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22 Dec 08
In Zimbabwe, Survival Lies in Scavenging - NYTimes.com
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In Nzvere, a group of scrawny men sat under a Musasa tree, rolling cigarettes in bits of newspaper and chewing over the central fact of life in rural Zimbabwe: It is impossible to make a living as a farmer anymore.
In the 1990s, these men said, they harvested a cornucopia of vegetables on their small farms and sold the surplus in Harare. Now their land doesn’t yield nearly as much. With the formerly white-owned, large-scale farms no longer productive, the economies of scale that kept prices low for hybrid seed and fertilizer are gone. These small farmers cannot afford the higher prices.
The dollars and cents of farming simply do not add up, they said. The government monopolizes the buying and selling of corn through the Grain Marketing Board. With inflation running officially at hundreds of millions of percent, anything the board pays them is worthless by the time they get it out of the bank.
The farm redistribution has done them no good, they said, instead benefiting those who helped the ruling party grab the land. Even when food aid has come, only those in the ruling party hierarchy have gotten any, the farmers said.
So they have become scavengers, living off the land and surviving on field mice and wild fruit, white ants and black beetles.
19 Dec 08
Madoff's 'Ponzi' scheme collapses major sustainable-food foundation
Is Bernard Madoff guilty of 'manslaughter' if any of his poisonous greed kills?
24 Nov 08
The Food Issue - An Open Letter to the Next Farmer in Chief - Michael Pollan - NYTimes.com
The coming food wars will be extreme.
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It may surprise you to learn that among the issues that will occupy much of your time in the coming years is one you barely mentioned during the campaign: food. Food policy is not something American presidents have had to give much thought to, at least since the Nixon administration — the last time high food prices presented a serious political peril. Since then, federal policies to promote maximum production of the commodity crops (corn, soybeans, wheat and rice) from which most of our supermarket foods are derived have succeeded impressively in keeping prices low and food more or less off the national political agenda. But with a suddenness that has taken us all by surprise, the era of cheap and abundant food appears to be drawing to a close. What this means is that you, like so many other leaders through history, will find yourself confronting the fact — so easy to overlook these past few years — that the health of a nation’s food system is a critical issue of national security. Food is about to demand your attention.
Future of Agriculture
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You may have watched the video to your right. If you haven't, it's Barack Obama's recent address on his commitment to fighting global climate change. Other than the 'clean' coal business, it sounds very reassuring if you spend a lot of time worrying about the environment.
Still, when I say, "the environment," I do remember the areas and issue sets I used to think about when someone else said that: waste from heavy industry, urban air quality, water pollution (via manufacturing, chemical dumping and road runoff in urban areas), bad logging practices, and wilderness reserves. But the environment includes the whole planet, including that half of the land mass (give or take) devoted to food and fiber production for human uses. Agriculture is the largest source of what's called non-point water pollution, basically runoff from large areas, and the primary cause of the enormous ocean dead zones at the mouths of our rivers. It's a major factor in soil erosion, and depending on who you ask, may be responsible for nearly 40 percent of greenhouse gas emissions.
It's simply impossible to fix our environmental problems as a whole without taking agriculture into account. Further, agriculture, as one of the few professions that remains heavily weather dependent, is already taking hits from global climate disruption. Global grain productivity is already dropping in the face of droughts and warmer weather, which is leading farmers to further overuse rapidly depleting sources of fresh water, while common land management practices further diminish the availability of that water.
The major agribusiness consortiums are peddling all sorts of snake oil to supposedly address these crises, as well as the global hunger problem. But their solutions are retreads of the Green Revolution strategy that substituted petrochemical fertilizer and broadly damaging pesticides for soil-building, and patented hybrid crops for locally adapted varieties.
The Green Revolution did temporarily sol
02 Nov 08
Perceptual Bias - The Behavioral Revolution -
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Alan Greenspan noted in his Congressional testimony last week, he was “shocked” that markets did not work as anticipated. “I made a mistake in presuming that the self-interests of organizations, specifically banks and others, were such as that they were best capable of protecting their own shareholders and their equity in the firms.”
So perhaps this will be the moment when we alter our view of decision-making. Perhaps this will be the moment when we shift our focus from step three, rational calculation, to step one, perception.
Perceiving a situation seems, at first glimpse, like a remarkably simple operation. You just look and see what’s around. But the operation that seems most simple is actually the most complex, it’s just that most of the action takes place below the level of awareness. Looking at and perceiving the world is an active process of meaning-making that shapes and biases the rest of the decision-making chain.
Economists and psychologists have been exploring our perceptual biases for four decades now, with the work of Amos Tversky and Daniel Kahneman, and also with work by people like Richard Thaler, Robert Shiller, John Bargh and Dan Ariely.
My sense is that this financial crisis is going to amount to a coming-out party for behavioral economists and others who are bringing sophisticated psychology to the realm of public policy. At least these folks have plausible explanations for why so many people could have been so gigantically wrong about the risks they were taking.
14 Oct 08
The Food Issue - An Open Letter to the Next Farmer in Chief
The coming "food wars."
