From The Progressive Populist, May 15, 2011
Costs of Farming and Eating
by Seth Sandronsky
A chilling trend stalks humanity: the price of food. It’s climbing now as it did in 2008. How and why is this nightmare back?
Let’s, briefly, look back to three years ago. “Prices for basic foodstuffs doubled or tripled in a short period, and food riots spread beyond Mexico to many countries in the global South,” write Fred Magdoff and Brian Tokar, co-editors of Agriculture and Food in Crisis: Conflict, Resistance and Renewal (Monthly Review Press, November 2010).
It is worth noting that Egypt, whose 2011 political revolution shook the world in ways big and small, is also a country where rising food prices hammered common people. Legal fictions such as Cargill and Monsanto, with the rights of human beings without the legal responsibilities, are driving this scary food trend. At the same time, corporate consolidation and concentration of farming is rising, advancing like a tsunami of greed over arable land and fresh water.
This is impacting a wide swathe of humanity, from rural peasant farmers in India to urban consumers in Oakland. We’re all in this farming and eating crisis together, a theme that runs a red line through Magdoff and Tokar’s vital book….
…read the entire review in The Progressive Populist
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