Jan Douwe van der Ploeg. [Photo/Agencies]

The Beijing Farmers' Market will host Jan Douwe van der Ploeg, author of The New Peasantries: Struggles for autonomy and sustainability in an era of empire and globalization (2008, Earthscan), for a talk on the strength and qualities of peasant agriculture. The Dutch author argues that today's peasant agriculture has a great capacity to meet the new scarcities: the need to create employment, the need to double world food production and to do so in a sustainable way, the need to cool the Earth and the need to economize on the use of "sweet" water. These challenges are global and the different forms of peasant agriculture of today’s world are best able to meet them.Van der Ploeg will show and discuss several examples of new peasant markets from different countries.

Saturday, 2:30-4:30 pm, Phoenix Galleria shopping center, Sanyuanqiao subway exit B, Chaoyang district (RSVP required by e-mail to [email protected]). The farmers' market hours are 10am - 9pm.

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