATIVES

Microbes will feed the world, or why real farmers grow soil, not crops

11th August 2017

From Modern Farmer: On the horizon of agriculture’s future, a 40,000-strong army is marching towards a shimmering goal. They see the potential for a global food system where pesticides, herbicides and fertilisers are but relics of a faded age. A peek into a treasure trove of latest research released by The American Society of Microbiologists….