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 increasingly difficult to successfully 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, Timothy A. Wise’s Eating Tomorrow explores how in country after country agribusiness and its well-heeled philanthropic promoters have hijacked food policies to satisfy corporate interests.

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 to grow and how. These same farmers—who already grow more than 70 percent of the food eaten in developing countries—can show the way forward. 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 healthier food; in the process, they are not just victims of the climate crisis, but rather protagonists whose solutions can show us the way forward.

Praise for Eating Tomorrow

Eating Tomorrow is a wake-up call about the future of food.”

—Vandana Shiva, author of Who Really Feeds the World? and Soil Not Oil

“I recommend Eating Tomorrow to anyone who wants to understand how the industrial food system is destroying our health, biosphere, and food culture.”

—Million Belay, coordinator, Alliance for Food Sovereignty in Africa

“Wise exposes our consuming obsession with corporate agriculture.”

—Frances Moore Lappé, author of Diet for a Small Planet

“Tim Wise’s Eating Tomorrow reveals the stunning disconnect between what is needed to address future food shocks and the scheme by multinational corporations to squeeze every penny from the poorest people in the world.”

—Wenonah Hauter, author of Foodopoly: The Battle Over the Future of Food and Farming in America and executive director of Food & Water Watch

About the Author

Timothy A. Wise is a senior researcher at the Small Planet Institute, where he directs the Land and Food Rights Program. He is also a senior research fellow at Tufts University’s Global Development and Environment Institute, where he founded and directed its Globalization and Sustainable Development Program. He previously served as executive director of the US-based aid agency Grassroots International. He is the author of Eating Tomorrow: Agribusiness, Family Farmers, and the Battle for the Future of Food (The New Press) and Confronting Globalization: Economic Integration and Popular Resistance in Mexico. He lives in Cambridge, Massachusetts.

Header photo by Global Justice Now on Flickr