Vice-Chancellor’s International Scholarships at Macquarie University Australia 2017/2018

Application Deadline: Session 2: 30th June 2017. Session 1: 31st January 2018

Offered annually? Yes

Eligible Field of Study: Priority areas include Engineering, Environment, Human Science, Media, Linguistics, and Education.

About Scholarship: The Macquarie University Vice-Chancellor’s International Scholarship provides a partial tuition fee scholarship for outstanding students to study at Macquarie University North Ryde campus. It has been designed to recognise academic excellence and provide financial assistance for international students. The Vice-Chancellor’s International Scholarship is country-specific and will be awarded progressively through the year to future applicants to Macquarie University.

Type: Partial scholarships for Undergraduate or Masters studies

Selection Criteria: The Vice-Chancellor’s International Scholarship is highly competitive and awarded based on academic merit.

Eligibility: Candidates must:

• Have citizenship of a country other than Australia or New Zealand.
• Have met the University’s academic and English requirements for the course to be considered for a scholarship (must hold a full offer of admission for North Ryde by the application deadline).
• Have achieved a minimum GPA of 3.0 out of 4.0 (5.0 out of 7.0 from 2017 onward) for Postgraduate applications and minimum requirement of an ATAR equivalent of 90 out of 100 for Undergraduate applications.
• Have applied for a program that is longer than one Session in duration.
• Commence study in session and year indicated in the scholarship offer letter.
• Have applied for a course which has a full-time study load.
• Commence study in the semester and year indicated in their offer of Scholarship. Commencement may not be deferred.

Number of Scholarships: not specified

Value of Scholarship: Macquarie University Vice-Chancellor’s International Scholarship is a Partial Scholarship for Undergraduate or Postgraduate studies. The amount is varied up to AUD$10,000 and it will be applied towards your tuition fee.

The Macquarie University Vice-Chancellor’s International Scholarships do NOT provide financial support in the form of a living allowance, nor does it provide for the cost of visa application, Overseas Student Health Cover (OSHC), airfares, accommodation, conferences or other costs associated with study.

Duration of Scholarship: The Scholarship is a single scholarship and not available to be renewed.

Eligible Countries: International

To be taken at (country): Macquarie University Australia

How to Apply

1. Candidates must complete an online course application form. Online course application will enable you to select your course and upload scanned copies of the required documents. Once your course application has been processed, you will receive a Macquarie University Student Number which is compulsory to submit the online scholarship application form.
2. Applicants must complete an online scholarship application form

For more details, visit the scholarship webpage.

Sponsors: Macquarie University Australia

Important Notes: Applicants can only receive one scholarship.

Applicants applying for the Vice-Chancellor’s International scholarship will not be required to submit Referee’s Report or a Statement of Purpose. Once you have completed the online scholarship application form, a confirmation email will be sent to you at your nominated email address. Incomplete applications will not be considered.

AfricaFrance Young Leaders Programme for Young African Leaders 2017. Fully-funded to France

Application Deadline: 31st March 2017

Eligible Countries: African and French Countries

To be taken at (country): France

About the Award: The Young Leaders program aims to identify, unite, value the very high potential African and French in a spirit of “promotion” of exception. The promotion will bring together young African and French leaders in two sessions in France and Africa with the aim of forging personal ties and proposing a common reflection on global issues.

Type: Short courses/Training

Eligibility: 

• Are you between 28 and 38 years old? 
• Are you French, French diaspora, African?
• Do you contribute to building inclusive, sustainable and shared growth between the African continent and France? 
• You demonstrate leadership, commitment and involvement that has an impact on your community or country? 
• Do you come from companies or civil society in all areas of economic and social life?

