Failed harvests, disease, deteriorating water and pasture conditions, and animal deaths mean 12 million need food aid now, and the situation is fast deteriorating
Humanitarian crisis
Famine looms as millions go hungry in East Africa
Archive | Food and Farming
Movement Building
Food Sovereignty: A Strategy for Environmental Justice
Food sovereignty offers a strategy for social mobilization that confronts rural disintegration while addressing environmental crises.
Interview
Hannah Holleman on environmental justice and ecological imperialism
“The pace and scale of ecological degradation we confront today is unfathomable without understanding the legacy and persistent realities of ecological imperialism.”
New books
Ecosocialist Bookshelf, August 2016
Five new books for green lefts and left greens. Cuban science fiction … the birth of the Anthropocene … agribusiness and disease … surviving catastrophe … rising seas … private plunder of public assets.
Marxist Ecology
Colonialism, Racism and the Global Dust Bowl of the 1930s
An important new paper challenges prevalent conceptions of the Dust Bowl, in which colonial and racial-domination aspects of the crisis are invisible, and affirms the necessity of deeper conceptions of environmental (in)justice.
Farming in crisis
Millions face drought and famine in Southern Africa
Worst drought in 35 years causes crop failures, widespread malnutrition in 10 countries. More than 640,000 drought-related livestock deaths have been reported due to lack of pasture, lack of water and disease outbreaks.
Movie Review
Is there a vast cowspiracy about climate change?
Cowspiracy’s argument is based on badly flawed and almost unanimously rejected interpretations of science. Actual science and scientists are hard to find among the many talking heads in the film.
Book Review
Why changing our diets won’t save the Earth
Received wisdom says that to save the planet we have to change our eating habits. Elaine Graham-Leigh explains why the received wisdom isn’t just wrong, it blames working people for a crisis they didn’t cause.
Via Campesina
Food sovereignty and climate change
Industrial agriculture is grounded in the use of fossil fuel and high energy consumption. Campesino agriculture with an agro-ecological basis is the only force capable of achieving food sovereignty and responding to climate change.
Too Many People?
Population and food sovereignty: An exchange
Ian Angus replies to a reader. If ‘overpopulation’ is not a primary cause of global environmental problems, what about island nations with limited space and resources?
Book Review
Fishers and plunderers: The tragedy of the commodity
Overfishing, pollution and warming water have pushed the world’s oceans into crisis. If nothing is done the results will be catastrophic for marine systems and the billions of humans who rely on them. To stop this destruction our society has to be organized in a completely different way.
Articles & Reports
Ecosocialist resources, April 2016
Click and learn: 10 new recommended readings for green-lefts and left-greens
Food and Farming
The True Cost of Cheap Meat
Martin Empson reviews Farmageddon, an important expose of the disastrous failings of the global food system that never quite gets to the bottom of why the agricultural system is like it is.
INTERNATIONAL JOINT STATEMENT
Condemn the murder of Honduran indigenous leader!
Berta Cáceres was a firm defender of small farmers and indigenous peoples’ rights and an inspiring social activist, both at regional and continental level, in defense of social and environmental justice, She was murdered in her home on March 3, by “unknown” gunmen.
Food and Farming
Cowspiracy: stampeding in the wrong direction
By focusing on veganism to the exclusion of all else, Cowspiracy implies that anyone who eats meat isn’t a ‘proper’ environmentalist. This is deeply offensive and elitist, and it harms the movement we need to build.
Food and Farming
Film Review: Are cows destroying the climate?
How not to change the world. ‘Cowspiracy’ ignores capitalism and rejects Indigenous peoples’ concerns, while denouncing everyone who eats meat.
Foodies and farmworkers: Allies or enemies?
Fred Magdoff reviews Labor and the Locavore. Can the ‘buy local food’ movement support both sustainable farming and justice for farmworkers?
Ecosocialist resources, May 2015
Ecosocialist Resources, published monthly in Climate & Capitalism, links to articles, reports, talks and videos that are relevant to our mission.
Ecosocialist resources, April 2015
Eleven new articles! Ecosocialist Resources, published monthly in Climate & Capitalism, links to articles, reports, talks and videos that are relevant to our mission.
Rural activists in Latin America call for socialism
Final declaration of the 6th Congress of countryside organizations affiliated with La Via Campesina, held April 10-16, 2015, in Buenos Aires, Argentina