Abolitionist Agroecology, Food Sovereignty and Pandemic Prevention Contributor(s): Montenegro de Wit, Maywa (Author) |
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ISBN: 1990263038 ISBN-13: 9781990263033 Publisher: Daraja Press OUR PRICE: $14.25 Product Type: Paperback Published: March 2021 |
Additional Information |
BISAC Categories: - Social Science | Disease & Health Issues - Social Science | Agriculture & Food - Political Science | Public Policy - Agriculture & Food Policy |
Physical Information: 0.17" H x 6" W x 9" (0.26 lbs) 79 pages |
Descriptions, Reviews, Etc. |
Publisher 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. |