Timothy A. Wise - Eating Tomorrow: Agribusiness, Family Farmers, and the Battle for the Future of Food

Eating Tomorrow

Eating Tomorrow

AGRIBUSINESS, FAMILY FARMERS, AND THE BATTLE FOR THE FUTURE OF FOOD

Timothy A. Wise

2019 by Timothy A. Wise

All rights reserved.

No part of this book may be reproduced, in any form, without written permission from the publisher.

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Published in the United States by The New Press, New York, 2019

Distributed by Two Rivers Distribution

ISBN 978-1-62097-423-0 (ebook)

Names: Wise, Timothy A., 1955 author.

Title: Eating tomorrow : agribusiness, family farmers, and the battle for the future of food / Timothy A. Wise.

Description: New York, NY : New Press, [2019] | Includes bibliographical references and index.

Identifiers: LCCN 2018036746 | ISBN 9781620974223 (hc : alk. paper)

Subjects: LCSH: Food supply. | Agricultural industries. | Family farms.

Classification: LCC HD9000.5 .W489 2019 | DDC 338.1dc23

LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2018036746

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Contents

Foreword

Raj Patel

More people are hungry today than yesterday. For the first time in a generation, global hunger is increasing. Its not just the absolute number of malnourished people on the rise. The percentage of humans facing food shortages is climbing too.

Not everyone will eat tomorrow becauseof how we eat today. Every study that troubles itself with the question finds that climate change trends and industrial agricultural practices will cause staple foods to become more expensive in the future. Either that or there just wont be any food at all: fish could be commercially extinct by 2050.

Industrial agriculture is an engine for the exploitation of humans and the web of life. If you want to invent pandemic disease, you couldnt imagine a better laboratory than the hells of concentrated animal feeding operations, in which the constant drip of antibiotics creates a perfect breeding ground for the next deadly swine or bird flu. Along the food production line, workers in the food chain are treated as brutally as the product they butcher. And a complex web of social and ecological subsidies allows the system to produce food that appears as a bargain but is increasingly likely to contribute to chronic disease and ecological destruction.

Ask not, then, how the existing food system is going to kill us. Ask why it is allowed.

At every turn, the architects of the industrial food system appear to have created a world without alternative. Economic bumper stickers are presented as imperatives never to be questioned. Youll hear slogans from the thought leaders like: developing countries can export their way to success or without cheap food, the world will starve or industrial agriculture is the only way we can feed the world or technology can feed the 9 billion or organic food just yields less. You may have uttered one or two of these slogans yourself.

When you begin with the conviction that youre going to feed the world, theres nothing that can prick your conscience. Thats what hubris feels like. If peasants need to be displaced in order to increase efficiency, their lives dont even rise to the level of collateral damage. Theyre being liberated from work they didnt particularly want to do, emancipated to find higher-paying jobs and a better future in the cities, where they can eat tomorrow. The GDP data prove it. Except with safety nets shredded and food prices higher, thats not true at all. In India, the epicenter of this magical thinking, the poor are consuming fewer calories than they once did. Despite the fact that GDP is soaring.