In today’s globally integrated food system, events in one part of the world can have multiple and wide-ranging effects, as has been shown by the recent and rapid global rise in food prices. Transnational corporations (TNCs) have been central to the development of this global food system, dominating production, international trade, processing, distribution, and retail sectors. Moreover, these global corporations play a key role in the establishment of rules and regulations by which they themselves are governed. This book examines how TNCs exercise power over global food and agriculture governance and what the consequences are for the sustainability of the global food system.

The book defines three aspects of this corporate power: instrumental power, or direct influence; structural power, or the broader influence corporations have over setting agendas and rules; and discursive, or communicative and persuasive, power. The book begins by examining the nature of corporate power in cases ranging from “green” food certification in Southeast Asia and corporate influence on U.S. food aid policy to governance in the seed industry and international food safety standards. Chapters examine such issues as promotion of corporate-defined “environmental sustainability” and “food security,” biotechnology firms and intellectual property rights, and consumer resistance to GMOs and other cases of contestation in agrobiology. In a final chapter, the editors raise the crucial question of how to achieve participation, transparency, and accountability in food governance.
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My study, Agroecology in Action, shows that many people are assembling different configurations of social networks, based on their understanding of sustainable agriculture, and that these are having a profound effect on American farming. I wrote this book to help theoreticians and practitioners better understand that alternative agriculture requires an alternative extension process: social learning.

I love California’s environment and I love California agriculture. As I rambled around our state’s rural landscape, I discovered that many people working in agriculture do, too, while at the same time, most urban Californians are removed from farming. This prompted me to show how farming is evolving to become more environmentally conscious. I discovered that thousands of people were working to make incremental, affordable improvements in stewardship, but these were largely invisible to the public. The environmental problems of modern agriculture get newspaper headlines. I wanted my study to take on the “big picture” question of the evolution of these “thought and practice” issues, something that is not generally reported in popular media or scientific journal articles.

My first idea for a dissertation centered on agricultural policy questions, but I soon discovered that extension strategies in sustainable agriculture were more critical, and begged for social science analysis. How do growers or consultants learn what they need to know? Why have some UC Cooperative Extension advisors and commodity groups worked intensively with grower networks to foster sustainable agriculture innovation? What extension strategies have they developed? When I about the agricultural partnership model, I realized that there were many initiatives taking place in the agricultural community with many crops that represented a “quiet revolution.” I set out to document them and to look for emergent patterns that could inform further efforts.

My initial work suggested that the “partnership model” depended on grower participation and cooperative learning in networks, and these features distinguish it from “technology transfer.” The UC Biologically Integrated Farming Systems (BIFS) Workgroup was generous in funding a portion of my study specifically investigating the role of grower participation. I used a network analysis methodology because it allowed me to look at how clusters of people were coordinating their participatory learning efforts. Over a three-year period, I conducted over 150 interviews and 13 focus groups with 84 participants. I attended more than 34 field days and agricultural partnership meetings, and reviewed over 200 reports and articles.

Each chapter opens with a narrative of how farmers, consultants, extension agents, scientists, growers groups and environmental agency officials collaboratively learned about how to make ecological principles practical in farming—in other words, useful for pollution prevention and sustaining rural livelihoods. I show the critical importance of “social learning” to foster innovation. Many great ideas for preventing pollution in agriculture exist on paper. My book explains how these networks realized their potential. The balance of each chapter provides social science analysis of how these networks negotiate the challenges of putting these ideas into action.

I wrote the book so that it would appeal to multiple audiences. General readers can engage the big issues by reading the opening narratives. Anyone interested in assembling a network for environmental resource protection will benefit from a close reading of the more formal social science analysis, which constitutes the balance of each chapter. My study suggests that pollution prevention has taken place in general proportion to the resources and effort invested in the development of integrated farming systems. This begs the question: What would happen if the same research, innovation and collaborative Extension efforts were expended on all crops?

