Abolitionist Agroecology, Food Sovereignty and Pandemic Prevention PDF Download

Author: Maywa Montenegro de Wit
Publisher: Daraja Press
ISBN: 9781990263033
Category :
Languages : en
Pages : 80

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Book Description
COVID-19 has exposed the racialized nature of food systems, but also potentially grants opportunities to build anew. Maywa Montenegro explores a series of breakdowns, from fractured supply chains to uncontrolled infection among essential food workers to Black, Brown, and Indigenous communities scythed through by the virus along old grooves of race-class oppression. She traces the likely origins of COVID-19 to spillover sites forged by agroindustrial expansion into forested regions where pathogens spring free and infect humans. Industrial animal agriculture drives these ecological changes that incubate future outbreaks. Pandemics have their roots in the violent separation of communities from their territories, seeds, knowledge and wealth. Racism enables such theft as fundamental to capitalist expansion. To tackle pandemics and food injustices, Montenegro calls for an abolitionist agroecology. No anti-capitalist alternative can ignore the racism that is central to the transnational industrial food system. Scholars including Angela Davis, Ruth Wilson Gilmore, and Mariame Kaba have argued that although abolition is frequently seen as an oppositional strategy - to eradicate, for example, prisons and police - abolition is equally propositional. An abolitionist agroecology cracks open multiple possibilities that respond to the exigencies of a pandemic planet - there is no 'normal' to which we can safely return.

Author: Michel. P. Pimbert
Publisher: Routledge
ISBN: 1317354974
Category : Technology & Engineering
Languages : en
Pages : 407

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Book Description
Contestations over knowledge – and who controls its production – are a key focus of social movements and other actors that promote food sovereignty, agroecology and biocultural diversity. This book critically examines the kinds of knowledge and ways of knowing needed for food sovereignty, agroecology and biocultural diversity. ‘Food sovereignty’ is understood here as a transformative process that seeks to recreate the democratic realm and regenerate a diversity of autonomous food systems based on agroecology, biocultural diversity, equity, social justice and ecological sustainability. It is shown that alternatives to the current model of development require radically different knowledges and epistemologies from those on offer today in mainstream institutions (including universities, policy think tanks and donor organizations). To achieve food sovereignty, agroecology and biocultural diversity, there is a need to re-imagine and construct knowledge for diversity, decentralisation, dynamic adaptation and democracy. The authors critically explore the changes in organizations, research paradigms and professional practice that could help transform and co-create knowledge for a new modernity based on plural definitions of wellbeing. Particular attention is given to institutional, pedagogical and methodological innovations that can enhance cognitive justice by giving hitherto excluded citizens more power and agency in the construction of knowledge. The book thus contributes to the democratization of knowledge and power in the domain of food, environment and society. Chapters 1 and 8 of this book are freely available as downloadable Open Access PDFs at http://www.taylorfrancis.com under a Creative Commons Attribution-Non Commercial-No Derivatives (CC-BY-NC-ND) 4.0 license.

Author: Pandemic Research for the Peo (Prep)
Publisher:
ISBN: 9781988832975
Category :
Languages : en
Pages : 52

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Book Description
Pathogens repeatedly are emerging from a global agrifood system rooted in inequality, labor exploitation, and unfettered extractivism by which communities are robbed of their natural and social resources. A crisis-prone economic system that prioritizes production for profit over meeting human needs and ecological preservation is organized around intense monocultural production that, along the way, allows the deadliest of diseases to emerge. The PReP Agroecologies working group focuses on how agriculture might be reimagined as the kind of community-wide intervention that could stop coronaviruses and other pathogens from emerging in the first place. We address how mainstream science supports the same political and economic systems that helped produce the pandemic. Then we introduce agroecology, an environmentalism of the peasantry, the poor, and indigenous, long in practice, that treats agriculture as a part of the ecology out of which humanity grows its food. Agroecology-a science, movement, and practice-combines ecological science, indigenous and peasant knowledges, and social movements for food and territorial sovereignty to achieve environmentally just food systems. Peasant- and indigenous-led agroecology is uniquely positioned to limit the spread of zoonotic viruses: Post-capitalist agroecology champions the indigenous and smallholders who protect agricultural biodiversity. A diverse agroecological matrix of farm plots, agroforestry, and grazing lands all embedded within a forest can conserve animal biodiversity in the landscape. Agricultural biodiversity can make it more difficult for zoonotic diseases to prevail. Such a mode of conservation also takes into account the economic and social conditions of people currently tending the land, rather than a conservation that uproots people to foster the private accumulation of capital.

