Author Anthony Weis, associate professor of geography at the University of Western Ontario in London, Canada, will present a lecture titled, “The Meat of the Global Food Crisis,” on Monday, April 22, at 7:30 p.m., in the Fillius Events Barn. His lecture comes as part of the Levitt Center’s Sustainability Program, and is free and open to the public.
Weis earned his Ph.D. in geography in 2003 from Queens University in Kingston, Ontario. His research is broadly located in the fields of agrarian political economy and political ecology. Entwined with this is an abiding interest in land reform, farmer co-operatives and various movements to build alternatives. Much of Weis’ empirical research has been grounded in the Caribbean, especially Jamaica. Attention to the broader context of small farmers’ struggles led him on a path toward his first book, The Global Food Economy: The Battle for the Future of Farming (2007). The work examines the structural imbalances, social tensions and ecological instabilities in the global system of agricultural production and trade; the historical development and institutional entrenchment of this system; and prospects for more socially just, ecologically rational and humane alternatives.
Recently, Weis has been mainly focused on worsening food crises and problems associated with the industrial grain-oilseed-livestock complex. He is currently at work on a book titled The Ecological Hoofprint: The Global Burden of Industrial Livestock, which is due later in 2013.
