Tony Weis

My interests are broadly located in the field of political ecology, with a focus on agriculture and rural development. Much of my empirical research was initially grounded in the Caribbean, especially Jamaica, where I worked with small farmers and focused on issues surrounding land reform, co-operatives, and neoliberal policy restructuring. Attention to the wider political economic context of small farmer’s struggles led me on a path towards my first book, The Global Food Economy: The Battle for the Future of Farming (Zed, 2007), which analyzes how the global system of agricultural production and trade evolved and has been institutionally entrenched, with a focus on its extreme social imbalances and ecological instabilities . More recently, I have focused on the problems associated with one of the most powerful dimensions of world agriculture, the industrial grain-oilseed-livestock complex, culminating in my second book, The Ecological Hoofprint: The Global Burden of Industrial Livestock (Zed, 2013).