Hungry for Profit: The Agribusiness Threat to Farmers, Food, and the Environment

by Fred Magdoff (Editor), John Bellamy Foster (Editor), Frederick H. Buttel (Editor)

Overview

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.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9781583673942
Publisher:	Monthly Review Press
Publication date:	09/01/2000
Sold by:	Barnes & Noble
Format:	eBook
Pages:	220
File size:	3 MB

About the Author

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 a Professor Emeritus of Sociology at the University of Oregon and editor of Monthly Review. He has written many books including The Robbery of Nature (with Brett Clark) and The Return of Nature, which won the Deutscher Memorial Prize.
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).

Table of Contents

	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