Author: Juber Akhtar
Publisher: BoD – Books on Demand
ISBN: 1837683786
Category : Science
Languages : en
Pages : 166

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Book Description
Vitamin B is a water-soluble vitamin that plays important roles in cell metabolism and synthesis of red blood cells. Many foods contain B vitamins, including meat, poultry, and fish, among others. Vitamin E is a fat-soluble vitamin with antioxidant properties that can be found in vegetable oils, cereals, meat, poultry, eggs, and fruits. Both vitamins B and E are important for human health. This book provides a comprehensive overview of vitamins B and E. It is organized into three sections on the role of vitamin B on body health and gut flora, vitamin B deficiency and its association with the disease pellagra, and the medicinal significance and complications associated with vitamin E deficiency.

Author: Brian K. Murphy
Publisher:
ISBN: 9781856497077
Category : Commitment (Psychology).
Languages : en
Pages : 0

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Book Description
Confronted with the powerful forces of huge corporations and governments, many people involved in social action feel pessimistic. This call for values-led action and radical social change elaborates a framework for human action and learning.

Author: Rob Wallace
Publisher: NYU Press
ISBN: 1583675906
Category : Business & Economics
Languages : en
Pages : 456

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Book Description
The first collection to explore infectious disease, agriculture, economics, and the nature of science together Thanks to breakthroughs in production and food science, agribusiness has been able to devise new ways to grow more food and get it more places more quickly. There is no shortage of news items on hundreds of thousands of hybrid poultry—each animal genetically identical to the next—packed together in megabarns, grown out in a matter of months, then slaughtered, processed and shipped to the other side of the globe. Less well known are the deadly pathogens mutating in, and emerging out of, these specialized agro-environments. In fact, many of the most dangerous new diseases in humans can be traced back to such food systems, among them Campylobacter, Nipah virus, Q fever, hepatitis E, and a variety of novel influenza variants. Agribusiness has known for decades that packing thousands of birds or livestock together results in a monoculture that selects for such disease. But market economics doesn't punish the companies for growing Big Flu—it punishes animals, the environment, consumers, and contract farmers. Alongside growing profits, diseases are permitted to emerge, evolve, and spread with little check. “That is,” writes evolutionary biologist Rob Wallace, “it pays to produce a pathogen that could kill a billion people.” In Big Farms Make Big Flu, a collection of dispatches by turns harrowing and thought-provoking, Wallace tracks the ways influenza and other pathogens emerge from an agriculture controlled by multinational corporations. Wallace details, with a precise and radical wit, the latest in the science of agricultural epidemiology, while at the same time juxtaposing ghastly phenomena such as attempts at producing featherless chickens, microbial time travel, and neoliberal Ebola. Wallace also offers sensible alternatives to lethal agribusiness. Some, such as farming cooperatives, integrated pathogen management, and mixed crop-livestock systems, are already in practice off the agribusiness grid. While many books cover facets of food or outbreaks, Wallace's collection appears the first to explore infectious disease, agriculture, economics and the nature of science together. Big Farms Make Big Flu integrates the political economies of disease and science to derive a new understanding of the evolution of infections. Highly capitalized agriculture may be farming pathogens as much as chickens or corn.

