agriculture definition

Our first and second posts in this series are, respectively, here and here . �The logistics of a just, equitable, and healthy agricultural landscape here in the United States would remain a problem if Michael Pollan himself, Wendell Berry , or better yet Fred Magdoff were appointed Secretary of Agriculture. Decades-long efforts pealing back agribusiness both as paradigm and infrastructure, however successful, would require a parallel program. With what would we replace the present landscape? As a black hole about its horizon, a poverty in imagination orbits the question stateside. The vacuum is most recently felt in the developing animus between public health officials and artisan cheesemakers. What Europe has long streamlined into amicable regulation, the United States has lurched into clumsy opposition: cheese wheels are increasingly treated as suitcase bombs filled with Listeria . After [more than] sixty years of industrial production Americans have quite forgotten the logistics o...

Our first post, with an introduction to this series, is here . �Dumping grain on another country is a classic maneuver in economic warfare. When a country�s borders are opened by force or by choice, by structural adjustment or by neoliberal trade agreement, when tariffs and other forms of protectionism are finally scotched, heavily subsidized multinational agribusinesses can flood the new market with commodities at prices less than their production costs. That is, these companies are happy to sell their foodstuffs abroad at a loss. That doesn�t make sense, you say. Aren�t these guys in business for profit? They are indeed. The deficits are in actuality a cold-blooded calculation. The objective is to drive previously domestic sectors unable to compete with that kind of pricing, out of business. Once the mom-and-pop competition is rubbed out, Walmart-style, the multinationals, their competition cleared off the field, can impose what prices they please across a market they now dominate. [...

Over the course of a month or two (perhaps longer), I�m going to occasionally post snippets from a handful of Rob Wallace�s rhetorically pungent, intellectually incisive, and politically powerful collection of essays in his book Big Farms Make Big Flu: Dispatchers on Infectious Disease, Agribusiness, and the Nature of Science (Monthly Review Press, 2016). Early last year I posted notice of an article in New Left Review , 102 (Nov/Dec 2016): � Ebola�s Ecologies: Agro-Economics and Epidemiology in West Africa ,� co-authored by Rob Wallace and Rodrick Wallace, appending a list of suggested reading that included Big Farms . I will post bits and pieces from the book sans the notes and with slight editing (e.g., in the interest of length, I�ve left out some of the many examples that illuminate the arguments), although I may provide some embedded links (some of which may be in the book�s notes). As this work�with notes�is well over 400 pages, the material I�m sharing is best viewed as provid...