Why read The Agricultural Dilemma?

Book cover of The Agricultural Dilemma: How Not to Feed the World

Book description

provides a new analysis of population and agricultural growth. argues that we can't make sense of population and food production without recognizing the drivers of three fundamentally different types of agriculture: Malthusian (expansion), industrialization (external-input-dependent) and intensification (labour-based). upends entrenched misconceptions such as that we are running out of land…

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Why read it?

1 author picked The Agricultural Dilemma as one of their favorite books. Why do they recommend it?

Chris Smaje

Author

I’ve been reading, thinking about, and doing food and farming for a long time, but I still found this book an eye-opener in its rigorous understanding of how we’re getting the food system so wrong globally.

We’ve been spun a line that modern petrochemical-intensive agriculture, with its supposedly scientific and efficient methods, holds the line against poverty and hunger in our populous modern world. In scholarly but readable prose, Stone’s book demolishes this idea, showing how modern industrial farming makes too many of us ill, poor, and vulnerable.

Breathing new life into the much-maligned model of the labour-intensive small ‘peasant’…

From Chris' list on The best books to help us understand why we must adopt low-impact local food systems, and what’s stopping us.