The Great Climate Robbery: how the food system drives climate change and what we can do about it
The Great Climate Robbery provides valuable information about how the industrial food system causes climate change, how food and agribusiness corporations are getting away with it, and what can be done to turn things around. The various chapters in this collection document the ill effects of this industrial food system such as the growing hunger, the destruction of rural peoples’ livelihoods, the loss of biodiversity and cultures, the exploitation of labour and a range of health calamities.
This timely anthology by the international NGO Grain shows how food sovereignty is critical to any lasting and just solution to climate change. With governments, particularly those from the main polluting countries, abdicating their responsibility to deal with the problem, it has become ever more critical for people to take action into their own hands. Changing the food system is perhaps the most important and effective place to start.
2016 | ISBN 9781742199917 | Paperback | 246 pp
Table of Contents
Introduction
1. Food and climate change: the forgotten link
1.1 How the industrial food system contributes
to the climate crisis
1.2 Food sovereignty: five steps to cool the planet
1.3 The Exxons of agriculture
1.4 How REDD+ projects undermine peasant
farming and real solutions to climate change
1.5 Trade deals boosting climate change: the food factor
Hungry for land
2.1 The solution to climate change is in our lands
2.2 Family farm stories are not the fairy tales
we’re being told
2.3 Hungry for land: small farmers feed the world
with less than one–quarter of all farmland
2.4 Squeezing Africa dry: behind every land grab
is a water grab
2.5 Asia’s agrarian reform in reverse:
laws taking land out of small farmers’ hands
2.6 The landgrabbers of the Nacala Corridor
2.7 Socially responsible farmland investment:
a growing trap
The struggle for seeds
3.1 Seed laws that criminalise farmers
3.2 Trade deals and farmers’ seeds
3.3 GMOs: Feeding or fooling the world?
3.4 Yvapuruvu Declaration:
seed laws – resisting dispossession
Controlling the food system
4.1 Corporations replace peasants in China’s
new food security agenda
4.2 Defending people’s milk in India
4.3 Food sovereignty for sale: supermarkets
and dwindling people’s power over food and
farming in Asia
4.4 How does the Gates Foundation spend its
money to feed the world?
4.5 Planet palm oil: peasants pay the price
for cheap vegetable oil
4.6 Free trade and Mexico’s junk food epidemic
Reviews
It’s about time that the role agriculture plays in the climate crisis – and the role it could play in the solution – got a concentrated dose of attention. This is fine work that will provoke much new activism!
—Bill McKibben, author of Deep Economy
This book is a must read for movements addressing climate change as well as seed and food Sovereignty. It shows that industrial corporate agriculture is a major part of the climate crisis, and small scale ecological farming is a significant solution. It also alerts us to the false solutions being offered by those who created the problem — the Exxons of agriculture.
—Vandana Shiva, author of Soil, Not Oil, Making Peace with the Earth
Food, land and seeds: protecting them is as essential to climate justice as rooftop solar, wind co-ops, or democratic public transit. This book lifts up the voices of indigenous and peasant farmers around the world, comprehensively explaining why their fight to stop the industrial food juggernaut is the same as the fight for a habitable, just planet.
—Naomi Klein, author of This Changes Everything and The Shock Doctrine
This is a very timely book, particularly for readers in developing countries where elites may be actively promoting industrial agriculture or may be pressured to open their countries’ markets to it. The capital-driven industrial agriculture and food system is a totalising enclosure of the commons that affect not only land, but almost every factor in food production, particularly seeds. This book is very valuable to all those who are concerned about the changes in the food system and its linkage to climate change. It captures and analyses the critical forces and dynamics in industrial agriculture and food system, as well as offering ways to change it.
—Yan Hairong, Department of Applied Social Sciences, Hong Kong Polytechnic University, China
This publication is an instrument of great analytical value providing an alternative for moving forward in the fight for sustainable human development and for the right to life on the planet.
—Víctor Hugo Jijon, Commission for the Defense of Human Rights, Quito, Ecuador
This book is the fruit of GRAIN’s long experience in the field. It is based on solid evidence and excellent analysis. The link between climate and agricultural activities is essential to contribute to a solution and GRAIN does not hesitate to denounce responsibilities and to indicate efficient ways for action.
—François Houtart, Professor, National Institute of Higher Studies (IAEN), Ecuador
GRAIN takes on the key challenge of our time and lays the scaffoldings for the construction of a livable future. Climate crisis, toxic industrial agriculture and dirty energy: this publication shows the linkages as not being incidental but orchestrated by a warped system that must be straightened out.
—Nnimmo Bassey, Director, Health of Mother Earth Foundation, author of To Cook a Continent: Destructive Extraction and the Climate Crisis in Africa
We welcome the efforts of our colleagues at GRAIN to put Via Campesina’s proposals to cool the planet and fight false solutions at the centre of the debate. The time has come to change the system, not the climate. Our farmers and indigenous peoples can cool the planet.
—Edgardo García, International Coordinating Committee – Via Campesina.