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The Agricultural Dilemma (Earthscan Food and Agriculture)
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About The Agricultural Dilemma
Product Description The Agricultural Dilemma questions everything we think we know about the current state of agriculture and how to, or perhaps more importantly how not to, feed a world with a growing population. This book is about the three fundamental forms of agriculture: Malthusian (expansion), industrialization (external-input-dependent), and intensification (labor-based). The best way to understand the three agricultures, and how we tend to get it wrong, is to consider what drives their growth. The book provides a thoughtful, critical analysis that upends entrenched misconceptions such as that we are running out of land for food production and that our only hope is the development of new agricultural technologies. The book contains engaging and enlightening vignettes and short histories, with case studies drawn from across the globe to bring to life this important debate and dilemma. The book concludes by arguing there is a viable alternative to industrial agriculture which will allow us to meet the world's needs and it ponders why such alternatives have been downplayed, obscured, or hidden from view.This important book is essential reading for all studying and researching food production and agriculture, and more broadly for all interested in ensuring we are able to feed our growing population. Review "In his provocative new book Glenn Davis Stone insists that a critical 'modern dilemma is how we misunderstand agriculture'. More than this, he argues that too many luminary analysts – Malthus, Borlaug, Ehrlich – have gotten too many things precisely backwards. Most centrally, the runaway train is not a burgeoning population but an industrial agriculture committed to overproduction. Persuasively illuminating the need to unlearn a variety of agricultural truisms, he shows how a just and regenerative 'Third Agriculture' is being sustained and recreated by peasant farmers and neo-agrarians around the world." Jack Kloppenburg, Professor Emeritus, University of Wisconsin-Madison, USA and author of First the Seed: The Political Economy of Plant Biotechnology, 1492-2000"Stone combines scholarly precision and compelling prose to shatter the received wisdom that industrial agriculture―patented seeds, mined and synthesized agrichemicals―can ever 'feed the world,' or ever has. An essential book." Tom Philpott, author of Perilous Bounty"In a magnificent synthesis of anthropology, economics, history and politics, Glenn Davis Stone has traced the arc of why consistently bad questions are being asked of the food system, and consistently bad answers so reliably delivered. In lucid prose, Stone offers a tour of the most important literature, and figures, shaping debates about hunger in the past two centuries. If we are wise, we’ll understand why they are poor guides to feeding the planet in the 21st century. And if that happens, it’ll be in no small part because of this instant classic, by a scholar writing at the height of his powers." Raj Patel, Research Professor, University of Texas, USA and author of Stuffed and Starved"With his deft mix of meticulous research and engaging storytelling, Stone reveals how agribusiness has invoked the ghost of Thomas Malthus to impose its technology-obsessed vision of an industrialized agriculture, from Iowa to India to Africa. In the process, he unearths so many deeply rooted myths that we begin again to see our way forward." Timothy A. Wise, author of Eating Tomorrow: Agribusiness, Family Farmers, and the Battle for the Future of Food"Stone’s book is a thoughtful and stinging indictment of the unexamined logics that underlie industrial agriculture. It is a welcome rebuke to the monotonous excuses of big ag, framed in a clear and beautiful reassessment of Malthus. Historians and policymakers will find plenty to chew on here." Deborah Fitzgerald, Professor, MIT, USA"Stone’s new book challenges one of the cherished myths that Western know-how saved the Global South from famine by revoluti
