Subjects Archives: Agriculture

Once again the Thai NGOs have sided with the military-installed royalist government against the demands of hundreds of thousands of pro-democracy Red Shirts.  The Red Shirts, who represent millions of ordinary working people in urban and rural areas, have been staging huge protests in Bangkok in recent days.  Their demands are for the dissolution of […]

  John Bellamy Foster.  The Ecological Revolution: Making Peace with the Planet.  New York: Monthly Review Press, 2009.  288pp.  $17.95 (pb).  ISBN 9781583671795. This book is a major achievement.  It combines enormous breadth of scholarship with consummate theoretical integration to produce a powerful political argument.  It should be required reading for anyone who cares about […]

The terse, typewritten note slipped under my door in a sealed envelope confirmed my appointment with India’s Gravest Internal Security Threat.  I’d been waiting for months to hear from them.  I had to be at the Ma Danteshwari mandir in Dantewada, Chhattisgarh, at any of four given times on two given days.  That was to […]

  Zimbabwe’s land issue has generated unprecedented debates both within and outside the country.  The debates, which followed the dramatic occupations of white farms by rural peasants in the late 1990s, are generally polarised between those who support radical land reform and those who support market-orientated reforms.  The former stand accused of supporting Mugabe’s regime […]

The prospects for democracy, socio-economic development, and conflict resolution will suffer if the West continues to rely on punitive measures. This time, the warmongers’ silly season found its apogée in U.S. neo-conservative Daniel Pipes’ advice to Obama to “bomb Iran,” which appeared shortly after Tony Blair, having outlined why he helped invade Iraq, remarked ominously, […]

Johannesburg, 11 March 2010 (IRIN) — Most food crop cultivation in Africa is rain-fed, but climate change is affecting vital rainfall patterns and pushing up temperatures, diminishing yields that could halve in some countries by 2020.  This warning has been widely quoted since it first appeared in a synthesis report for policy-makers in 2007 by […]

China and India are generally regarded as the two large countries in the developing world that are the “success stories” of globalisation.  This success has been defined by the high and sustained rates of growth of aggregate and per capita national income; and the substantial reduction in income poverty.  Further, both China and India are […]

  The white man called you Bhagat Singh that day, The black man calls you Naxalite today. But everyone will call you the morning star tomorrow. — Excerpt from the Telugu poem ‘Final Journey: First Victory’ by Sri Sri 1 It has been a long and tortuous route.  Forty-three years ago, a group of Maoist […]

From 21 January to 2 February 2010, Eric Toussaint and Olivier Bonfond — both involved in alterglobalization activism and members of the International Council of the World Social Forum, of the world coordination of social movements, and of the Committee for the Abolition of the Third World Debt 1 — participated in various events and […]

It’s now more than a month since the earthquake that laid waste to Port-au-Prince, killing more than 200,000 people and thrusting millions of people into the most desperate conditions. But according to the U.S. government, Haitians have a lot to be thankful for. On February 12, the U.S. Ambassador to Haiti Ken Merten boasted: “In […]

  Interview by Aleix Bombila, for En Lucha (Spain), of John Bellamy Foster, editor of Monthly Review, and author of Marx’s Ecology and The Ecological Revolution En Lucha: In your book Marx’s Ecology you argue that Marxism has a lot to offer to the ecologist movement.  What kind of united work can be established between […]

Dambisa Moyo was no doubt an excellent student.  Unfortunately, she is a product of the conventional economics curriculum, which is great if one is to embark on a career at the World Bank or Goldman Sachs.  She attempts a radical critique of ‘aid’ but sadly she is not up to the task, her noble intentions […]

The capitalist world has experienced its deepest economic meltdown since the Great Depression of the 1930s.  Paradoxically, whereas the earlier period saw the breakdown of liberal capitalism, the rise of fascism and Nazism, and the Soviet alternative to liberal capitalism, today neo-liberalism and capitalist globalization still remain powerful, and apparently supreme, on the stage of […]

Jeffrey Sachs has become something of a force in international development circles over the past decade.  As special advisor to the UN’s Secretary General Ban Ki-Moon, former director of the UN’s Millennium Development Project, and a decorated economist at Columbia University, Sachs certainly has much to brag about.  The publication of his runaway bestseller, The […]

  Michael Sauter.  Visions of the Enlightenment: The Edict on Religion of 1788 and the Politics of the Public Sphere in Eighteenth-Century Prussia.  Brill’s Studies in Intellectual History.  Leiden: Brill, 2009.  xvii + 242 pp. $147.00 (cloth), ISBN 978-90-04-17651-5. In this recent book, Michael J. Sauter has set himself many tasks.  His first argument urges […]

Over the past four decades Israel has defrauded Palestinians working inside Israel of more than $2 billion by deducting from their salaries contributions for welfare benefits to which they were never entitled, Israeli economists have revealed. A new report, “State Robbery,” to be published later this month, says the “theft” continued even after the Palestinian […]

  Haitians’ incredible plight has always been difficult to fully appreciate.  Then the earthquake struck: hundreds of thousands dead, hundreds of thousands more hurt, a million homeless, and two million in need of food.  It defies imagination. And according to a journalist just returned from Haiti, even the heart-rending footage we’ve seen here on television […]

“Development,” I’ve discovered, operates as a flagrantly racist discourse in some guises.  Scrambling to explain the reasons for Africa’s perpetual poverty and apparently incurable misery, laypersons in the West point to Africans’ “savagery” and alleged incapacity for civilization.  This is not just a fringe opinion; even among putatively educated individuals such nonsense recurs with disturbing […]

On January 14, two days after the Port-au-Prince earthquake, I finally got a chance to look over my email, courtesy of a small Haitian NGO in a quiet, relatively undamaged neighborhood in the south of the city.  After reading and answering personal messages, I noticed that a lot of my mail consisted of appeals for […]

On Monday, six days after the earthquake in Haiti, the U.S. Southern Command finally began to drop bottled water and food (MREs) from an Air Force C-17.  U.S. Defense Secretary Robert Gates had previously rejected such a method because of “security concerns.” The Guardian reports that people are dying of thirst.  And if they do […]