The Political Ecology of Bananas

The Political Ecology of Bananas

Author: Lawrence S. Grossman

Publisher: Univ of North Carolina Press

Published: 2000-11-09

Total Pages: 291

ISBN-13: 0807861820

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This study of banana contract farming in the Eastern Caribbean explores the forces that shape contract-farming enterprises everywhere--capital, the state, and the environment. Employing the increasingly popular framework of political ecology, which highlights the dynamic linkages between political-economic forces and human-environment relationships, Lawrence Grossman provides a new perspective on the history and contemporary trajectory of the Windward Islands banana industry. He reveals in rich detail the myriad impacts of banana production on the peasant laborers of St. Vincent and the Grenadines. Grossman challenges the conventional wisdom on three interrelated issues central to contract farming and political ecology. First, he analyzes the process of deskilling and the associated significance of control by capital and the state over peasant labor. Second, he investigates the impacts of contract farming for export on domestic food production and food import dependency. And third, he examines the often misunderstood problem of pesticide misuse. Grossman's findings lead to a reconsideration of broader debates concerning the relevance of research on industrial restructuring and globalization for the analysis of agrarian change. Most important, his work emphasizes that we must pay greater attention to the fundamental significance of the "environmental rootedness" of agriculture in studies of political ecology and contract farming.


Banana Systems in the Humid Highlands of Sub-Saharan Africa

Banana Systems in the Humid Highlands of Sub-Saharan Africa

Author: Guy Blomme

Publisher: CABI

Published: 2013-11-28

Total Pages: 268

ISBN-13: 1780642318

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?Banana Systems in the Humid Highlands of Sub-Saharan Africa: Enhancing Resilience and Productivity? addresses issues related to agricultural intensification in the (sub)humid highland areas of Africa, based on research carried out in the Great Lakes Region by the Consortium for Improving Agriculture-based Livelihoods in Central Africa.


Guardians of the Trees

Guardians of the Trees

Author: Kinari Webb, M.D.

Publisher: Flatiron Books

Published: 2021-09-28

Total Pages: 289

ISBN-13: 1250751403

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"EMPOWERING...KINARI WEBB IS AN INSPIRATION." --BILL MCKIBBEN "A WONDERFUL BOOK." --JANE GOODALL A TIMELY, HOPEFUL MEMOIR ABOUT A WOMAN SPEARHEADING A GLOBAL INITIATIVE TO HEAL THE WORLD'S RAINFORESTS AND THE COMMUNITIES WHO DEPEND ON THEM Full of hope and optimism, Kinari Webb takes us on an exhilarating, galvanizing journey across the world, sharing her passion for the natural world and for humanity. In our current moment of crisis, Guardians of the Trees is an essential roadmap for moving forward and the inspiring story of one woman’s quest to heal the world. When Webb first traveled to Indonesian Borneo at 21 to study orangutans, she was both awestruck by the beauty of her surroundings and heartbroken by the rainforest destruction she witnessed. As she got to know the local communities, she realized that their need to pay for expensive healthcare led directly to the rampant logging, which in turn imperiled their health and safety even further. Webb realized her true calling was at the intersection of medicine and conservation. After graduating with honors from the Yale School of Medicine, Webb returned to Borneo, listening to local communities about their solutions for how to both protect the rainforests and improve their lives. Founding two non-profits, Health in Harmony in the U.S. and ASRI in Indonesia, Webb and her local and international teams partnered with rainforest communities, building a clinic, developing regenerative economies, providing educational opportunities, and dramatically transforming the region. But just when everything was going right, Webb was stung by a deadly box jellyfish and would spend the next four years fighting for her life, a fight that would lead her to rethink everything. Was she ready to expand her work to a global scale and take climate change head on?


Handbook of Hazards and Disaster Risk Reduction

Handbook of Hazards and Disaster Risk Reduction

Author: Ben Wisner

Publisher: Routledge

Published: 2012-03-29

Total Pages: 876

ISBN-13: 1136918698

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The Handbook provides a comprehensive statement and reference point for hazard and disaster research, policy making, and practice in an international and multi-disciplinary context. It offers critical reviews and appraisals of current state of the art and future development of conceptual, theoretical and practical approaches as well as empirical knowledge and available tools. Organized into five inter-related sections, this Handbook contains sixty-five contributions from leading scholars. Section one situates hazards and disasters in their broad political, cultural, economic, and environmental context. Section two contains treatments of potentially damaging natural events/phenomena organized by major earth system. Section three critically reviews progress in responding to disasters including warning, relief and recovery. Section four addresses mitigation of potential loss and prevention of disasters under two sub-headings: governance, advocacy and self-help, and communication and participation. Section five ends with a concluding chapter by the editors. The engaging international contributions reflect upon the politics and policy of how we think about and practice applied hazard research and disaster risk reduction. This Handbook provides a wealth of interdisciplinary information and will appeal to students and practitioners interested in Geography, Environment Studies and Development Studies.


Case Studies in Human Ecology

Case Studies in Human Ecology

Author: Daniel G. Bates

Publisher: Springer Science & Business Media

Published: 2013-06-29

Total Pages: 409

ISBN-13: 147579584X

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This volume was developed to meet a much noted need for accessible case study material for courses in human ecology, cultural ecology, cultural geography, and other subjects increasingly offered to fulfill renewed student and faculty interest in environmental issues. The case studies, all taken from the journal Human Ecology: An Interdisciplinary Jouma~ represent a broad cross-section of contemporary research. It is tempting but inaccurate to sug gest that these represent the "Best of Human Ecology." They were selected from among many outstanding possibilities because they worked well with the organization of the book which, in turn, reflects the way in which courses in human ecology are often organized. This book provides a useful sample of case studies in the application of the perspective of human ecology to a wide variety of problems in dif ferent regions of the world. University courses in human ecology typically begin with basic concepts pertaining to energy flow, feeding relations, ma terial cycles, population dynamics, and ecosystem properties, and then take up illustrative case studies of human-environmental interactions. These are usually discussed either along the lines of distinctive strategies of food pro curement (such as foraging or pastoralism) or as adaptations to specific habitat types or biomes (such as the circumpolar regions or arid lands).


Unsafe Motherhood

Unsafe Motherhood

Author: Nicole S. Berry

Publisher: Berghahn Books

Published: 2010-10-01

Total Pages: 271

ISBN-13: 1845459962

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“[S]heds light not only on the obstacles to making motherhood safer, but to improving the health of poor populations in general.”—Social Anthropology Since 1987, when the global community first recognized the high frequency of women in developing countries dying from pregnancy-related causes, little progress has been made to combat this problem. This study follows the global policies that have been implemented in Sololá, Guatemala in order to decrease high rates of maternal mortality among indigenous Mayan women. The author examines the diverse meanings and understandings of motherhood, pregnancy, birth and birth-related death among the biomedical personnel, village women, their families, and midwives. These incongruous perspectives, in conjunction with the implementation of such policies, threaten to disenfranchise clients from their own cultural understandings of self. The author investigates how these policies need to meld with the everyday lives of these women, and how the failure to do so will lead to a failure to decrease maternal deaths globally. From the Introduction: An unspoken effect of reducing maternal mortality to a medical problem is that life and death become the only outcomes by which pregnancy and birth are understood. The specter of death looms large and limits our full exploration of either our attempts to curb maternal mortality, or the phenomenon itself. Certainly women’s survival during childbirth is the ultimate measure of success of our efforts. Yet using pregnancy outcomes and biomedical attendance at birth as the primary feedback on global efforts to make pregnancy safer is misguided.


Women in the New Asia

Women in the New Asia

Author: Yayori Matsui

Publisher: Zed Books

Published: 1999-03

Total Pages: 212

ISBN-13: 9781856496261

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This remarkable book charts the effects of the economic boom on women across Asia. Yori Matsui, one of Japan's leading journalists, demonstrates how Asian women are confronting rapid economic developmentwhich is accompanied by widespread infringement of human rights. Analysing the lives of women in Japan, Thailand, the Philippines, Taiwan, China, Nepal, and Korea, the author explores * the impact of globalization - including the feminization of migration and an increase in the trafficking of women * sexual violence - from the 'comfort women' to child prostitution * development projects - the cause of mass deforestation and displacement of communities However she also describes women's credit co-ops, democratization movements and unionization of women workers. She meets women who have organised ant-logging blockades, literacy classes and campaighns against trafficking. She finds women across Asia resisiting the dictatorship od development, the feminization of poverty and patriarchal values. Throughout the continent she finds the seeds of hope for a new Asia.


The Oxfam Poverty Report

The Oxfam Poverty Report

Author: Kevin Watkins

Publisher: Oxfam

Published: 1995

Total Pages: 262

ISBN-13: 9780855983185

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Fifty years ago, the United Nations Charter proclaimed universal rights to shared prosperity, peace, and security. How far has that vision of world citizenship been realised? Despite advances in human welfare and technology, there is today a growing polarisation between rich and poor. One in four of the world's people live in absolute poverty, unable to meet their basic needs; armed conflict is affecting millions of people; and the global environment is under threat. Yet there is a failure of political will to address the silent emergency of poverty. The Oxfam Poverty Report draws on Oxfam's experience of working in over 70 countries, to examine the causes of poverty and conflict. It identifies the structural forces which deny people their basic rights, and gives a wide range of examples of the ways in which men and women are bringing about positive change at every level, from the household to the international arena. Oxfam believes that it is time to renew the UN vision of universal basic rights. The Report concludes by proposing policy and institutional reforms which would transform international institutions and trading relations, and calls for a new commitment to work together to eradicate poverty and bring sustainable peace and security for all the world's people.