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January 2007

Bryan Newman, BA
Asian Studies
University of North Carolina

Alongside India’s tremendous middle class growth and the much-celebrated boom of its IT sector, a quiet emergency of debt-driven suicide has taken hold in the countryside. It is estimated that between 1993 and 2003, as many as 100,000 indebted Indian farmers took their own lives. Many of these farmers died consuming the very same pesticides they had bought to use on their fields.

by Eric Holt-Giménez, Ph.D.
September 2007

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Introduction

Many of the current critiques of the World Bank's "market-assisted" programs for land reform center on the contradictions between the Bank's neo-liberal agrarian discourse and the poor distributive results of its projects on the ground . Taking the Bank to task for the inconsistency between its mission to alleviate rural poverty and the regressive nature of its land reform programs is important, not only because it can help amplify the voices of the landless, but because it helps expose the inherent hypocrisies in the Bank's non-distributive approach to economic growth and rural development, overall.

However, these critiques do not necessarily shed light on why the Bank continually implements these failed programs with such insistence. Simply pointing to the "Washington Consensus" does not provide a specific understanding of the role of market-based land reform within the Bank's national development strategies. Without a structural analysis of the Bank's agenda, it is difficult to understand the political scope of its land reform programs. Further, it is important to consider the Bank's suite of policies and projects in a particular country in order to know what role land reform (or lack of it) might play in the Bank's overall strategy. A market-based land reform project may be an agrarian failure for the peasantry, yet still be quite successful in terms of helping restructure the social and economic institutions in a country's hinterlands in favor of agribusiness, tourism, or extractive industries, for example.

Fair to the Last Drop:
The Corporate Challenges to Fair Trade Coffee

-By Eric Holt-Giménez, Ian Bailey, and Devon Sampson

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Coffee, Poverty and Crises

Coffee has long stood for both privilege and poverty. Since the time of the colonial coffee booms of the mid 1800s, coffee has been one of the world's most valuable export commodities, and today is among the top five in gross value of world trade.

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	DR 18 Ghana's Gold Mining.pdf	2.09 MB

By Albert T. Armstrong
April 2008

To read the entire report, open the pdf file at the bottom of the executive summary. To order additional copies contact Food First Books directly.
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About the Author

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	DR 20 Oakland Food Retail Impact Study feb 2009.pdf	757.45 KB

After decades of underinvestment, West Oakland finally has two potential food retailers considering locations in the neighborhood. Fresh & Easy, a chain store owned by British-based Tesco (the world’s third-largest food retailer), and People’s Grocery, the for-profit arm of an Oakland nonprofit organization, have both indicated their intent to locate in this long-underserved area.

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	Food Policy Councils Report Exec Summ.pdf	1.52 MB

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	Food Policy Councils Report small.pdf	2.9 MB

Executive Summary

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	DR 19 BA Meta-Analysis -Mar 2009.pdf	376.86 KB

Over the past decade, more than 50 studies have examined food system and community food issues throughout the Bay Area. While all of the studies have an obvious element in common—food—each addresses different “sectors” of the food system, including food production, processing and distribution, consumption, and waste recovery. The design and intent of each study varies widely, making cross-comparisons difficult.

Development Report No.12:

Cultivating Havana: Urban Agriculture and Food Security in the Years of Crisis

By Catherine Murphy

1999

Read the whole report in PDF format.

Executive Summary

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Development Report No. 14

Cuba's New Agricultural Revolution

The Transformation of Food Crop Production in Contemporary Cuba

Laura J. Enríquez

Department of Sociology

University of California

Berkeley, California

May 2000

Other Development Reports can be ordered from our on-line bookstore.