The astonishing story of how a movement’s quest for rural simplicity drifted into a formula for mass death By George Monbiot, published on monbiot.com, 4th October 2023 Tourism sells to you the story of what it has taken away. It markets the “traditional” and “unchanging” and, in doing so, changes it. As the old joke…

Western leftists are arguing among themselves about whether there will be bananas under socialism. In Africa, however, bananas do not necessarily represent the vagaries of capitalism.

Plantation owners in the Borneo state of Sabah are setting aside land for conservation but some remain sceptical.

Listen to The History of US Agriculture: How Jim Crow paid off for the Midwestern family farm from Farm to Taber. Episode cover photo: “Roy Merriot getting ready to move a transportable house. He is a tenant of a 160 acre loan company farm which has recently been sold, and is now holding a ‘quitting farm’ sale. This is the third farm he has lost in the last ten years.” Russell Lee, photographer, December 1936, from Farm Security Administration – Office of War Information Photographs, Yale University Photogrammar Project. Available at https://photogrammar.org/photo/fsa1997021314/PPTranscriptFull bibliographyMain sources in this episode:SC food imports in 1917: Kirkendall, Richard S. 1988. Henry A. Wallace’s Turn Toward the New Deal, 1921-1924. The Annals of Iowa 49(3):221-239. Accessed 3 Mar 2022. Available at https://pubs.lib.uiowa.edu/annals-of-iowa/article/10699/galley/119275/view/The Rise and Fall of Pellagra. 2018. Karen Clay, Ethan Schmick, Werner Troesken. National Bureau of Economic Research Working Paper 23730. Available at http://www.nber.org/papers/w23730Shu-Ching Lee. 1947. The Theory of the Agricultural Ladder. Agricultural History 21(1):53-61.https://www.jstor.org/stable/3739772?seq=1#metadata_info_tab_contentsPossession and Power: The Legal Culture of Tenancy in the United States, 1800-1920. Adam Jacob Wolkoff. Dissertation, Rutgers, 2015.

Burning fields are blamed for hazardous levels of air pollution in northern Thailand but the government is doing little.

An interactive and highly illustrated story that investigates the historic rubber industry in Malaya, and its discriminative practices.

The convergence of global diets means just three crops provide 50% of the world’s calories. When shocks come, they hurt.