Selection Criteria: 

• Candidates must be between the ages of 28 and 38 on 1st January 2017
• Candidates must be French or must come from an African country
• Anglophone candidates require fluency in French as well as the ability to hold a conversation
• At the time of the application, candidates must be working in companies or civil society in all fields of economic and social life (manufacturing, services, both cultural and societal) (the position of President, Chairman of the Board, Chief Executive Officer, Managing Director, Managing Partner or equivalent)
• They must demonstrate leadership, commitment and sustainable engagement (5 to 15 years) that has had an impact on their community or their country
• Candidates must also be able to travel and must make themselves available for the programme’s two sessions in July 2017 and October 2017
• They must demonstrate leadership potential that would enable them to reach the highest level within their sphere of activity
• They must demonstrate the requisite skills, in addition to an ability and a willingness to express themselves at the highest level. They must also be capable of making an oral presentation relating to their candidacy
• Candidates must show a willingness and a capacity to participate in strengthening the Franco-African relationship in their particular sphere of activity
• They must demonstrate the capacity to fully invest themselves in the programme as part of the network of previous Young Leaders

Number of Awardees: Limited

Value of Scholarship: ALL EXPENSES (INCLUDING VISAS, TRANSPORT AND ACCOMMODATION) WILL BE PAID FOR.

How to Apply: Interested applicants must submit the following:

The form, duly completed and signed • Curriculum Vitae • Covering letter • A letter presenting their professional and personal project • A one-page essay on the theme of “Coming together: for a new generation of Africa-France leaders” • 3 letters of recommendation and full details for their references • Copies of their most recent qualifications • Certificates of roles and publications (KBIS and/or Official Journal) referring to the roles • Balance sheets for 2015 and 2016 • One form of valid and in-date ID showing the candidate’s nationality

The form should be returned duly completed and signed in French or in English along with the supporting documents before the 31st March 2017 at 11.59 p.m. by email to: programmes@africafrance.org

Visit Scholarship Webpage for details

Award Provider: AfricaFrance

KDI School GKS-KGSP (Korean Government Scholarship Program) for International Students 2017

Application Deadline: 20th March 2017

Offered annually? Yes

Eligible Countries: International

To be taken at (country): South Korea

Type: Masters

Eligibility: 

-Be non-Korean citizens whose parents are also non-Korean citizens*.

-Be physically and mentally healthy

-Be under 40 years of age as of September 1st, 2017

-Hold a bachelor’s or an equivalent degree prior to August 31st, 2017

-Have a GPA higher than B or 80% from the previously attended institution
*Applicants must be from designated countries (see NIIED application guideline)

Number of Awardees: Not specified

Value of Scholarship: Full tuition, monthly stipend, round-trip airfare

Duration of Scholarship: Total 3 years:

-First year: Korean language training

-Second & Third year: Master’s program

Apply Here

If you are applying directly to KDIS (for University Track), all required documents must be submitted at the admissions office of KDIS. (address: 263 Namsejong-ro, Sejong-si, 30149, Republic of Korea)

Visit Scholarship Webpage for details

Award Provider: Government of Korea

Rockefeller Foundation Art Residency Programme 2017 – Italy

Application Deadline: 

• The application period for an Academic Writing residency begins 1st March 2017 with the deadline on 1st May 2017, for residencies in 2017.
• The application period for Arts & Literary Arts residency will soon open. Application Dates will be updated on this site when it opens
• Applications for practitioner residencies are accepted until 31st March 2017

Offered annually? Yes

Eligible Countries: Countries in Asia, Latin America, Africa and the United States

To be taken at (country): Bellagio, Italy. The Center consists of several buildings in 55 acres grounds on Lake Como in Northern Italy: the Villa Serbelloni and Villa Maranese house the resident fellows (scholars, practitioners and artists); the Sfondrata and Frati buildings are reserved for meetings. The town of Bellagio, immediately adjacent to the Bellagio Center, is located in northern Italy at the point where Lake Como divides to form its Lecco and Como arms. It is approximately 75 km. (47 miles) north of Milan.

