Tags: commodity

Should Africa’s land be owned? Westerners have a crucial blind spot when it comes to engaging with other landholding systems. Private, exclusive title backed by statutory law is sacrosanct in the West, and has been sold to the rest of the world on our behalf through international development agencies such as USAID and the World Bank.  Many benefits are said to flow from this outside intervention in African land relations, from greater…

2019 Guggenheim Fellow Scott Nelson, Georgia Athletic Association Professor in Humanities in the department of history, published a timely new book this year recounting the story of how people have been growing wheat along Ukraine’s Black Sea coast since at least 2700 BC. Nelson's book Oceans of Grain (Basic Books, 2022) has met with widespread acclaim worldwide for both its insights on this global commodity as well as grain's…