Eating Tomorrow: Agribusiness, Family Farmers, and the Battle for the Future of Food

Few challenges are more daunting than feeding a global population projected to reach 9.7 billion in 2050—at a time when climate change is making it more difficult to grow crops. In response, corporate and philanthropic leaders have called for major investments in industrial agriculture, including genetically modified seed technologies. Reporting from Africa, Mexico, India, and the United States, Tim Wise’s Eating Tomorrow discovers how in country after country, agribusiness and its well-heeled philanthropic promoters have actually exacerbated food crises.

Most of the world, Wise reveals, is fed by hundreds of millions of small-scale farmers, people with few resources and simple tools but a keen understanding of what and how to grow. These same farmers—who already grow more than 70 percent of the food eaten in developing countries—can show the way forward as climate rises and population increases. Wise takes readers to remote villages to see how farmers are rebuilding soils with ecologically sound practices and nourishing a diversity of native crops without chemicals or imported seeds. They are growing more and better food; in the process, they are not just victims in the climate drama but protagonists that all of us can learn from.