Environment Agriculture

"The State of Food and Agriculture 2002" is FAO's annual report on current developments and issues in world agriculture. It monitors the global agricultural situation as well as the overall economic environment surrounding world agriculture, and this year includes an overview of the status of negotiations on agricultural trade following the launch of a new round of multilateral trade negotiations by the World Trade Organization. An overview of the current agricultural situation by main regions in the world, both developing and developed, is presented, with discussion of current issues of importance for agriculture in the various regions. Agriculture, fisheries and forestry, if properly managed, can provide a series of benefits to large sections of people. Included in this issue is the SOFA 2002 CD-ROM, containing time series data for 150 countries, country groups and regions in English, French and Spanish, together with FAOSTAT TS software to ensure easy access and use.

It is easy to feel overwhelmed and depressed by all the threats facing modern agriculture--threats to the environment, to the health and safety of our food, to the economic and cultural viability of farmers and rural communities. Hundreds of thousands of farmers leave their farms every year as the juggernaut of "big agriculture" plows across our rural landscape. But there are viable alternatives to big agriculture, as many farmers and others involved in agriculture, including consumers, are discovering. In Farming for Us All, Michael Mayerfeld Bell offers crucial insight into the future of a viable sustainable agriculture movement in the United States. Based on interviews and years of close interaction with more than sixty Iowa farm families, Bell answers two critical questions concerning sustainable agriculture: why some farmers are becoming sustainable farmers and why, as yet, most are not. The first part of the book describes how the structure of agriculture--that nexus of markets, regulations, subsides, and technology--has created a situation in which farmers are paid to undermine their own economic and social security as well as the security of the land. The second part explores why most Iowa farmers carry on with these destructive practices. Farming is a pressured endeavor, and farmers find themselves relying on recipes of knowledge to get them through the latest crisis, with little opportunity to explore some other way--even if they think what they know how to do isn't likely to work very well for them. And yet some farmers resist the tide of big agriculture. In the third part of the book, Bell examines Iowa's largest sustainable agriculture group, Practical Farmers of Iowa(PFI), and he finds a new model of social relations at work.