Publications
Rural Social Movements and Diálogo de Saberes
While many contemporary rural social movements once argued for increased industrial farming inputs and machinery for their members, the past few years have seen an accelerating shift toward the promotion of agroecology as an alternative to the so-called Green Revolution.
Financialization, Distance and Global Food Politics
This paper provides a new perspective on the political implications of intensified financialization in the global food system.
“Like gold with yield”
Since 2007, capital markets have acquired a newfound interest in agricultural land as a portfolio investment. This phenomenon is examined through the theoretical lens of financialization.
Risk and Blame in the Anthropocene
Climate change and climate-change policies affect food security. Vulnerabilities, however, do not just fall from the sky. Vulnerability is not an attribute of changing hazards. It is produced and reproduced through social and political-economic relations on the ground.
Peasant-driven agricultural growth and food sovereignty
The concept of food sovereignty represents an important theoretical and practical challenge. The political economy of agriculture can only take this gauntlet by developing a better understanding of the processes of agricultural growth. Without such an understanding it is difficult to address the issue of food sovereignty.
Achieving Mexico’s Maize Potential
Once the poster child for free trade, Mexico is now better known for its failures, among them the loss of the country’s food sovereignty. Rising agricultural prices, combined with growing import dependence, have driven Mexico’s food import bill over $20 billion per year and increased its agricultural trade deficit.
Gold for Export? … or Water & Food for Life?
With the rapid expansion of gold mining, social movements in many countries have gathered force to oppose the mining. Environmental concerns have been central to this opposition. But the opposition has grown into a larger critique of “what is development?” posing corporate-led export growth against peasant-led local agriculture.
Historicizing Food Sovereignty
To historicize food sovereignty is to situate it: first, as a strategic countermovement in/of the food regime; and second, by historicizing the food regime itself to identify the shifting terrain of food sovereignty politics.
Feast and Famine
This paper explores how recent Mexican food policies have spurred the growth of three large transnational food corporations while at the same time leaving more than 20 million Mexicans in nutritional poverty with little access to their traditional staples and ways of life.
How to Build Food Sovereignty
Around the world, rural social movements and urban food activist-citizens have proposed that food sovereignty has the potential to be the foundation of an alternative food system that can transcend the deep-seated social, economic and ecological contradictions of the global food economy.