Eligible Fields: The Rockefeller Foundation seeks applicants with projects that contribute to discourse and progress related to its dual goals: i) advancing inclusive economies that expand opportunities for more broadly shared prosperity, and ii) building resilience by helping people, communities and institutions prepare for, withstand, and emerge stronger from acute shocks and chronic stresses. To achieve these goals, The Rockefeller Foundation works at the intersection of four related focus areas: Advance Health, Revalue Ecosystems, Secure Livelihoods, and Transform Cities.

Applicants with projects that may help shape thinking or catalyze action in these areas are also strongly encouraged to apply.

About the Award:  The Rockefeller Foundation’s Bellagio Residency Programme is split into 3 areas:

• Academic Writing residency
• Arts & Literary Arts residency
• Practitioner residencies

The Rockefeller Foundation’s Bellagio Residency Programme has a track record for supporting the generation of important new knowledge addressing some of the most complex issues facing our world, and innovative new works of art that inspire reflection and understanding of global and social issues.

The Bellagio Center Residency Program is committed to creating an environment that fosters rich cross-cultural and interdisciplinary exchanges, which arise from bringing highly diverse and international cohorts of artists, academics, practitioners, and policymakers together. The Bellagio Center typically offers residencies of two to four weeks for no more than 15 residents at a time. Collegial interaction within the community of residents is an integral dimension of the Bellagio experience. Meals and informal presentations of residents’ work afford an opportunity for dynamic discussions and engagement within and across disciplines. To help build connections across one another’s work, residents are also offered opportunities to interact with participants from international conferences that are hosted in other buildings on the Bellagio Center’s grounds.

Type: Residency

Eligibility: 

• Residencies are open to university or think-thank based academics in all disciplines, literary artists, visual artists, and practitioners from a variety of fields, particularly those working on socially impactful endeavors. The Foundation seeks to promote a broad, stimulating mix of disciplines and fields within the Bellagio Community.
• The Academic Writing residency is for university and think tank-based academics, researchers, professors, and scientists working in any discipline. Successful applicants can either demonstrate decades of significant professional contributions to their field or show evidence of being on a strong upward trajectory in their careers.
• The Bellagio Arts & Literary Arts residency is for artists working in any discipline including composers, fiction and non-fiction writers, playwrights, poets, video/filmmakers, and visual artists who share in the Foundation’s mission of promoting the well-being of humankind and whose work is inspired by or relates to global or social issues.
• The Center also welcomes applications from practitioners, defined as senior-level policymakers, nonprofit leaders, journalists, private sector leaders and public advocates with ten or more years of leadership experience in a variety of fields and sectors.

Selection Criteria: Bellagio Center arts & literary arts residencies are for composers, fiction and non-fiction writers, playwrights, poets, video/filmmakers, interdisciplinary and visual artists seeking time for disciplined work, reflection, and collegial engagement, uninterrupted by the usual professional and personal demands.

Number of Awardees: Not more than 15 residents

Value of Residency: 

• During the course of the residency, room, meals and board are provided without charge.
• Opportunity for dynamic discussions and engagement within and across disciplines.
• Accessibility: housing/grounds/studios are accessible
• Studios/special equipment: Painting, Photography (digital)
• Additional studio information: The Maranese Art Studio (for painters) is located directly one flight downstairs from the bedroom (access through an outside stairway).
• To help build connections across one another’s work, residents are also offered opportunities to interact with participants from international conferences that are hosted in other buildings on the Bellagio Center’s grounds.
• Space for Spouses/Life Partners of residents are welcomed at the Center and can utilize this time to work on their own projects
• Travel grants and modest stipends to offset incidental travel costs are available on a needs basis, with awards granted to approximately half of all resident fellows.

Duration of Residency: 2 to 4 weeks

Go to Application

It is important to go through individual application requirements of each residency on the Rockefeller Foundation Webpage before applying.

Visit Program Webpage for details

Award Provider: Rockefeller Foundation

England: the Banana Monarchy

LUKE O'BRIEN

Several rungs below banana republics on the roster of government types, one might find “banana monarchy”. This is post-Brexit Britain.

