Tony Weis

Food Consumption and its Impact on Cardiovascular Disease: Importance of Solutions Focused on the Globalized Food System: A Report From the Workshop Convened by the World Heart Federation.

Major scholars in the field, on the basis of a 3-day consensus, created an in-depth review of current knowledge on the role of diet in cardiovascular disease (CVD), the changing global food system and global dietary patterns, and potential policy solutions. Evidence from different countries and age/race/ethnicity/socioeconomic groups suggesting the health effects studies of foods, macronutrients, and dietary patterns on CVD appear to be far more consistent though regional knowledge gaps is highlighted. Large gaps in knowledge about the association of macronutrients to CVD in low- and middle-income countries particularly linked with dietary patterns are reviewed. Our understanding of foods and macronutrients in relationship to CVD is broadly clear; however, major gaps exist both in dietary pattern research and ways to change diets and food systems. On the basis of the current evidence, the traditional Mediterranean-type diet, including plant foods and emphasis on plant protein sources provides a well-tested healthy dietary pattern to reduce CVD.

Introduction: critical perspectives on food sovereignty

Visions of food sovereignty have been extremely important in helping to galvanize broad-based and diverse movements around the need for radical changes in agro-food systems. Yet while food sovereignty has thrived as a ‘dynamic process’, until recently there has been insufficient attention to many thorny questions, such as its origins, its connection to other food justice movements, its relation to rights discourses, the roles of markets and states and the challenges of implementation. This essay contributes to food sovereignty praxis by pushing the process of critical self-reflection forward and considering its relation to critical agrarian studies – and vice versa.

The meat of the global food crisis

The global food crisis has been widely described in terms of the volatility of grain and oilseed markets and the associated worsening conditions of food security facing many poor people. Various explanations have been given for this volatility, including increasingly meat-centered diets and rising demand for animal feed, especially in China. This is a very partial reading, as the food crisis runs much deeper than recent market turbulence; when it is understood in terms of the biophysical contradictions of the industrial grain–oilseed–livestock complex and how they are now accelerating, meat moves to the center of the story. Industrial livestock production is the driving force behind rising meat consumption on a world scale, and the process of cycling great volumes of industrial grains and oilseeds through soaring populations of concentrated animals serves to magnify the land and resource budgets, pollution, and greenhouse gas emissions associated with agriculture. These dynamics not only reflect disparities but are exacerbating them, foremost through climate change. Thus, this paper suggests that rising meat consumption and industrial livestock production should be understood together to comprise a powerful long-term vector of global inequality.

Beyond peasant deforestation: environment and development in rural Jamaica.

Abstract Jamaica is experiencing one of the highest rates of deforestation in the world, with severe environmental consequences attendant to the loss of its forests. It is also plagued by high levels of poverty, particularly in rural areas. As throughout much of the tropics, impoverished peasant farmers are blamed as the primary agents in Jamaicas forest colonisation. Employing a case study in the Blue Mountains, this paper explores the discord that exists between forest conservation and the development priorities of poor farmers, arguing that this unsustainable dichotomy can only be understood by acknowledging the political economy which constrains peasant agriculture.

A precarious balance: Neoliberalism, crisis management, and the social implosion in Jamaica

This article examines the process of structural adjustment in Jamaica, and the various ways in which the contradictory tensions embedded in the current order are being contained. Although political, economic and social realities are deeply inequitable and potentially unstable, there are serious barriers to understanding, dialogue, organisation and optimism among the poor, which have produced implosive intra-class dynamics. Assessing these barriers provides insight into the challenge of re-inspiring alternative imaginations and collective opposition to class structures in Jamaica, as well as in other adjusted and heavily-indebted countries where a neoliberal fatalism is contributing to social atomisation, rather than to mobilisation.

The Rise, Fall and Future of the Jamaican Peasantry

This article examines the crisis of the Jamaican peasantry. Jamaicas peasants are struggling against pressures old and new, with the burden of their spatial inheritance magnified by a withering state, rising food imports following trade liberalisation, and oft-conflictive social relations. It begins by examining the historical formation of the peasantry after Emancipation, emphasising the unevenness of the landscape and the tensions between individualism and cooperation, before describing the protracted process of de-peasantisation, which has sped under structural adjustment reforms. Current conditions and future prospects are assessed through the insights and experiences of peasant farmers situated on the periphery of a plantation landscape. Ultimately, the future of peasant farming in Jamaica is seen to be bound up foremost in the struggle for land reform, and it is hoped that the current de-stabilisation of the plantation system will provide a new window for historic change.

