Special Edition of Monthly Review

Here is a link to the Monthly Review special edition on Agriculture and Food in Crisis: Conflict, Resistance and Renewal http://www.monthlyreview.org/

Re-thinking Industrial Agriculture

In our introduction to food politics this week, we began by thinking about the changes that have occurred across agriculture and food systems as an outcome of agro-industrialisation and the uptake of scientific and technological innovations (including hybrid seeds, harvest and plough machinery, and more recently remote sensing and genetically engineered seeds). While pre-industrial agriculture can be characterised by small scale, mixed (polyculture) and subsistence production, industrial agriculture occurs on a large scale, is often based on monoculture production, and has integrated farmers into a global cash economy. In this context, many farmers end up buying most of the food they eat, while the crops they grow are destined for distant markets. At the same time however, a growing number of movements are re-thinking ideas around scale, diversity and markets. Permaculture is one example, see http://www.ipcon.org/ for details of the permaculture movement in Africa. Does permaculture share similarities with Indigenous culinary cultures, or peasant based agriculture?