In 30 years of research and writing, Wise has published an extensive range of books, articles, and reports, most while working as a Senior Researcher at Tufts University’s Global Development and Environment Institute (GDAE). Others come from his time directing the Land and Food Rights Program at Small Planet Institute, including articles written while researching his book, Eating Tomorrow. This is the most comprehensive collection of his writings sorted into the main areas of his work.

books

Eating Tomorrow: Agribusiness, Family Farmers, and the Battle for the Future of Food
The New Press (2019), with Foreword by Raj Patel

In the face of climate change, how can we ensure that everyone eats today and tomorrow? Wise travels the world to understand why policy-makers are ignoring the low-cost, climate-resilient solutions offered by their own family farmers and instead promoting failing policies that enrich agribusiness firms while undermining the natural resource base on which future food production depends.

Look inside: read excerpts from Eating Tomorrow.

Other Books by Timothy A. Wise

Confronting Globalization: Economic Integration and Popular Resistance in Mexico
with Hilda Salazar and Laura Carlsen (also available in Spanish)
Kumarian Press (2003)

La Promesa y los Peligros de la Liberalización del Comercio Agrícola: Lecciones de América Latina
with Mamerto Pérez and Sergio Schlesinger
Asociación de Instituciones de Promoción y Educación (AIPE), La Paz, Bolivia, 2009. Available online (PDF) English summary here.

A Survey of Sustainable Development: Social and Economic Dimensions
edited with Jonathan M. Harris, Neva R. Goodwin, and Kevin P. Gallagher (Island Press, 2001)

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Articles & Reports

Land and food rights in Africa

Wise’s research for Eating Tomorrow took him to Southern Africa, where the battles for the future of food are urgent. Peasant farmers fight land-grabbing and defend their rights to save, exchange, and sell their seeds in the face of pressure from those advocating a “Green Revolution for Africa.” Those farmers’ low-cost, nutritious, and climate-resilient alternatives point the way forward in a climate-constrained world.

Feeding the World: Myths & facts

Since world crop prices spiked in 2007-8, sparking food riots in many parts of the world, we have seen a new wave of warnings that growing populations in developing countries will outstrip the resources available to feed them. It remains true that we grow more than enough food now to feed everyone, that industrial agriculture worsens climate change while undermining current food producers, and that the solutions to hunger and climate change lie in supporting those farmers to develop climate-resilient sustainable farms that grow a diversity of crops as they rebuild their depleted soils.

Latin America & Rural Development

Wise has been working and writing on Latin America since the 1980s. The Globalization and Sustainable Development Program that he founded at Tufts University’s Global Development and Environment Institute two decades ago focused heavily on Mexico under the North American Free Trade Agreement and trade liberalization in Latin America.

Trade and Global Governance

Rich-country governments have long promoted trade rules that favor multinational agricultural export firms, from the North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA) to the World Trade Organization. Such policies have resulted in the widespread “dumping” of below-cost agricultural exports on developing countries, undermining local farmers with unfair competition.

U.S. Agricultural Policies

Since 2000, Wise has focused on U.S. agricultural policies and their impacts on farmers in developing countries. His research has shown that U.S. agricultural subsidies are not the primary cause of agricultural dumping and that the main beneficiaries are not U.S. farmers but agribusiness firms that see high sales and low prices for crops. This has fed the rise of industrial livestock firms that get an “implicit subsidy” for their feed costs.