The entire conversion from local small-scale food production for local communities to large-scale export-oriented monocultural production has brought the melancholy decline of the traditions, cultures, and cooperative pleasures and convivialities associated for centuries with community-based production and markets, diminishing the experience of direct food growing and the long celebrated joys of sharing food grown by local hands from local lands.

     Despite all of the above there are many developments that inspire optimism. Thousands of new and alternative initiatives are flowering across the world to promote ecological agriculture; defense of the livelihoods of small farmers; production of healthy, safe, and culturally diverse foods; and localization of distribution, trade, and marketing. Another agriculture is not only possible, it is already happening. *