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Book Launch: Small Farmers for Global Food Security: The Demise and Reinvention of Moral Ecologies in Indonesia (2024)
Book Launch
Session Description
Please join Dr Graeme MacRae and Professor Thomas Reuter to launch their book Small Farmers for Global Food Security: The Demise and Reinvention of Moral Ecologies in Indonesia (2024) available now from Cambridge Scholars Publishing.
Food systems in Indonesia, as in most developing countries, have experienced major transformations in the course of agriculture modernisation. This has led to a loss of once healthy human diets and eco-systems, as well as a decline in social cohesion and long term food security. Our detailed ethnographic research over the past decade, mainly in Java and Bali but also in East Timor and India, informs this volume. It documents this decline but also the recent rise of bottom-up initiatives to revive small farming, sustainable production methods, and community-based distribution systems. A growing movement of farmers in Asia and beyond rejects the dominant paradigm of aggressive capitalist development, and supports the re-creation of food systems based on what we refer to as moral ecology — that is, the notion that food is a common good rather than for profit, and needs to be produced without harming the natural environment. Small farmers such as these already feed two thirds of humanity with one third of agricultural land. With proper support, we argue, they could feed the entire world, using fully sustainable and socially responsible approaches to reverse biodiversity loss and curb world hunger.
Click here to read an extract
About the editors:
Food systems in Indonesia, as in most developing countries, have experienced major transformations in the course of agriculture modernisation. This has led to a loss of once healthy human diets and eco-systems, as well as a decline in social cohesion and long term food security. Our detailed ethnographic research over the past decade, mainly in Java and Bali but also in East Timor and India, informs this volume. It documents this decline but also the recent rise of bottom-up initiatives to revive small farming, sustainable production methods, and community-based distribution systems. A growing movement of farmers in Asia and beyond rejects the dominant paradigm of aggressive capitalist development, and supports the re-creation of food systems based on what we refer to as moral ecology — that is, the notion that food is a common good rather than for profit, and needs to be produced without harming the natural environment. Small farmers such as these already feed two thirds of humanity with one third of agricultural land. With proper support, we argue, they could feed the entire world, using fully sustainable and socially responsible approaches to reverse biodiversity loss and curb world hunger.
Click here to read an extract
About the editors:
- Dr Graeme MacRae teaches anthropology at Massey University in New Zealand and is a Senior Research Fellow at the Asia Institute, University of Melbourne, Australia. His research in Indonesia and India over the last three decades is published in over 50 articles and chapters, many of them on agriculture. A recent book is “John Darling: An Australian Filmmaker in Indonesia.”
- Prof Dr Thomas Reuter is an anthropologist at the Asia Institute, University of Melbourne, who has researched transformative social change, food systems and sustainability in Asia and beyond since 1994. He is a board member of the World Academy of Arts and Science, a fellow of Academia Europaea, and former chair of the World Council of Anthropological Associations and Senior Vice-President of the International Union of Anthropological and Ethnological Sciences. He has produced 17 books, 150 papers and two documentary films.