Excerpted from Eating Tomorrow: Agribusiness, Family Farmers, and the Battle for the Future of Food (New Press 2019), Chapter 5. At the Kasisi Agricultural Training Center outside Lusaka, the innovation pipeline was flowing freely, and Kasisi’s innovators had long since shifted their focus to organic agriculture. As Kasisi director Henrietta…

When I saw the photo of the little girl in Mutanga, Zambia, I cried. It was the kind of image that tugs at Western bleeding-heartstrings to loosen their purse-strings. It had that emotional effect on me, which was incongruous because I’d taken the photo myself. And the girl was was…

The following excerpt from Chapter 6 of Eating Tomorrow: Agribusiness, Family Farmers, and the Battle for the Future of Food (New Press 2019) chronicles the failed attempt by British Sun Biofuels to make biodiesel from jatropha plants in Kisarawe, Tanzania. And the more modest and sustainable efforts by Kakute and…

Norman Borlaug, Milk Strikes, and the Green Revolution The notion that hunger is caused by scarcity and that producing more food commodities will solve hunger are, oddly enough, rooted in our agricultural history of overproduction, of surplus not scarcity. Norman Borlaug, father of the Green Revolution, got it wrong from…

Excerpt from Eating Tomorrow (New Press 2019), Chapter 8, with deep gratitude to the late Alejandro Nadal I saw how far-reaching NAFTA’s effects were in Soteapan, a small municipality on the slopes of the Santa Marta volcano in Mexico’s southeastern state of Veracruz. Colleagues from El Colegio de Mexico (ColMex)…

Adapted from the conclusion to Eating Tomorrow (New Press 2019) If anyone at the World Food Prize ceremonies in October 2017 back in Iowa was paying attention, reality was waving its arms in warning about our unsustainable model of agricultural development. Days before, Reuters had reported that the continued development…

The following is excerpted from Chapter 8 of Eating Tomorrow: Agribusiness, Family Farmers, and the Battle for the Future of Food (New Press 2019). The North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA) provoked a wave of migration to the United States. …

Leaders endorse agroecology as one of the cutting-edge innovations we need to help small-scale farmers adapt to climate change. October 24, 2019 (Originally published by Common Dreams) The Climate Action Summit at the UN last month was widely considered a disappointment, failing to garner the kinds of government actions needed…

Climate change comes for farmers — from Mozambique to Iowa It felt ominous when I was in Iowa in March that both Iowa and Mozambique were underwater from cyclone-induced flooding widely attributed to climate change. I’d studied and written about both places in my recent book. …