Monarchy

Some apologists of monarchy would have you believe that Britain’s first family is actually its worst off. They, like Dostoevsky’s Grand Inquisitor, or O’Brien of the 1984‘s Inner Circle, suffer a burden so great – all so that the thousands of millions may maintain their authoritarian consolations. A self-selected few keeping big, bad Freedom from our doors.

But do they let the mask slip? Do they let on that, behind the enchanted glass, sits nothing more than a troop of hairless apes (with just as many, if not greater, foibles than the rest)? Do they heck. They trudge along through opening ceremonies, and palace balls, and horse shows, waving and granting this and that, trailing past glories. This, they do for us. Or, more pointedly, they do it for you. Why would you – and why do you – inflict such existences? Upon they, who by accident of birth have to lord it over you. Isn’t it about time we end this protracted farce?

I suggest so. It’s time we got together, take the Windsors to one side and say, “you can pack it in dears, we can see through you”.

Military

The one industry prevented from collapse by Maggie Thatcher and her heirs is the arms. This broader trend – one you might call military protectionism – mimics another. As revealed in Curtis’ The Mayfair Set, under David Sterling the SAS evolved from being a band of Lawrences into the world’s premier mercenary force. Of course, like private physicians, they do a bit of “national service” (the raid on the Iranian Embassy) but the bulk of their work is the propping of Arab princes and African despots, so that they may, in turn, fulfill the Foreign Office’s need for “forces of stability”.

So vital, to take one salient example, is Saudi Arabia as a lynchpin (putting solidarity between kings to one side), that we routinely overlook this hub and exporter of Wahhabism – the greatest ideological foe to British values found offshore.

This relationship almost guarantees perpetual war. Wars, we were told, nuclear weapons had made redundant. Trident, in its titanium skin, with its terrible luminous eyes trained on its equals on what we call Russia and China – perhaps even on those currently irradiating American soil. I say ‘perhaps’ because the Keepers, as Martin Amis named nukes in his essay Thinkability, are incomprehensible. Their purposes are beyond the scope of human imagination, Their intentions surpass the confines of theory. And to Them, the spawn of Rutherford and Oppenheimer: we are nothing. Mere fetuses of the post-civilisation age – the age of Atom.

Culture

As the Empire folded, leaving cartographers with the headache of endless partition, Yemen’s last British governor hosted a dinner party before heading home. As the meal came to a close, he turned to the Minister of Defense and honoured guest Denis Healy (an aside: never trust a man with eyebrows like that), and said, “do you know, Minister, I believe that in the long view of history, the British Empire will be remembered only for two things… The game of football, and the expression ‘fuck off’.”

The British don’t really help competing visions. (One such bid see Brits as the greying wise old Greeks to the new Rome, situated in Maryland. Personally, as you can probably already tell, I find Athenian allusions a little strained.)

But beyond the endless football, shit TV, imported bluster and petite bourgeoisie tedium, there’s plenty to respect: see Blake’s dragon, Darwin’s finches, Byron’s portrait (author of the stunningly brilliant line, “[in England] Cant is so much stronger than Cunt“), books by Orwell, Paine, Mill and Kipling, the works of Milton, Hazlitt, E.P. Thompson and Auden. There’s also the great British dissidents: Richard Carlile, whose bravery in the fight for free expression should be known to all liberals and libertarians; and John Ball who, along with Wat Tyler, led the Peasants’ Revolt and met a tragic end.

Equally worthy of mention are Bertrand Russell, Mary Wollstonecraft, Charles Dickens, George Elliot, John M. Keynes, Eric Hobsbawm and Shelley.

These are the literary and political traditions I admire, and hope to draw attention to in some small way. They, and, more generally, the cause of Liberty, are cultural handrails far more deserving of respect and celebration than anything the Hanoverians ever forced upon us.

