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Food for All
This book assesses the prospects for achieving the sustainable development goals, and the role of international organizations in achieving them, in light of recent economic, medical, and environmental developments.
More than Rural
In the 1970s, Thailand was developing but poor and largely agrarian. By the 1980s it had become the fastest growing large economy in the world and, in the process, made the transformation from a low-income to a middle-income economy. Fast forward to 2010 and Thailand had climbed yet another rung in the development ladder to become, according to World Bank criteria, an upper middle-income economy. Throughout this period of economic and social transformation, contrary to historical experience and theoretical models, one thing has remained constant: the central role of Thai smallholder farming. This conundrum—the persistence of the smallholder in a time of extraordinary change—lies at the h...
Dark Machines
This book offers a critical primer on how Artificial Intelligence and digitalization are shaping our planet and the risks posed to society and environmental sustainability. As the pressure of human activities accelerates on Earth, so too does the hope that digital and artificially intelligent technologies will be able to help us deal with dangerous climate and environmental change. Technology giants, international think-tanks and policy-makers are increasingly keen to advance agendas that contribute to “AI for Good” or “AI for the Planet." Dark Machines explores why it is naïve and dangerous to assume converging forces of a growing climate crisis and technological change will act syne...
In Defense of Farmers
Industrial agriculture is generally characterized as either the salvation of a growing, hungry, global population or as socially and environmentally irresponsible. Despite elements of truth in this polarization, it fails to focus on the particular vulnerabilities and potentials of industrial agriculture. Both representations obscure individual farmers, their families, their communities, and the risks they face from unpredictable local, national, and global conditions: fluctuating and often volatile production costs and crop prices; extreme weather exacerbated by climate change; complicated and changing farm policies; new production technologies and practices; water availability; inflation an...
On Social Closure
On Social Closure reinvigorates the idea of social closure as a basic sociological concept for understanding the strategies powerful groups use to improve their life chances at the expense of the less powerful. Jürgen Mackert provides sociological tools for analysing three critical forms of closure in the world today: exclusion in the context of neoliberalism; exploitation within global capitalism; and elimination in the ongoing legacy of settler colonialism, thereby transcending Eurocentric analyses. Mackert puts forward a mechanism-based explanatory approach identifies two critical social mechanisms that operate in various kinds of social closure struggles. The first explains how human beings, social groups, or communities are denied access to resources, rights, or critical networks, while the second explains how the powerful exert control that leaves the less powerful vulnerable and unable to fight back. Through a critical reconsideration and revision of existing concepts and by bringing in new ones, Jürgen Mackert develops a novel theoretical approach to social closure.
Working with Smallholders
Smallholder farmers are the stewards of more than 80 percent of the world’s farms. These small family businesses produce about one-third of the world’s food. In Africa and Asia, smallholders dominate the production of food crops, as well as export commodities such as cocoa, coffee, and cotton. However, smallholders and farm workers remain among the poorest segments of the population, and they are on the frontline of climate change. Smallholder farmers face constraints in accessing inputs, finance, knowledge, technology, labor, and markets.Raising farm-level productivity in a sustainable way is a key development priority. Agribusinesses are increasingly working with smallholder farmers in...
The Accidental Seed Heroes
‘A special, important book of hope, action and integrity.’ Mark Diacono, food and garden writer ‘After reading Adam’s book, I won’t look at a handful of seed the same way again!’ Joe Swift, garden designer; writer; presenter, BBC’s Gardeners’ World Across the world, chefs, farmers, plant scientists and backyard growers are doing something extraordinary: creating new generations of fruit, vegetables and cereals, all bred specifically to flourish locally, taste delicious, and contribute to our food future. In The Accidental Seed Heroes, Adam Alexander dons his seed detective homburg to meet these twenty-first century seed heroes, who are not only championing traditional varieti...
Farms, family farms, farmland distribution and farm labour: What do we know today?
A better and more complete understanding of family farms is urgently needed to guide policy makers’ efforts towards achieving a number of Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs). This paper takes stock of the number of farms worldwide, and their distribution and that of farmland, on the basis of agricultural censuses and survey data. Thus, it shows that there are more than 608 million farms in the world. Rough estimates also indicate that more than 90 percent of these farms are family farms (by our definition) occupying around 70–80 percent of farmland and producing about 80 percent of the world’s food in value terms. We underscore the importance of not referring to family farms and small...
Sustainable Agricultural Development
This book provides a non-technical, accessible primer on sustainable agricultural development and its relationship to sustainable development based on three analytical pillars. The first is to understand agriculture as complex physical-biological-human systems. Second is the economic perspective of understanding tradeoffs and synergies among the economic, environmental and social dimensions of these systems at farm, regional and global scales. Third is the understanding of these agricultural systems as the supply side of one sector of a growing economy, interacting through markets and policies with other sectors at local, national and global scales. The first part of the book introduces the ...
Local Autonomy as a Human Right
Local Autonomy as a Human Right contends that local communities struggle to preserve their territorial autonomy over time despite changes to the broader political and geographic contexts within which they are embedded. Forrest argues that this both reflects and is evidence of a worldwide embrace of local control as a key political and social value, indeed, of such importance that it should be embraced and codified as a human right. This study weaves together evidence grounded in a variety of disciplines - history, geography, comparative politics, sociology, public policy, anthropology, international jurisprudence, rural studies, urban studies -- to make clear that a presumed, inherent moral ...