The book concludes with a call to public mobilization. The public wants more sustainable agriculture. Many producers and scientists do as well. Agricultural policymakers and research directors are the critical missing links. This book shows how agriculture could be an even better steward of the environment, with more investment in these new forms of research and innovation. I would like to thank the hundreds of people who helped me with this study, but especially the past and present staff of SAREP and the UC BIFS Workgroup. These are the people making the difference; all I did was tell their story.

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Edited by Paloma Pavel
Introduction by Carl Anthony

Forthcoming, MIT Press

Sustainable Metropolitan Communities and Regional Equity brings together the leading organizers, researchers and policy analysts, who tell the stories and provide the analysis about the growing movement for regional equity and sustainability.
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David V. Carruthers

March 2008, MIT Press

Environmental justice concerns form an important part of popular environmental movements in many countries. Activists, scholars, and policymakers in the developing world, for example, increasingly use the tools of environmental justice to link concerns over social justice and environmental well-being. Environmental Justice in Latin America investigates the emergence of a distinctively Latin American environmental justice movement, offering analyses and case studies that examine both the promise and the limits of environmental justice in Latin America and the Caribbean–both as a rallying point for popular mobilization and as a set of principles for analysis and policymaking.

After considering such conceptual issues as the connection between environmental conditions and race, trade, and social justice, the book presents a series of case studies. These studies focus first on industrial development, examining such topics as social tension over “megadevelopment” projects in Argentina and the concentrated industrial waste hazards of the export assembly plants on the U.S.-Mexico border, and then on the power and politics involved in land and resource use. Other chapters explore ecotourism, inequitable land distribution in Brazil, the ongoing struggle for justice and accountability over the former U.S. Navy bombing range in Vieques, Puerto Rico, and water policy in Chile, Bolivia, and Mexico. Taken together, the analyses and case studies suggest that environmental justice–which highlights both broader issues of global injustice and local concerns–holds tremendous promise as a way to understand and address environmental inequities in Latin America and elsewhere.

Contributors:
Henri Acselrad, David V. Carruthers, Jordi Díez, Katherine T. McCaffrey, Sarah A. Moore, Peter Newell, Tom Perreault, Carlos Reboratti, Reyes Rodríguez, Juanita Sundberg, Stefanie Wickstrom, Wendy Wolford, Michele Zebich-Knos

About the Editor

David V. Carruthers is Associate Professor in the Department of Political Science at San Diego State University.
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Q. Do you have any suggestions or recommendations of nutritional analysis programs that parents have used (and have liked using)? If not, can you suggest an analysis program that has been used extensively in research of pre-schoolers?

A. There is a Nutrition Data System for Research, based on parental recall of preschoolers’ intake, but we don’t know of any programs parents are able to use. The citation for the study is:

Fitzgibbon ML, Stolley MR, Schiffer L, Van Horn L, KauferChristoffel K, Dyer A. Two-year follow-up results fro HIP-HOP to Heath JR.: A randomized controlled trial for overweight prevention in preschool minority children. Journal of Pediatrics 2005;146:618-625.
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“As I started my dissertation research, I observed that many theories have evolved about sustainable agriculture, but few studies explain how people (farmers, farm advisers, scientists) had actually put these ideas into action.”

From the publication Sustainable Action. Click here for the full commentary
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Robert Gottlieb and Irene Wolt

1977, Island Press

Power – how it is created, how it has been and how it is being used – is at the heart of Thinking Big, the first book to tell the story of the Los Angeles Times and its critical role in the explosion of a small cattle town into the nation’s second-largest metropolis. Irene Wolt and Robert Gottlieb recount this absorbing saga of how the Chandler family built one of the largest publishing empires on earth from the beginning of the Los Angeles Times in 1881 to its present gigantic conglomerate, the Times Mirror Company.