Pharma Funded “Patient” Groups Keep Drug Prices Astronomical

Martha Rosenberg

It happens with regularity during citizen open-mike sessions at FDA drug advisory committee hearings. A queue of “patients” materializes out of nowhere to testify, often in tears, about the crucial need for a new drug or new use approval. Some are flown in by Pharma.

It can’t be a generic drug, cry the “patients” because, they are just not the same. It has to be the $1000 a month drug or even the $1000 a pill drug  so that taxpayers and the privately insured prop up Pharma’s cred on Wall Street.

While more than 80 percent of patient groups are Pharma funded the New York Times reported this week including the National Hemophilia Foundation, the American Diabetes Association and the National Psoriasis Foundation, mental health front groups which include the National Alliance for Mental Health (NAMI) and Mental Health America are the most insidious.

Not only do psychiatric drugs represent four digit outlays per month per patient  and sometimes much more, patients are kept on them for decades or life—with few medical attempts to determine if patients still need them or ever needed them.  Side effects of the drug cocktails are viewed, thanks to Pharma spin, as confirmation of the “mental illness” not the side effects they almost always are. The use of such drugs in the elderly, despite their links to death in those with dementia, has become epidemic and is an underreported cause of falls.

“Mental illness” is a category deliberately “grown” by Pharma with aggressive and unethical million dollar campaigns. These campaigns, often unbranded to look like a public service, convince people with real life challenges they are “depressed” or “bipolar” and that their children have ADHD. Despite the Pharma marketing, the New England Journal of Medicine recently reported that the rate of severe mental illness among children and adolescents has actually dropped dramatically in the past generation.

The tactics of these front groups have been widely reported. “When insurers balk at reimbursing patients for new prescription medications, these groups typically swing into action, rallying sufferers to appear before public and consumer panels, contact lawmakers, and provide media outlets a human face to attach to a cause,” reported the Los Angeles Times .

Targeting poor people on government health plans is Pharma’s marketing plan. “For years, the alliance [NAMI] has fought states’ legislative efforts to limit doctors’ freedom to prescribe drugs, no matter how expensive, to treat mental illness in patients who rely on government health care programs like Medicaid, says the New York Times . “Some of these medicines routinely top the list of the most expensive drugs that states buy for their poorest patients.”

Thanks to the Sunshine Act, part of the Affordable Care Act, it is possible to see what Pharma is paying patient front groups and the numbers are astounding. Last year Eli Lilly, one of the primary makers of psychiatric drugs, bestowed an astonishing 22 grants on NAMI including $25,000 for its “Healthy Americas Briefings.” How objective are those “briefings”? Pfizer gave NAMI $32,500 during one quarter last year.

Lilly also greased the palms of Mental Health America to the tune of $35,000 last year. Government is increasingly funding Mental Health America, adding to the Pharma exploitation and heisting of our tax dollars. Last year, Counterpunch reported that Walgreens had announced a partnership with Mental Health America. The plan empowered Walgreens to “screen” customers to see if they might need expensive psychiatric drugs but not know it–until Pharma magnanimously told them.  Screening is widely viewed, even by the medical establishment, as shameless Pharma marketing that leads to over-diagnosis, over-treatment and over-medication even as people who actually need medical treatment are ignored.

The Pharma business model actually wants people sick. Currently, in radio campaigns, Pharma is trying to convince people they have “exocrine pancreatic insufficiency” and “Non-24 Sleep Wake Disorder” two conditions so rare as to be laughable as radio campaigns.

How much do the drugs Pharma, NAMI, Mental Health America and Walgreens push cost?  If a “bipolar” child is prescribed a middle dose of the mood stabilizers Topamax and Lamictal, the yearly cost would be $23,220. If Seroquel is added, at a cost of $24,000, along with the ADHD drug Concerta at $7,812, and Neurontin at $4,860, one bipolar child would make Pharma $59,892 a year. Remember, you can’t substitute a generic.

