There is mounting evidence that monocultural food and ‘bio’energy technologies promising lower carbon futures are deepening inequalities in natural resource access and in power relations between corporate interests and (rural) workers. Localised conflicts in the North and the South are emerging in relation to ‘public’ goods (sun, air, water) and their transnational commodification for the ‘green economy’ at the expense of communities excluded from decision making yet often most vulnerable to the consequent economic and environmental changes.
In this theme we investigate the emerging primary commodity trades through the prism of the workers engaged in nodes of production, and of the communities effected by and resisting dispossession and intoxication from the spatial and technological advances in monocultures and mega projects. In doing so we seek to make visible socially and environmentally committed alternatives –much further advanced in the southern hemisphere- to harmful modes of production, and facilitate the collective and horizontal effective sharing of struggle and experiences across North and South.