Environment, Migration and Food Security in the Upper West Region of Ghana

Ghana has achieved dramatic improvements in national food security in recent years, but concealed in this overall progress is a considerable measure of regional unevenness, with the population living in the dry savannah regions in the north faring the worst. The Upper West Region (UWR) is the poorest region of Ghana and has long served as a reservoir of migratory labour for the southern parts of the country, but in recent years migration patterns have been both escalating and changing. Increasingly, permanent UWR migration is focusing on the more fertile lands of the Brong-Ahafo Region (BAR), where migrants are able to access farmland in different leasehold relationships. A rapid research appraisal conducted in Techiman (BAR) suggests that UWR migrants view their growing settlement in the BAR to be a long-term phenomenon. It also highlighted how land tenancy issues are central to the challenges migrant farmers face, and are largely perceived as being immutable by the farmers themselves. Nearly all new UWR migrants must begin working in sharecropping relationships for BA landlords, paying out one-third of their harvest as rent, and over time they hope to save sufficient market earnings in order to lease the land outright. Despite these rents and the high cost of transportation, this chapter suggests that evolving migration patterns from the Upper West Region (UWR) of Ghana are connected to an intensifying system of domestic “food aid” (i.e. non-market transfers) back to the region, providing a crucial means of coping with its precarious food insecurity. With environmental conditions in dry regions of Sahelian Africa projected to worsen with climate change, the agricultural capacity of the UWR is likely to deteriorate further in coming years, with migratory pressures therefore continuing to rise. In light of this, this study points towards both future research objectives in the UWR and the BAR, as well as to the implications such research could have for policy interventions and locally grounded regional initiatives.

Peasant balances, neoliberalism, and the stunted growth of non- traditional agro-exports in Haiti

This paper examines divergent peasant responses to models of export-oriented mango production that have been promoted in post-earthquake Haiti. While critical agrarian studies tends to focus more on the ways that capital shapes conditions facing peasant producers, there has been much less attention to the ways that peasant decision-making can restrict how capital operates. This paper argues that Haitian peasants strive to pursue their livelihoods in ways that are at odds with the ambitions of the country’s political and economic elites, and highlights some of the ways that peasants are pushing back against exploitative arrangements to maintain a degree of autonomy over their cropping systems. The field research that forms the empirical basis of this paper was conducted between November 2010 and July 2013 and included: qualitative interviews with leaders of peasant and other rural community organizations, Haitian government officials, and representatives of multilateral institutions; focus groups with peasant farmers; and participant observation.

The challenge of climate change adaptation in Guyana

Climate change threatens to bring enormous infrastructural challenges for low-lying regions, and the capacity for adaptation is highly uneven on a global scale. Guyana, a developing country in South America, is highly susceptible to sea-level rise and flooding, because much of the population lives at or below sea level and depends upon old and decaying coastal infrastructure. This article examines the efforts of the Guyanese state to prioritize climate change adaptation, drawing from budgetary and documentary analyses and in-depth interviews with key informants in pertinent government ministries and non-governmental organizations. The Guyana government clearly recognizes the countrys acute vulnerability to climate change – which has been accentuated by multiple recent flood events – and focuses on the need for vast infrastructural rehabilitation and enhancement as the main adaptation priority. However, while Guyana has emerged as a champion of climate change mitigation through averted deforestation, government investment in adaptation remains relatively small, and although a limited budget is one of the reasons for this, a number of other impediments complicate the issue. These include limited technical skills, low public awareness and the longer time-scale of threats relative to other national priorities. Ultimately, this case highlights some of the formidable challenges which poor countries face in prioritizing investments in adaptation.

Contradictions and Change in Jamaica: Theorizing Ecosocial Resistance Amidst Ecological Crisis

Jamaica’s plantation landscape and its associated racio-class scars persist to this day. Embedded by colonialism, large estates and pastures continue to dominate the best coastal lowland while the peasantry remains confined to the rugged interior. At the same time, Jamaica possesses extreme and persistent rural poverty. Forty-five percent of Jamaica’s 2.5 million people live in rural areas, and roughly half of this