The continued expansion of industrial-scale chemical-intensive agriculture around the world relies on one central powerful myth: only industrial agriculture can feed the world.

 

Timothy A. Wise - author of Eating Tomorrow - joins us to discuss why, despite overwhelming evidence to the contrary, governments continue to invest in a model of farming that is devouring the natural resources on which future food production depends. By choosing the path of industrial agriculture today, we are, quite literally, "eating our collective tomorrows".

Tim and I discuss:

• Who actually "feeds the world"
• Who (or what) industrial agriculture feeds
• The failing Green Revolution in Africa: feeding corporations, not the hungry
• Alternative local agroecological solutions in Malawi and Mozambique nourishing people and planet
• How agroecology, not hybrid seeds, builds lasting resilience against floods and drought, the 'evil twins of climate change':
• Global trade and market failure: NAFTA devastating biodiversity and Mexican farmer livelihoods
• India's National Food Security Act: the most ambitious anti-hunger program in the world and why the US opposes it

 

Timothy A. Wise directs the Land and Food Rights Program at Small Planet Institute. He is a Research Fellow in the Globalization Program at Tufts University's Global Development and Environment Institute. With a background as an economic journalist and an international development practitioner, Wise's research and writing have covered U.S. farm policies, trade and agricultural development, agricultural biodiversity, food prices and biofuels, and Mexico's maize economy under the threat of genetically modified maize. He is also the former Executive Director of Grassroots International and a writer and editor at Dollars & Sensemagazine, and co-author of Confronting Globalization: Economic Integration and Popular Resistance in Mexico,The Promise and the Perils of Agricultural Trade Liberalization: Lessons from Latin America, and A Survey of Sustainable Development: Social and Economic Dimensions.

 

Links:

• Timothy A. Wise (2019) Eating Tomorrow: Agribusiness, Family Farmers, and the Battle for the Future of Food(The New Press)
• Small Planet Institute Website
• NY Book Launch - Eating Tomorrow (Youtube)
• Shiva, Vandana (1993) "Monocultures of the Mind". Trumpeter: 10, 4.
• Anna Lappé & Food MythBusters – Do we really need industrial agriculture to feed the world? (YouTube)

 

You might also like:

• FFS 039 – The Invisible ABCD Giants and the Financialisation of Food
• FFS 036 – Chicken Nugget Capitalism
• FFS 034 – Wizards and Prophets