Author: Patrick Anderson
Publisher:
ISBN: 9781988832876
Category : Political Science
Languages : en
Pages : 368

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Book Description
Lenin150 (Samizdat) aims to contribute to the re-kindling of the communist attractor by engaging, in the spirit of critical solidarity, with Vladimir Ilyich Ulyanov in the year of his 150th anniversary. Conceived out of the former Soviet republic of Kyrgyzstan, the book brings together contributions from all continents, ranging in style from the academic to the lyrical. As such, these compelling, and in some cases absolutely urgent, appropriations of (the spectre of) Lenin aspire to be of considerable use-value for the struggles ahead.

Author: Steven Best
Publisher: Lexington Books
ISBN: 0739136984
Category : Business & Economics
Languages : en
Pages : 345

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Book Description
The Global Industrial Complex: Systems of Domination is a groundbreaking collection of essays by a diverse set of leading scholars who examine the entangled and evolving global array of corporate-state structures of hegemonic power--what the editors refer to as "the power complex"--that was first analyzed by C. Wright Mills in his 1956 classic work, The Power Elite. In this new volume edited by Steven Best, Richard Kahn, Anthony J. Nocella II, and Peter McLaren, the power complex is conceived as co-constituted, interdependent and imbricated systems of domination. Spreading insidiously on a global level, the transnational institutional relationships of the power complex combine the logics of capitalist exploitation and profits and industrialist norms of efficiency, control, and mass production, While some have begun to analyze these institutional complexes as separate entities, this book is unique in analyzing them as overlapping, mutually-enforcing systems that operate globally and which will undoubtedly frame the macro-narrative of the 21st century (and perhaps beyond). The global industrial complex--a grand power complex of complexes--thus poses one of the most formidable challenges to the sustainability of planetary democracy, freedom and peace today. But there can be no serious talk of opposition to it until it is more popularly named and understood. The Global Industrial Complex aims to be a foundational contribution to this emerging educational and political project.

Author: Amrit Wilson
Publisher:
ISBN: 9781988832012
Category :
Languages : en
Pages : 288

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Book Description
First published in 1978, and winning the Martin Luther King Memorial Prize for that year, Finding a Voice established a new discourse on South Asian women's lives and struggles in Britain. This new edition includes a preface by Meena Kandasamy, some historic photographs, and a remarkable new chapter by young South Asian women.

Author: Reiland Rabaka
Publisher: Lexington Books
ISBN: 0739128868
Category : Biography & Autobiography
Languages : en
Pages : 453

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Book Description
Building on and going far beyond W.E.B. Du Bois and the Problems of the Twenty-First Century and Du Bois's Dialectics, Reiland Rabaka's Africana Critical Theory innovatively identifies and analyzes continental and diasporan African contributions to classical and contemporary critical theory. This book represents a climatic critical theoretical clincher that cogently demonstrates how Du Bois's rarely discussed dialectical thought, interdisciplinarity, intellectual history-making radical political activism, and world-historical multiple liberation movement leadership helped to inaugurate a distinct Africana tradition of critical theory. With chapters on W.E.B. Du Bois, C.L.R. James, Negritude (Aime Cesaire and Leopold Senghor), Frantz Fanon and Amilcar Cabral, Africana Critical Theory endeavors to accessibly offer contemporary critical theorists an intellectual archaeology of the Africana tradition of critical theory and a much-needed dialectical deconstruction and reconstruction of black radical politics. These six seminal figures' collective thought and texts clearly cuts across several disciplines and, therefore, closes the chasm between Africana Studies and critical theory, constantly demanding that intellectuals not simply think deep thoughts, develop new theories, and theoretically support radical politics, but be and constantly become political activists, social organizers and cultural workers - that is, folk the Italian critical theorist Antonio Gramsci referred to as 'organic intellectuals.' In this sense, then, the series of studies gathered in Africana Critical Theory contribute not only to African Studies, African American Studies, Caribbean Studies, Cultural Studies, Gender Studies, and Postcolonial Studies, but also to contemporary critical theoretical discourse across an amazingly wide-range of 'traditional' disciplines, and radical political activism outside of (and, in many instances, absolutely against) Europe's ivory towers and the absurdities of the American academy.