Sweat Shops, GMOs and Neoliberal Fundamentalism: The Agroecological Alternative to Global Capitalism

Colin Todhunter 

Much of the argument in favour of GM agriculture involves little more than misrepresentations and unscrupulous attacks on those who express concerns about the technology and its impacts. These attacks are in part designed to whip up populist sentiment and denigrate critics so that corporate interests can secure further control over agriculture. They also serve to divert attention from the underlying issues pertaining to hunger and poverty and genuine solutions, as well as the self-interest of the pro-GMO lobby itself.

The very foundation of the GMO agritech sector is based on a fraud. The sector and the wider transnational agribusiness cartel to which it belongs have also successfully captured for their own interests many international and national bodies and policies, including the WTO, various trade deals, governments institutions and regulators. From fraud to duplicity, little wonder then the sector is ridden with fear and paranoia.

“They are scared to death,” says Marion Nestle, professor of nutrition, food studies, and public health at New York University and author of several books on food policy. She adds: “They have an industry to defend and are attacking in the hope that they’ll neutralize critics … It’s a paranoid industry and has been from the beginning.”

War against reason

Global corporations like Monsanto are waging an ideological war against not only critics but the public too. For instance, consider that the majority of the British public and the Canadian public have valid concerns about GM food and do not want them. However, the British government was found to have been secretly colluding with the industry and the Canadian government is attempting to soften up the public to try to get people to change their opinions.

Instead of respecting public opinion and serving the public interest by holding powerful corporations to account, officials seem more inclined to serve the interests of the sector, regardless of genuine concerns about GM that, despite what the industry would like to have believe, are grounded in facts and involve rational discourse.

Whether via the roll-out of GMOs or an associated chemical-intensive industrialised monocrop system of agriculture, the agritech/agribusiness sector wants to further expand its influence throughout the globe. Beneath the superficial façade of working in the interest of humanity, however, the sector is driven by a neoliberal fundamentalism which demands the entrenchment of capitalist agriculture via deregulation and the corporate control of seeds, land, fertilisers, water, pesticides and food processing.

If anything matters to the corporate agribusiness/agritech industry, contrary to the public image it tries to convey, it clearly has little to do with ‘choice’, ‘democracy’ or objective science. It has more to do with undermining and debasing these concepts and displacing existing systems of production: economies are “opened up through the concurrent displacement of a pre-existing productive system. Small and medium-sized enterprises are pushed into bankruptcy or obliged to produce for a global distributor, state enterprises are privatised or closed down, independent agricultural producers are impoverished” (Michel Chossudovsky in The Globalization of Poverty, p16).

Critics are highlighting not only how the industry has subverted and debased science and has infiltrated key public institutions and regulatory bodies, but they are also showing how trade and aid is used to subjugate regions and the most productive components of global agriculture – the small/peasant farmer – to the needs of powerful commercial entities.

Critics stab at the heart of neoliberalism

By doing this, critics stab hard at the heart such corporate interests and their neoliberal agenda.

Eric Holt-Giménez:

“The World Bank, the World Trade Organization, the World Food Program, the Millennium Challenge, The Alliance for a Green Revolution in Africa, the U.S. Department of Agriculture, and industrial giants like Yara Fertilizer, Cargill, Archer Daniels Midland, Syngenta, DuPont, and Monsanto, carefully avoid addressing the root causes of the food crisis. The ‘solutions’ they prescribe are rooted in the same policies and technologies that created the problem in the first place: increased food aid, de-regulated global trade in agricultural commodities, and more technological and genetic fixes. These measures only strengthen the corporate status quo controlling the world’s food… The future of our food-and fuel-systems are being decided de facto by unregulated global markets, financial speculators, and global monopolies.”

The geopolitics of food and agriculture has played a significant role in creating food-deficit regions. For instance, African agriculture has been reshaped on behalf of the interests described in the above extract. The Gates Foundation is currently spearheading the ambitions of corporate America and the scramble for Africa by global agribusiness. And in India, there has been an ongoing attempt to do the same: a project that is now reaching a critical phase as the motives of the state acting on behalf of private (foreign) capital are laid bare and the devastating effects on health, environment and social conditions are clear for all to see.

