I'm currently devouring George Pyle's fiery Raising Less Corn, More Hell: The Case for the Independent Farm and Against Industrial Food. Devouring, not for the pun, but because I really am racing through the text at a speed usually reserved for the confrontation between Dumbledore's Army and Dolores Umbridge.
When I finish I'll post a proper review(ish), but I want to point out something that is truly mind-boggling that Pyle includes. Amartya Sen, the winner of the Nobel Prize for Economics, wrote that,
Starvation is the condition of some people not having enough food to eat. It is not the characteristic of there not being enough food to eat.
This was at the beginning of his manuscript Poverty and Famines: An Essay on Entitlement and Deprivation. What he showed, historico-economically, was that in the modern world people go hungry (as in those sad little African children) not because there isn't enough food in the world (or even their own country or region) but because those people lack cash. There's plenty of food--FAR more than enough. Yet people are still starving. For me, this changes everything.
In the meantime, think about this (from Monsanto's home page) in light of what Amartya Sen found:
The world's population is growing. To keep up with population growth, farmers will have to produce more food. America's farmers will meet this challenge.
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