Care and Resistance
A few years ago, I was invited to join a meeting to think through the polycrisis. It happened a few weeks after the assassination of Lindokuhle Mnguni, one of the most startlingly wise and visionary leaders I’d ever met – he was 28 years old. The polycrisis – understood as climate emergency, democratic decline, pandemic disease, the sixth extinction, authoritarianism and the emboldening of supremacists everywhere – felt very close to home. The discussions were, however, centred mainly on Europe and North America – the donors who convened the meeting had little experience of networks elsewhere.
Despite never having funded outside Europe and North America, they agreed to bankroll a project anchored by Focus on the Global South, in which Lilak – Purple Action for Indigenous Women’s Rights, Southern Peasant Federation of Thailand, Abahlali baseMjondolo South Africa, the Movimento dos Trabalhadores Rurais Sem Terra, and West Street Recovery exchanged ideas about how they were navigating this polycrisis. The result, just published by A Growing Culture, is brilliant.
Here’s some of the art, the zine, and the movement conversations.
Bella Ciao and the arts thinking & eating
H5N1p-2025: A Scenario
Books
Agricultural Subsidy Transition Bonds
You can tell I’m looking for excuses not to knuckle down and finish my next book project, because I’m catching up with posting things here. I’m very pleased to have put together a bit of research on the Andhra Pradesh Community-Managed Natural Farming programme with Vijay Kumar Thallam, just out in Nature Food. The reason we wrote it is prompted in part by the Indian Government’s PM-PRANAM policy, a plan to wean India off industrial fertilizer imports.
Continue reading “Agricultural Subsidy Transition Bonds”Food Sovereignty in the 2020s
The Alameda Institute, whose research director is the excellent Sabrina Fernandes, has put together a fantastic dossier on food sovereignty called Seeds of Sovereignty: Contesting the Politics of Food. There’s a lot of confusion about what food sovereignty is, and isn’t. (I wrote a short introduction a few years ago, and it holds up.) Many of my fellow International Panel of Experts on Sustainable Food Systems panelists have explored what it means, including Jennifer Clapp and Million Belay, as does Sabrina herself. My contribution has also been doing the rounds, and I thought I’d share it here. If you’re in the citation business, it’s Patel, Raj. “Food Sovereignty in the 2020s.” In Seeds of Sovereignty: Contesting the Politics of Food, 22-29: Alameda Institute, 2024.
Continue reading “Food Sovereignty in the 2020s”The Dalit Panthers Manifesto
It’s harder to track down the Dalit Panthers’ manifesto than it should be. Here’s an attempt to fix that, reproducing the text from “The Dalit Panthers and Their Manifesto.” Religion and Society 22, no. 2 (1975): 24-38.
Continue reading “The Dalit Panthers Manifesto”Hunger, Debt and Interest Rates
The awful choice between feeding the hungry or paying creditors isn’t
just one faced by indebted households. Countries are in similar straits. Hunger is both a fiscal issue and a monetary one. I put together this short piece, for Nature Food, on how to understand what that means, and how the debt crisis is making global hunger far worse…
The Grammar of a Future New International Economic Order
I’m on the road for an exciting new book project. It’s hard to imagine posting with even less frequency here, but to make up for an absence of New Things, here’s a piece I wrote for the good folk at Progressive International, which I forgot to share a little while back. If nothing else, I hope the opening quote, from Stefano Harney and Fred Moten, points you to their incredible work.
Continue reading “The Grammar of a Future New International Economic Order”