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Podcast: New Books in Food
Episode: Venus Bivar, āOrganic Resistance: The Struggle over Industrial Farming in Postwar Franceā (UNC Press, 2018)
Description: In Organic Resistance: The Struggle over Industrial Farming in Postwar France (University of North Carolina Press, 2018), Venus Bivar documents the development of agriculture in post-1944 France. Through the Second World War, Franceās agriculture was comparatively backward next to those of its neighbors and geopolitical rivals. The French government undertook a major program of āmodernizationā to encourage the consolidation of landholdings, increases in the productivity of agricultural labor, and the application of capital-intensive technologies. In this it was successfulāat least to the extent that France became one of the worldās leading exporters of agricultural goods. However, as Bivar docu...