Food, Farming, and Freedom: Sowing the Arab Spring

The wave of anti-government protests that swept through the Arab world from December 2010 on started to transform politics and society in the Middle East. The protests came as a surprise to many observers-- but not to Rami Zurayk, an veteran Lebanese agronomist and social activist who had been analyzing the collapse of traditional agricultural livelihoods in the Middle East since the late 1980s. In 2007, Zurayk started writing the "Land and People" blog, which charts food-policy and agricultural policy issues throughout the Middle East. Food, Farming, and Freedom presents his choice of the best of the posts in the blog from 2007 through April 2011. It concludes with a chapter tracking the early months of the Arab Spring.