ABSTRACT
There is a crisis in global agri-food systems. Environmental degradation of agricultural landscapes, skyrocketing food prices, and growing rates of hunger, with close to one billion of the world’s population recognized as “food insecure,” are demonstrative of this crisis (Holt-Gimenez and Patel 2009; Lawrence, Lyons, and Wallington 2010). Pat Mooney (2010), one of the world’s leading critics of agri-food nanotechnologies, has linked the contemporary crisis in food, along with the crises in “fuel, ˜nance, and Fahrenheit,” with the expansion of technological (and capital-and resource-intensive) approaches to farming and food, including chemical, genetic, and nanotechnological applications. Yet others argue industrial and high-tech agriculture and food production systems-including nanotechnologies-will be central to addressing the range of ecological, public health, and socioeconomic concerns that de˜ne the contemporary farming and food crisis.
