"Hungry Capital: The Financialisation of Food": Talk by Luigi Russi

Date: 16 May, 2014
Time: 5.00 pm - 6.30 pm
Venue: ESG Training Centre, Bangalore

Invitation to a Talk by

Luigi Russi

author of


Hungry Capital

 

The Financialization of Food

 

 

A compelling analysis of how global finance is devouring the food system and gambling with our future in the process.


 

Friday, 16th May 2014, 5.00 – 6.30 pm

at

ESG - Training Centre

No1575, 100 feet Outer Ring Road, Banashankari 2nd Stage, Bangalore-560070

 

 A Brief about the Talk:

Over the past thirty years, the ability of global finance to affect aspects of everyday life has been increasing at an unprecedented rate. The world of food bears vivid testimony to this tendency, through the scars opened by the 2008 world food price crisis, the iron fist of retailing giants that occupy the supply chain and the unsustainable ecological footprint left behind by global production networks.


In Hungry Capital, Russi offers a rigorous analysis of the influence that financial imperatives exert on the food economy at different levels: from the direct use of edible commodities as an object of speculation to the complex food chains set up by manufacturers and supermarkets. It argues that the circular compulsion to build profits upon profits that global finance injects into the world of food restructures the basic nurturing relationship between man and nature into a streamlined process from which value has to be mined. The end result is a monstrous Leviathan that holds together while – at every step – risks to crumble.


Luigi Russi describes himself as “researcher, bookworm and writer”.

 


Reviews about Hungry Capital:



Jayati Ghosh, Professor of Economics, Jawaharlal Nehru University

Luigi Russi takes up an issue that will dominate the lives of people everywhere in the coming years: the adequacy and safety of our food. He brings insights from the worlds of finance, legal sociology and political economy to link processes of global capitalism with the appalling persistence and increase of hunger and malnutrition. A must read.



Jan Douwe van der Ploeg, Professor in Transition Studies, Wageningen University

This is a thought-provoking book on the food industries and how these are entangled with the world of finance. It is theoretically well grounded, original and rich in empirical detail. It is an important contribution to the international debate on the future of agriculture.

 

 

RSVP: Shashikala Iyer at shashi@esgindia.org or by phone 080-26713559/60/61

Link to route map to ESG: http://tinyurl.com/pdjm53b

Keywords: