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The agribusiness/food sector is the second most profitable industry in the United States — following pharmaceuticals — with annual sales over $400 billion. Contributing to its profitability are the breathtaking strides in biotechnology coupled with the growing concentration of ownership and control by food’s largest corporations. Everything, from decisions on which foods are produced, to how they are processed, distributed, and marketed is, remarkably, dictated by a select few giants wielding enormous power. More and more farmers are forced to adopt new technologies and strategies with consequences potentially harmful to the environment, our health, and the quality of our lives. The role played by trade institutions like the World Trade Organization, serves only to make matters worse.
Through it all, the paradox of capitalist agriculture persists: ever-greater numbers remain hungry and malnourished despite an increase in world food supplies and the perpetuation of food overproduction.
Hungry for Profit presents a historical analysis and an incisive overview of the issues and debates surrounding the global commodification of agriculture. Contributors address the growing public concern over food safety and controversial developments in agricultural biotechnology including genetically engineered foods. Hungry for Profit also examines the extent to which our environmental, social, and economic problems are intertwined with the structure of global agriculture as it now exists.
Hungry for Profit demystifies the reasons why hunger proliferates in the midst of plenty and points the way toward sustainable solutions. Perhaps most important, it highlights the ways in which farmers, farmworkers, environmental and sustainable agriculture groups — as well as consumers — are engaged in the struggle to create a just and environmentally sound food system which, its editors argue, cannot be separated from a just and environmentally sound society.
Contents & Contributors
Introduction
FRED MAGDOFF, JOHN BELLAMY FOSTER,
& FREDERICK H. BUTTEL
The Agrarian Origins of Capitalism
by ELLEN MEIKSINS WOOD
Liebig, Marx, and the Depletion of Soil Fertility:
Relevance for Today's Agriculture
JOHN BELLAMY FOSTER & FRED MAGDOFF
Concentration of Ownership and Control in Agriculture
by WILLIAM D. HEFFERNAN
Ecological Impacts of Industrial Agriculture
and the Possibilities for Sustainable Farming
by MIGUEL A. ALTIERI
The Maturing of Capitalist Agriculture:
Farmer as Proletarian
by R.C. LEWONTIN
New Agricultural Biotechnologies:
The Struggle for Democratic Choice
by GERAD MIDDENDORF, MIKE SKLADNY,
ELIZABETH RANSOM, & LAWRENCE BUSCH
Global Food Politics
by PHILIP McMICHAEL
The Great Global Enclosure of Our Times:
Peasants and the Agrarian Question
at the Beginning of the Twenty-First Century
by FARSHAD ARAGHI
Organizing U.S. Farmworkers:
A Continuous Struggle
by LINDA C. MAJKA & THEO J. MAJKA
Rebuilding Local Food Systems
from the Grassroots Up
by ELIZABETH HENDERSON
Want Amid Plenty:
From Hunger to Inequality
by JANET POPPENDIECK
Cuba: A Successful Case Study
of Sustainable Agriculture
by PETER M. ROSSET
The Importance of Land Reform
in the Reconstruction of China
by WILLIAM HINTON
About the Editors
FRED MAGDOFF is professor of plant and soil science at the University of Vermont and the author of Building Soils for Better Crops (1993).
JOHN BELLAMY FOSTER is associate professor of sociology at the University of Oregon. He is coeditor of Monthly Review and Organization and Environment and the author of The Vulnerable Planet (1999) and Marx's Ecology (2000) and coeditor of Capitalism and the Information Age (1998), and In Defense of History (1996).
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).
