crops

Katarzyna Olga Beilin and Sainath Suryanarayanan discuss the intertwined nature of movements of resistance by humans and plants struggling against genetically engineered soy monocultures in Argentina, which they provocatively conceptualize as interspecies resistance.

Beginning in 1948, the Soviet Union launched a series of wildly ambitious projects to implement Joseph Stalin’s vision of a total “transformation of nature.” By the time of Stalin’s death, however, these attempts at “transformation” had proven a spectacular failure. This richly detailed volume, In the Name of the Great Work follows the history of such projects in three communist states—Poland, Hungary, and Czechoslovakia—and explores their varied, but largely disastrous, consequences.

This film follows an Indian farmer whose situation becomes a microcosm of the conflict between Monsanto and rural people living in poverty in India.

This article, “Artificial Apple Production in Fraiburgo, Brazil, 1958–1989,” by Jó Klanovicz explores connections between the “domestication” of apples in Southern Brazil, the polemic on contaminated apples in 1989, and the reactions of the apple industry to the news published in the press on the use of pesticides in Brazilian orchards.