Any serious commitment to feeding the world sustainably and equitably must work to challenge a globalised system of capitalism that has produced structural inequality and poverty; a system which fuels the marginalisation of small-scale farms and their vitally important cropping systems and is responsible for the devastating impacts of food commodity speculation, land takeovers, rigged trade and an industrial system of agriculture.

And embedded within the system is a certain mentality. Whether it is the likes of Monsanto’s High Grant, Robb Fraley or Bill Gates, highly paid (multi-millionaire) white men with an ideological commitment to corporate power are trying to force a profitable but bogus model of food production on the world.

They do so while conveniently ignoring the effects of a system of capitalism that they so clearly promote and have financially profited from.

It is a capitalism and a system of agriculture propped up by the blood money of militarism (Ukraine and Iraq), ‘structural adjustment’ and strings-attached loans (Africa) or slanted trade deals (India) whereby transnational agribusiness drives a global agenda to suit its interests and eradicate impediments to profit. And it doesn’t matter how much devastation ensues or how unsustainable their model is, ‘crisis management’ and ‘innovation’ fuel the corporate-controlled treadmill they seek to impose.

Genuine solutions: agroecology, decentralisation and localism

However, what really irks the corporate interests which fuel the current GMO/chemical-intensive industrialised model of agriculture is that critics are offering genuine alternatives and solutions. They advocate a shift towards more organic-based systems of agriculture, which includes providing support to small farms and an agroecology movement that is empowering to people politically, socially and economically.

This represents a challenge to all good neoliberal evangelists (and outright hypocrites) with a stake in corporate agriculture who rely on smears to attack those who advocate for such things.

To understand what agroecology involves, let us turn to Raj Patel:

“To understand what agro-ecology is, it helps first to understand why today’s agriculture is called “industrial.” Modern farming turns fields into factories. Inorganic fertilizer adds nitrogen, potassium, and phosphorous to the soil; pesticides kill anything that crawls; herbicides nuke anything green and unwanted—all to create an assembly line that spits out a single crop… Agro-ecology uses nature’s far more complex systems to do the same thing more efficiently and without the chemistry set. Nitrogen-fixing beans are grown instead of inorganic fertilizer; flowers are used to attract beneficial insects to manage pests; weeds are crowded out with more intensive planting. The result is a sophisticated polyculture—that is, it produces many crops simultaneously, instead of just one.”

And it works. Look no further than what Cuba has achieved and the successes outlined in this article. Indeed, much has been written about agroecology and its potential for radical social change, its successes and the challenges it faces (see this, this and this). And now there a major new book from Food First and Groundswell International: Fertile Ground: Scaling agroecology from the ground up.

Executive Director of Food First Eric Holtz-Gimenez argues that agroecology offers concrete, practical solutions to many of the world’s problems that move beyond (but which are linked to) agriculture. In doing so, it challenges – and offers alternatives to – the prevailing moribund doctrinaire economics of a neoliberalism that drives a failing system (also see this) of GM/chemical-intensive industrial agriculture.

He adds that the scaling up of agroecology can tackle hunger, malnutrition, environmental degradation and climate change. By creating securely paid labour-intensive agricultural work, it can also address the interrelated links between labour offshoring by rich countries and the removal of rural populations elsewhere who end up in sweat shops to carry out the outsourced jobs: the two-pronged process of neoliberal globalisation that has devastated the economies of the US and UK and which is displacing existing indigenous food production systems and undermining the rural infrastructure in places like India to produce a reserve army of cheap labour.

When you fail to understand capitalism and the central importance of agriculture, you fail to grasp many of the issues currently affecting humanity. At the same time, when you are part of the problem and fuel and benefit from it, you will do your best to attack and denigrate anything or anyone that challenges your interests.