The Food Wars

Neither the recent global food shortages nor the impending world energy crisis will be unfamiliar to readers, yet the link between the two has only recently been discussed. In Against the Grain, Walden Bello, renowned activist, academic and voice of the global South, situates the origins of the current food crisis within the neo-liberal reforms occurring on a global scale, describing the marginalization of the peasantry by global systems of production and distribution that service mainly the world's middle class and elite. Partially caused by the diversion of food crops to biofuel feedstock, the crisis, for Bello, has its roots in the destruction of peasant-based agricultural systems through structural adjustment and trade liberalization. He examines this phenomenon through various case studies in Africa, along with longer case studies of China, the Philippines and Mexico.

Yet Bello does not stop merely with his diagnosis of the disease. Instead, he traces the rise of the peasantry from being passive victims to a class-conscious force, one that has managed to intervene in global politics and precipitate the various collapses of the World Trade Organization's Doha Round. Following the rise of the progressive peasant federation Via Campesina, Bello finally suggests an alternative paradigm of production, one centered on the concept of de-globalization.

Walden Bello is a political activist and Professor of Sociology and Public Administration at the University of the Philippines in Manila, as well as executive director of Focus on the Global South, a policy research institute based in Bangkok and for which he was the Founding Director. He was previously executive director of the Institute for Food and Development Policy (Food First) in Oakland, California and was educated at Princeton University. He has taught at the University of California, Berkeley. In 2003, Bello was awarded the Right Livelihood Award, whose website describes him as “one of the leading critics of the current model of economic globalization, combining the roles of intellectual and activist.” Bello is also a fellow of the Transnational Institute (based in Amsterdam), and is a columnist for Foreign Policy In Focus. In March 2008 he was named Outstanding Public Scholar for 2008 by the International Studies Association. Bello is the author of Deglobalization: Ideas for a New Global Economy, Dark Victory: The United States and Global Poverty and Dilemmas of Domination: The Unmaking of the American Empire.