The great climate robbery: How the food system drives climate change and what we can do about it

In 2012 GRAIN published 'The great food robbery’. We thought it was high time to do a sequel.

Over the past twenty-five years, GRAIN has worked with social movements and organisations around the world to defend local food systems and cultures from the advance of industrial agriculture. Part of our work has involved documenting the ill effects of this industrial food system – the growing hunger, the destruction of rural people's livelihoods, the loss of biodiversity and cultures, the exploitation of labour and a range of health calamities – and analysing the ways through which this system expands, from seed laws to free trade agreements to secretive land deals.

But another important part of our work has involved connecting this analysis of the food system to larger issues affecting the planet and linking peoples' struggles situated within the food system to those happening in other areas. Climate change is one important example of this.

During the pasts five years, we have pulled together the available data to show how the industrial food system is a major driver of climate change and how food sovereignty is critical to any lasting and just solution. With governments, particularly those from the main polluting countries, abdicating their responsibility to deal with the problem, it has become ever more critical for people to take action into their own hands. Changing the food system is perhaps the most important and effective place to start.

The various articles on climate change selected for this book should provide readers with solid information about how the industrial food system causes climate change, how food and agribusiness corporations are getting away with it and what can be done to turn things around. Other chapters provide a picture of how this climate-killing food system is expanding through the consolidation of corporate control over lands, seeds and markets, and how struggles are under way to stop it.

We hope this book will help readers to better understand the ways in which corporations seek to increase their control over the food system so that this control can be more effectively challenged. We hope it will inspire people to take action and we hope that it will provide readers with some information and analysis that they can use directly in their own work.

What others have to say about the book:

This book is a must read for movements addressing climate change as well as Seed and Food Sovereignty. It shows that industrial corporate agriculture is a major part of the climate crisis, and small scale ecological farming is a significant solution. It also alerts us to the false solutions being offered by those who created the problem — the Exxons of Agriculture. —Dr Vandana Shiva, author of Soil, Not Oil and Who really feeds the world

Food, land and seeds: protecting them is as essential to climate justice as rooftop solar, wind co-ops, or democratic public transit. This book lifts up the voices of indigenous and peasant farmers around the world, comprehensively explaining why their fight to stop the industrial food juggernaut is the same as the fight for a habitable, just planet. —Naomi Klein, author of This Changes Everything and The Shock Doctrine

It's about time that the role agriculture plays in the climate crisis--and the role it could play in the solution--got a concentrated dose of attention. This is fine work that will provoke much new activism! —Bill McKibben, author of Deep Economy

GRAIN takes on the key challenge of our time and lays the scaffoldings for the construction of a livable future. Climate crisis, toxic industrial agriculture and dirty energy: this publication shows the linkages as not being incidental but orchestrated by a warped system that must be straightened out. —Nnimmo Bassey, author of To Cook a Continent: Destructive Extraction and the Climate Crisis in Africa