Press release
Pambazuka Press and GRAIN
17 May 2012

Pan-African publisher Pambazuka Press in collaboration with GRAIN, a small international non-profit that works to support small farmers, is to launch a vital text in the studies of food, land and climate, The Great Food Robbery: How corporations control food, grab land and destroy the climate. Available worldwide in May 2012, this publication marks the five-week countdown to Rio+20, the United Nations Conference on Sustainable Development.

After the failure of the United Nations Climate Change Conference at Durban last December to formulate a united response strategy, there are mixed feelings on what Rio+20 will be able to achieve. But what is clear is that all participants will need to be well informed. ‘Everyone should read The Great Food Robbery – every citizen, every political leader – to understand how agribusiness, which has created hunger and disease, is now contributing to the biggest resource grab since Columbus,’ said Dr Vandana Shiva, physicist, internationally renowned activist and founder of Navdanya International. Shiva is one of many high profile academics from around the world who have endorsed The Great Food Robbery. Others include Dr. Hans Herren, Naomi Klein, Eric Holt-Giménez, and UN Special Rapporteur on the Right to Food, Prof. Olivier De Schutter.

Henk Hobbelink, of GRAIN, in his speech to the Swedish government upon receiving the Right Livelihood Award stated the latest trend in global land grabbing for outsourced food production is just one facet of a much greater attack. ‘Land grabs for mining, tourism, biofuels, dam construction, infrastructure projects, timber and now carbon trading are all part of the same process, turning farmers into refugees on their own land.’

The Great Food Robbery is an advocate for the rural communities that have fed the world for millennia. It examines how agribusiness is driving today’s global food crisis and highlights the culpability of the industrial food system regarding the climate crisis, revealing how land grabbing is being fuelled by a financial industry unconcerned by its exploitation of the world’s poorest.

GRAIN has collected materials on topics ranging from agribusiness and food sovereignty to land grabbing and the climate crisis to produce The Great Food Robbery. It is an essential introduction to understanding the powers that are controlling our food system and crucially offers the means to challenge the status quo. It will be of interest to activists, academics, students, journalists, development and NGO professionals.

???FOR INTERVIEWS:

Contact

- Aaron O'Dowling-Keane (Ms.)
Publishing and Marketing Coordinator, Pambazuka Press
Tel: +44 (0)1865 727006 x204
Email: [email][email protected]
www.pambazukapress.org

- Dexter X
Information worker, GRAIN
Tel: +1 (0) 514 585 3987
Email: [email][email protected]
www.grain.org

NOTES TO EDITORS:

GRAIN supports small farmers and social movements in their struggles for community-controlled and biodiversity-based food systems. In 2011, GRAIN was awarded the Right Livelihood Award (the Alternative Nobel Peace prize) for ‘its worldwide work to protect the livelihoods and rights of farming communities and to expose the massive purchases of farmland in developing countries by foreign financial interests’.

BOOK DETAILS

17 May 2012
9780857491138
Paperback
GB pounds 14.95 / US dollars 24.95 / CAN dollars 24.95
216 x 279 mm
164 pp