Food, Farming, and Freedom Sowing the Arab Spring

The wave of anti-government protests that swept through the Arab world from December 2010 on transformed the face of the whole Middle East. The protests came as a surprise to many observers-- but not to Rami Zurayk, a very experienced Lebanese agronomist and social activist who had been charting the collapse of traditional agricultural livelihoods in the Middle East for more than quarter of a century and had watched the successive spikes in food prices that rocked the low-income portions of the world economy from 2007 on with great concern.In 2007, Zurayk started writing the "Land and People" blog, as an adjunct to a project he had founded the previous year, to provide agricultural extension and support services to some of the South Lebanese communities that had been hardest hit by the widespread Israeli attacks of July-August 2006.Now, with the publication of Food, Farming, and Freedom: Sowing the Arab Spring, Zurayk presents his choice of the best of the posts in the blog, along with some of his other writings, grouped into five chapters that address:1. Issues of food sovereignty and politics,2. The food-price crisis of 20072008 and how it affected Arab countries,3. Issues at the nexus of environment, resources, and people, including phenomena such as the "Slow Food" movement with which Zurayk has long been affiliated,4. A critique of many Western-dominated development efforts, and5. The story of the Arab Spring, from December 2010 through mid-April, 2011.Interleaved between these five chapters is a series of travel reports, illustrated with Zurayk's own photos, from trips he took in Lebanon, Syria, Iraq, and Morocco, during which he sought to learn more about (and enjoy) these countries' land and people-- and their food.

Rami Zurayk is an agronomy professor at the American University of Beirut and a longtime activist for political and social justice. Born in Beirut in 1958, he has witnessed two Israeli-Arab wars, one protracted civil war, one major Israeli invasion, one Israeli retreat, and one Israeli defeat. He has published over a hundred articles, monographs and technical reports on agriculture, food, environment and education, covering numerous countries throughout the Middle East.