Thinking Big is remarkable, colorful tale of dominating, gifted men and women, notably including Dorothy (“Buffy”) Norman, and Otis Chandler. We see in detail how the legendary Harrison Gray Otis, Harry Chandler, and their cohorts first orchestrated the development of Southern California. This involved the manipulation of scarce water resources, the boldest kind of land speculation, promotion of the freeway system and the automobile culture, and their control of the police forces – all bolstered by political clout stemming from the making or breaking of candidates through their newspaper. So power exercised in this story is hardly abstract. We read of the union warfare culminating in the bombing of the Times building and the McNamara brothers’ trial; of the Owens Valley water war; the creation of their huge Mexican and Imperial Valley landholdings as well as Tejon Ranch by the Otises and the Chandlers; and of the modern epoch, with such highlights as the politics of the cultural scene; Buffy Chandler and the Los Angeles Music Center; the GeoTek affair and young Otis Chandler’s connections with it; the ideological transformation of the Times, first signified by its expose of the John Birch Society and, following the Watts riots and Vietnam, is new critical line on Nixon and Watergate.

As Cary McWillaims says of Thinking Big, “its is more than the story of the Times: it is really a large part of the story of Los Angeles. It is, also, very much a part of a larger story – the dynamics of expansionism, of mindless unplanned growth, or free enterprise run amuck.”
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Robert Gottlieb and Peter Wiley

1984, Island Press

America’s Saints is the untold story of the rapid rise to national prominence of the Mormon Church since World War II. Investigative journalists Robert Gottlieb and Peter Wiley take a behind-the-scenes look at the Mormons – their enormous spiritual appeal, the mechanisms of their spreading bureaucracy, the little-known men at the top who control a vast economic empire, exercise tremendous political influence, and function as virtual patriarchs and authority figures for more than 5 1/4 million members, whose primary dictum is “Believe and Obey.”

This fascinating study describes the Mormons’ uniquely American belief system that today emphasizes the family, hard work, and self-reliance, and demonstrates how the Mormon Church is an all-pervasive influence exercising a degree of control over the daily lives of its members unknown to any other American church.

America’s Saints takes a comprehensive look at the Mormons’ extensive economic empire, which ranges from multimillion-dollar real estate and agribusiness holdings to the ownership of banks, insurance companies, a huge media chain that includes thirteen television and radio stations from New York to Los Angeles, and an investment portfolio rivaling those on Wall Street.

Gottlieb and Wiley reveal how the Mormon Church anticipated and contributed significantly to the New Right, and how Mormon politicians from the Intermountain West to Washington D.C. are gaining power and influence. Nowhere has that impact been greater than with the Mormon opposition to ERA. The authors also examine how the Church has become international in scope, expanding rapidly in Latin America and throughout the Third World, where it has supported right-wing military dictatorships in countries such as Argentine and Chile.

Probing the Church’s organizational structure, cultural dictates, and the day-to-day life of its members, the authors reveal a self-contained universe whose leadership faces challenges from within while simultaneously attempting to buttress the Church against an outside world with which it sees itself in rising conflict. This is a compelling and controversial look at America’s fast growing and increasingly powerful Mormon Church.
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Robert Gottlieb and Margaret FitzSimmons

May 1994, University of Arizona Press

Water policy today is at a crossroads. Continued efforts to secure new water supplies to support urban and agricultural expansion have reached an impasse. The viability of the Big Water Project, long the symbol of western water development and the underlying basis for its mission of growth, now seems increasingly uncertain.

In Thirst for Growth, Robert Gottlieb and Margaret FitzSimmons provide an overview of the key issues of public accountability and water policy innovation that confront urban and agricultural water agencies throughout the country – notably in California where the prospects for future water development have become especially problematic. Focusing on six agencies in the Southern California region, they offer a series of case studies analyzing the issues of water quality, including groundwater contamination and disinfection byproducts; reallocation and transfer of existing supplies; and management programs based on pricing changes, the conjunctive use of surface and groundwater supplies, and increased storage capacity aimed at greater efficiencies in stretching those existing supplies.

Thirst for Growth also provides a crucial review of the methods of governance and public input that are central features of today’s water agencies. The extensive and incisive analysis provided by the authors is a reflection of their experience and insight and of years of observation and participation in a changing and sometimes tumultuous water industry in transition from earlier goals and policy objectives.
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