* Winner of the George Perkins Marsh Prize for Best Book in Environmental History * Winner of the Meridian Book Award for Outstanding Work in Geography * James Blaut Award in recognition of innovative scholarship in Cultural and Political Ecology Tales of deforestation and desertification in North Africa have been told from the Roman period to the present. Such stories of environmental decline in the Maghreb are still recounted by experts and are widely accepted without question today. International organizations such as the United Nations frequently invoke these inaccurate stories to justify environmental conservation and development projects in the arid and semiarid lands in North Africa and around the Mediterranean basin. Recent research in arid lands ecology and new paleoecological evidence, however, do not support many claims of deforestation, overgrazing, and desertification in this region. Diana K. Davis's pioneering analysis reveals the critical influence of French scientists and administrators who established much of the purported scientific basis of these stories during the colonial period in Algeria, Morocco, and Tunisia, illustrating the key role of environmental narratives in imperial expansion. The processes set in place by the use of this narrative not only systematically disadvantaged the majority of North Africans but also led to profound changes in the landscape, some of which produced the land degradation that continues to plague the Maghreb today.Resurrecting the Granary of Rome exposes many of the political, economic, and ideological goals of the French colonial project in these arid lands and the resulting definition of desertification that continues to inform global environmental and development projects. The first book on the environmental history of the Maghreb, this volume reframes much conventional thinking about the North African environment. Davis's book is essential reading for those interested in global environmental history.

Resurrecting the Granary of Rome: Environmental History and French ColonialExpansion in North Africa

What's new in the research on agricultural entrepreneurship?

Change your habit to hang or waste the time to only chat with your friends. It is done by your everyday, don't you feel bored? Now, we will show you the new habit that, actually it's a very old habit to do that can make your life more qualified. When feeling bored of always chatting with your friends all free time, you can find the book enPDF future for regional australia escaping global misfortune and then read it.

A Future for Regional Australia: Escaping Global Misfortune

Framing the special issue on the transformation of Food and Agricultural Policy, this article introduces the concept of post-exceptionalism in public policies. The analysis of change in agri-food p...

Post-exceptionalism in public policy: transforming food and agricultural policy

the coming famine global food crisis and what we can do to avoid it are a good way to achieve details about operating certainproducts. Many products that you buy can be obtained using instruction manuals. These user guides are clearlybuilt to give step-by-step information about how you ought to go ahead in operating certain equipments. Ahandbook is really a user's guide to operating the equipments. Should you loose your best guide or even the productwould not provide an instructions, you can easily obtain one on the net. You can search for the manual of yourchoice online. Here, it is possible to work with google to browse through the available user guide and find the mainone you'll need. On the net, you'll be able to discover the manual that you might want with great ease andsimplicity

The Coming Famine: The Global Food Crisis And What We Can Do To Avoid It.

It is argued that both intensive agricultural production and related working conditions are highly dynamic. Regional patterns have developed from small-scale family farming to become an industrialized part of the global agri-food system, which increasingly depends on seasonal labour. Simultaneously, consumer demand for year-round supply has caused relocations of the industry within Europe; areas of intensive greenhouse production have moved further south and even into North Africa. The authors investigate this Mediterranean agri-food system that transcends borders and is largely constituted by invisible seasonal work. By revealing the story of food commodities loaded with implications of private profit seeking, exploitation, exclusion and multiple insecurities, the book unmasks the hidden costs of fresh food provisioning.

Seasonal Workers in Mediterranean Agriculture : The Social Costs of Eating Fresh

Sparked by the conjunction of food, fuel, and financial crises, there has been an increasing awareness in recent years of the scarce and finite character of natural resources. Productive resources such as agricultural land have been touted by financial actors—such as merchant banks, pension funds, and investment companies—as providing the basis for a range of new “alternative” financial asset classes and products. While the drivers, motives, and rationales behind the increasing interest of turning farmland into a financial asset class have been traced by a number of scholars, the interpretations of, and interactions with, financial actors at the community level have received less attention. Based on qualitative research in rural Australia, this paper reveals the grounds on which finance-backed investments have been accepted and accommodated by communities in rural Australia and delineates the reasons that have led to feelings of unease or refusal. The paper thereby demonstrates that the financialization of farmland is neither abstract nor one-sided but rather a multidimensional process that not only includes financial actors but also the impacted rural populations in various ways. Positioning the activities of financial actors in Australia within the emerging research on the financialization of farmland, the paper endorses context-sensitive analyses to better interpret these recent transformations of the agri-food system.

Grounding the financialization of farmland: perspectives on financial actors as new land owners in rural Australia

The growing involvement of financial actors in food production has been one of the major recent transformations in the global agri-food system. This 'financialization' of the agri-food sector has been observed at various levels, from commodity speculation to direct investment in agricultural production, along with farmland itself. While there has been concerted effort to track new landownership and control associated with financial actors, especially in the Global South, there has been less impetus to examine the motives of financial actors' engagement in food production and the narratives upon which such engagement is based. This paper examines the way in which a productivist food (in)security discourse is employed by financial actors to legitimate their actions and to position themselves to win public approval. We analyse two cases of agri-finance investors in the Australian context engaged in the discourse of food (in)security in relation to their agricultural investments - the Macquarie Group and Hassad Australia.

Finance capital, food security narratives and Australian agricultural land

In their highly influential teaching and research text Global Restructuring: The Australian Experience Fagan and Webber set out a substantivist, institutionalist and multi-scalar account of the Aus...

The redefined role of finance in Australian agriculture

This paper investigates the debate about foreign investment in Australian farmland. Employing a moral perspective, it is argued that the apparent tensions over foreign land investments in recent ye...

Sarah Ruth Sippel

Papers

Seasonal Workers in Mediterranean Agriculture : The Social Costs of Eating Fresh

Grounding the financialization of farmland: perspectives on financial actors as new land owners in rural Australia

Finance capital, food security narratives and Australian agricultural land

The redefined role of finance in Australian agriculture

Financialising farming as a moral imperative? Renegotiating the legitimacy of land investments in Australia: