In the last half century Brazil’s rural economy has developed profitable soy and sugarcane plantations, causing mass displacement of rural inhabitants, deforestation, casualization of labor, and reorganization of politics. Since the early 2000s Indigenous peoples have protested the taking of their land and transformed terms provided by state institutions, NGOs, agribusiness firms, and myriad local middlemen toward their material survival, leading to significant violence from third-party security forces. Guarani protestors have confronted these armed security forces through a form of life-or-death political theater and spectacle on the sides of highways, while squatters have viscerally disturbed the landscape and enlivened long-standing genocide and settler-colonial violence. In Unsettling Agribusiness LaShandra Sullivan analyzes the transformations in rural life wrought by the internationalization of agribusiness and contests over land rights by Indigenous social movements. The protest camps, by reclaiming the countryside as a site of residence and not merely one of abstract maximized agribusiness production, call into question the meanings and stakes of Brazil’s political model. The squatter protests complicated federal attempts to balance land reform with economic development imperatives and imperiled existing constellations of political and economic order. Unsettling Agribusiness encompasses the multiple scales of the conflict, maintaining within the same frame of analysis the unique operations of daily life in the protest camps and the larger political, economic, and social networks of pan-Indigenous activism and transnational agribusiness complexes of which they are a part. Sullivan speaks to the urgent need to link the dual preoccupations of multi-scalar political-economic change and the ethno-racial terms in which Indigenous people in Brazil live today.

A critical inquiry into the ways Americans have exploited and continue to exploit the land that sustains them, tracing attitudes toward and methods of farming from the eighteenth century to the present

A penetrating look at the condition of family farming--yesterday, today, and tomorrow.

The essays in The Gift of Good Land are as true today as when they were first published in 1981; the problems addressed here are still true and the solutions no nearer to hand. The insistent theme of this book is the interdependence, the wholeness, the oneness of people, land, weather, animals, and family. To touch one is to tamper with them all. We live in one functioning organism whose separate parts are artificially isolated by our culture. Here, Berry develops the compelling argument that the “gift” of good land has strings attached. We have it only on loan and only for as long as we practice good stewardship.

What holds America together? In this classic work, Russell Kirk identifies the beliefs and institutions that have nurtured the American soul and commonwealth. Beginning with the Hebrew prophets, Kirk examines in dramatic fashion the sources of American order. His analytical narrative might be called a "tale of five cities": Jerusalem, Athens, Rome, London, and Philadelphia. For an understanding of the significance of America in the twenty-first century, Russell Kirk's masterpiece on the history of American civilization is unsurpassed.

The breathtaking number of mergers and joint ventures among agribusiness firms has left independent American farmers facing the power of an increasingly concentrated buying sector. The origin of farmers' concern with such economic concentration dates back to protests against meatpackers and railroads in the late nineteenth century. Jon Lauck examines the dimensions of this problem in the American Midwest in the decades following World War II. He analyzes the nature of competition within meat-packing and grain markets. In addition, he addresses concerns about corporate entry into production agriculture and the potential displacement of a production system defined by independent family farms. Lauck also considers the ability of farmers to organize in order to counter the market power of large-scale agribusiness buyers. He explores the use of farmer cooperatives and other mechanisms which may increase the bargaining power of farmers. The book offers the first serious historical examination of the National Farmers Organization, which fully embraced the bargaining power cause in the postwar period. Lauck finds that independent farmers' attempts at organization have been more successful than previously recognized, but he also shows that their successes have been undermined by the growing concentration and power of agri-business firms, justifying a new approach to antitrust law in agricultural markets.