Eating Tomorrow:
Agribusiness, Family Farmers, and the Battle for the Future of Food

Few challenges are more daunting than feeding a global population projected to reach 9.7 billion in 2050—at a time when climate change is making it increasingly difficult to grow crops successfully. In response, corporate and philanthropic leaders have called for major investments in industrial agriculture, including genetically modified seed technologies. Reporting from Africa, Mexico, India, and the United States, Timothy A. Wise’s Eating Tomorrow discovers how in country after country agribusiness and its well-heeled philanthropic promoters have hijacked food policies to feed corporate interests.

Wise on why he wrote Eating Tomorrow, and other clips from his book talks.

With his unique background in academic research, international development, and economic journalism, Wise takes readers far and wide in his quest to understand how governments, development agencies, and farmers themselves have responded to the challenge to help developing countries grow more of their own food by empowering their small-scale farmers.

Wise talks to victims of land-grabbing in Mozambique, Monsanto officials trying to push genetically modified corn into Mexico, and Malawian farmers trying to preserve and promote their nutritious native seeds. Wise reports on the damage done to Mexican rural communities by the North American Free Trade Agreement and exposes the hypocrisy of U.S. officials using arcane World Trade Organization rules to curtail India’s ambitious national food security plan. He reports from Iowa, where biofuels and factory farms absorb industrial agriculture’s surpluses and the rivers flow with toxic runoff.

Wise reminds readers that we already grow enough food to feed 10 billion. The true path to eating tomorrow is alongside today’s resource-starved farmers, who can and will feed the hungry – if we let them.

REVIEWS & ENDORSEMENTS

Nature, International Journal of Science: “[I]n Eating Tomorrow, Timothy Wise writes a powerful polemic against agricultural technology that is sold to developing countries as progress towards the common good, but that ends up as a tool of agribusiness oligopoly and profit.”
(read full review)

Kirkus Reviews: “The ravages of climate change come into sharp focus in this exhaustive report from the front lines.… A grave and timely look at the future of feeding the planet.”
(read full review)

Ricardo J. Salvador, Union of Concerned Scientists: “Wise’s writing is riveting, melding the right mix of historical context, first-person accounts, interactions with key players, and original insight, all related in fast-moving, piquant prose. This is a concentrated dose of perceptive exposition that leaves a reader informed and energized.”

Read all reviews and endorsements

Media Coverage

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Feb 4, 2020

Big Ag and the Small-Scale African Farmer

Feb 4, 2020

(Originally published by Yes! Magazine)

The headquarters of the world’s largest charitable foundation stretch along an entire block near downtown Seattle. There’s a plaza at the entrance, and to one side, a wall embossed in elegant gold lettering proclaims “The Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation.” (Read full article on Yes! Magazine)

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Aug 28, 2019

Big Ag Is Sabotaging Progress on Climate Change

Aug 28, 2019

(Originally published on Wired)

Climate experts have sounded yet another dire alarm, this time aimed straight at our stomachs. The United Nations’ Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change’s latest report, on “Climate Change and Land,” warns that meeting the challenges of our climate crisis requires urgent changes in our food systems.

Read the full article

Aug 28, 2019