Episode 111: Pat Mooney on Who Really Feeds The World

The Checkout speaks with food sovereignty activist and scholar Pat Mooney about the role of small scale peasant farming and food sovereignty. Pat Mooney debunks industrial agriculture’s self-serving claims and presents compelling scientific evidence in support of grassroots farmworker movements.

From https://www.etcgroup.org/users/pat-mooney :

Pat Mooney has more than four decades experience working in international civil society, first addressing aid and development issues and then focusing on food, agriculture and commodity trade. In 1977 Mooney co-founded RAFI (Rural Advancement Fund International, renamed ETC Group in 2001). He received The Right Livelihood Award (the "Alternative Nobel Prize") in the Swedish Parliament in 1985 and the Pearson Peace Prize from Canada's Governor General in 1998. He has also received the American "Giraffe Award" given to people "who stick their necks out."

The author or co-author of several books on the politics of biotechnology and biodiversity, Pat Mooney is widely regarded as an authority on issues of global governance, corporate concentration, and intellectual property monopoly. Although much of ETC's work continues to emphasize plant genetic resources and agricultural biodiversity, the work expanded in the early 1980s to include biotechnology. In the late 1990s, the work expanded more to encompass a succession of emerging technologies such as nanotechnology, synthetic biology, geoengineering, and new developments in genomics and neurosciences.

ETC remains a nano-CSO with offices in Canada, the United States, Mexico, the Philippines and Ethiopia and works in close cooperation with many civil society partners around the world.

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Episode #111 Pat Mooney Notes

:30 On how small farms nourish 70% of the world’s population.

3:00 On the study “Which Farms Feed the World and Has Farmland Become More Concentrated?”

8:30 On Food Sovereignty and industrial agriculture.

17:30 What do large, corporate food entities stand to gain from changing our narrative around food production?

21:00 Can you tell us about the concept of Degrowth?