A Growing Problem: Pesticides and the Third World Poor

Science & Math

Bull, David

Biological Sciences

FOOD FIRST BOOKS *

Why is a country with some of the world's most fertile land also the home of so many hungry people? 
The authors of Needless Hunger spent two years in Bangladesh investigating the paradox of hunger in a "basketcase" country which actually produces enough grain for its people already. 
Boyce and Hartmann, Bengali-speaking anthropologists, not only trace the history and structure of Bangladesh society, they also draw us into the daily lives of the people of Katni, the village where they lived. 
"There is no natural barrier to the satisfaction of the basic human needs of Bangladesh's people," they conclude. "But there is the man-made barrier of a social order which benefits a few at the expense of the many." The foreign aid which pours into the country actually entrenches the very elite which keeps the majority powerless and hungry, they found. 
Needless Hunger is also a book of hope which describes the strength and potential of the Bangladesh people and their desire for a society in which food-producing resources are controlled by the majority.

Needless Hunger: Voices from a Bangladesh Village

Business & Money

Betsy Hartmann

James Boyce

Economics

In recent decades, the various strands of the food movement have made enormous strides in calling attention the many shortcomings and injustices of our food and agricultural system. Farmers, activists, scholars, and everyday citizens have also worked creatively to rebuild local food economies, advocate for food justice, and promote more sustainable, agroecological farming practices. However, the movement for fairer, healthier, and more autonomous food is continually blocked by one obstacle: land access. As long as land remains unaffordable and inaccessible to most people, we cannot truly transform the food system. The term land-grabbing is most commonly used to refer to the large-scale acquisition of agricultural land in Asian, African, or Latin American countries by foreign investors. However, land has and continues to be grabbed” in North America, as well, through discrimination, real estate speculation, gentrification, financialization, extractive energy production, and tourism. This edited volume, with chapters from a wide range of activists and scholars, explores the history of land theft, dispossession, and consolidation in the United States. It also looks at alternative ways forward toward democratized, land justice, based on redistributive policies and cooperative ownership models. With prefaces from leaders in the food justice and family farming movements, the book opens with a look at the legacies of white-settler colonialism in the southwestern United States. From there, it moves into a collectively-authored section on Black Agrarianism, which details the long history of land dispossession among Black farmers in the southeastern US, as well as the creative acts of resistance they have used to acquire land and collectively farm it. The next section, on gender, explores structural and cultural discrimination against women landowners in the Midwest and also role of womanism” in land-based struggles. Next, a section on the cross-border implications of land enclosures and consolidations includes a consideration of what land justice could mean for farm workers in the US, followed by an essay on the challenges facing young and aspiring farmers. Finally, the book explores the urban dimensions of land justice and their implications for locally-autonomous food systems, and lessons from previous struggles for democratized land access. Ultimately, the book makes the case that to move forward to a more equitable, just, sustainable, and sovereign agriculture system, the various strands of the food movement must come together for land justice.

Land Justice: Re-imagining Land, Food, and the Commons

Agricultural Sciences

Book by Valentine, William, Lappe, Frances Moore

What Can We Do? Food and Hunger: How You Can Make a Difference

Lappé, Frances Moore

Valentine, William

Casting New Molds: First Steps Toward Worker Control in a Mozambique Steel Factory

Sketchley, Peter

Management & Leadership

Exposes the problems surrounding the international marketing of pesticides banned in the United States, describing growing incidences of pesticide poisoning in farm workers and through the exportation of contaminated foods

Circle of Poison: Pesticides and People in a Hungry World

Schapiro, Mark

Weir, David

Self-Help

Food First Comic

Rifas, Leonard

Examines the crisis that faces American farmers today

Trading the Future: Farm Exports and the Concentration of Economic Power in Our Food System

Wessel, James

This book focuses on the lives of ordinary men and women in Nicaragua -- how they are changing and why there is hope.

Now We Can Speak: A Journey Through the New Nicaragua

Collins, Joseph

A quiet violence today stalks the villages and shanty towns of the Third World, the violence of needless hunger. In this book, two Bengali-speaking Americans take the reader to a Bangladesh village where they lived for nine months. There, the reader meets some of the world's poorest people - peasants, sharecroppers and landless labourers - and some of the not-so-poor people who profit from their misery. The villagers' poverty is not fortuitous, a result of divine dispensation or individual failings of character. Rather, it is the outcome of a long history of exploitation, culminating in a social order which today benefits a few at the expense of many.

Quiet Violence: View from a Bangladesh Village (Third World Studies)

Boyce, James K.

Hartmann, Betsy

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