With the breeding and marketing of new “improved” varieties, traditional varieties are being replaced. Farmers and gardeners stop growing them. Field after field is planted with one variety. Where thousands of varieties of wheat once grew, only a few can now be seen. When these traditional plant varieties are lost...
Tag - agribusiness
The two scenarios just developed were (1) science as it is – researchers engaged in basic and applied research aimed at the mechanization of the tomato harvest – and (2) science as it could be – researchers engaged in basic and applied research aimed at the improvement of farmworkers' jobs. The first is science in...
Support to the traditional systems of science and technology in the third world countries has often been attacked as a reactionary attempt to hold back the national progress and to go back in history. These attacks originate from vested interests as well as well-meaning radical groups. Movements to defend the...
The blatant use of food as a weapon of control and manipulation by US imperialism is surprisingly openly discussed by capitalists and their policy makers. In the words of Earl Butz, past US Secretary of Agriculture: "Food is a weapon. It is one of the principal tools in our negotiating kit."
I grew up in a small town, and spent a lot of time on the farms of friends and relatives. Rural life, it seemed to me, offered a good blend of sensual pleasures, hard work and whole tasks. As an adult, I've spent most of my life in the largest cities of the U.S. I am familiar, then, with rural and urban living. But I...
Up until last summer, Flavio Martinez made his living in the cannery tomato fields of the Sacramento Valley. Though he found work thinning and weeding tomato plants, picking apricots, or gathering prunes and walnuts, he earned most of his annual income in the eight weeks of the tomato harvest.
The most surprising fact about agriculture today is that sometimes people have enough food, that hunger is not more widespread than it is. This is surprising because in most of the world today, food production is not undertaken to feed people, food does not flow from well-fed areas to hungry areas; nor do fluctuations...
This year I have been growing vegetables in my backyard, and when I can, baking my own bread. While a sense of back-to-the-earth may be a part of my motivations, my vegetable garden is also, in a way, my personal protest against capitalism. I have come to realize that foods are corporate products, not grown to feed...