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It may surprise you to learn that among the issues that will occupy much of your time in the coming years is one you barely mentioned during the campaign: food. Food policy is not something American presidents have had to give much thought to, at least since the Nixon administration — the last time high food prices presented a serious political peril. Since then, federal policies to promote maximum production of the commodity crops (corn, soybeans, wheat and rice) from which most of our supermarket foods are derived have succeeded impressively in keeping prices low and food more or less off the national political agenda. But with a suddenness that has taken us all by surprise, the era of cheap and abundant food appears to be drawing to a close. What this means is that you, like so many other leaders through history, will find yourself confronting the fact — so easy to overlook these past few years — that the health of a nation’s food system is a critical issue of national security. Food is about to demand your attention.
24 Sep 08
Progressive Conditions for a Bailout
That's quite a list, most of which can be distilled down to reform of the rating agencies, deprivatization of F&F, return of the uptick rule, and using the Treasury as an auction house for illiquid securities. Great policy guidelines - humane and forward
18 Aug 08
Social Origins of the American Corporate Predator State
Great article - Covers considerable evils of BushCo
Bush's Strategic Drift -- Dan Froomkin
Excerpt: Maybe we should call [Bush Strategic Policies] "Incompetence and Internal Warfare."
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"'What freedom strategy?' asked David L. Phillips, a senior fellow at the Atlantic Council and author of a report on Georgia. 'It is scorned worldwide. Afghanistan is backsliding. The bar has been set low in Iraq. Georgia is in ruins.'"
Jacob Weisberg wrote in January for Newsweek that five different Bush Doctrines have come and gone -- starting with "Unipolar Realism", switching to "With Us or Against Us" after 9/11, and eventually turning into "Freedom Everywhere" -- leaving us since late 2006 with the "absence of any functioning doctrine at all." In my July 21 column, I suggested that Bush's new doctrine is a mystery. Also see my July 10, 2006, column, Desperately Seeking Doctrine.
But perhaps there is a new doctrine of sorts. Maybe we should call it "Incompetence and Internal Warfare."
26 Jul 08
Let Them Eat Free Markets
When will we stop deferring to big corporations to solve our society's problems by deregulating the markets and hoping for the best. We must demand a national food policy ASAP.
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When world leaders met in June for a U.N. Food and Agricultural Organization summit, says Steve Suppan, senior policy analyst for the Minneapolis-based Institute for Agriculture and Trade Policy (IATP), a research and advocacy group, “there was an urgent recognition of the food crisis but a more urgent sense of the need to salvage neoliberalism.”
And Raj Patel, author of the recent book, Stuffed and Starved: The Hidden Battle for the World’s Food System (See review on page 40), adds, “It’s preposterous that the Bush administration and EU are pushing us toward precisely the policies that got us into this mess.”
Many developments may have triggered the food price crisis, including bad weather conditions (from droughts in Australia to more recent floods in the Midwest), oil price increases, and rising biofuel and consumer demand.
But the current food crisis ultimately stems from over-reliance on deregulated global markets and increasingly concentrated corporate control of an ecologically unsound world food system. Pushing free-market fundamentalism harder will only intensify the fault lines, setting the stage for even more serious crises in the future.
12 May 08
Fact Check: Biofuels Done Right :: The Full Story on Biofuels and the Food Crisis
There is no one cause for the food shortage. Biofuel production has been a factor but is not solely responsible. The real culprits are: changing diets, global warming and drought, high energy costs, and investors fleeing the dollar and going into commodit
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“The world is suddenly awakening to the folly of subsidized biofuels. All it took was a mere global ‘food crisis.’”
Food prices have risen 83 percent worldwide since 2005 and some staples such as rice and wheat have risen 141 percent and 130 percent respectively in the last year alone. Yet only 4 percent of world grain is currently being used in biofuel production. These numbers just don’t add up.
So what are the main causes of the food crisis? The answer: changing diets, global warming and drought, high energy costs, and (as our sister organization the Center for American Progress Action Fund points out) investors fleeing the dollar and going into commodities.
Changing Diets: Meat is highly inefficient; it takes 8.3 grams of corn feed to produce 1 gram of beef. Global demand for meat is increasing with changing diets, particularly in countries such as China. where vast quantities of grain are going to livestock over humans.
Global Warming: Drought and volatile weather in key grain producing countries such as Australia and the Ukraine have also limited supply. As Australia enters its 10th year of drought, many analysts predict that climate change will exacerbate competition for natural resources and reduce crop yields in sub-Saharan Africa by 20 percent in some scenarios.
High Energy Costs: High energy prices have increased costs at every stage of agricultural production from the farming itself to the transportation. This in turn bumps up the price for food. Yet since most consumers are similarly strapped by the high price of gas and energy, they’re also less likely to be able to afford the increased cost of food.
The tremendous recent growth in first generation biofuels is certainly playing a role in planting decisions and global grain prices. But at present it’s only a very small slice of the problem.
“The perfect biofuel is always just out of reach, only a few more billion dollars in subsidies away from commercial viability. But sometimes eve
23 Apr 08
Agency warns of 'silent tsunami' of hunger
Good read.
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World Bank says food prices have risen 83 percent in three years.
Excerpt: "The fact no one has previously made the link between agriculture and poverty is quite incredible," he said.
21 Apr 08
WIC: Women, Infants, and Children Federal Nutrition Program for States
WIC provides Federal grants to States for supplemental foods, health care referrals, and nutrition education for low-income pregnant, breastfeeding, and non-breastfeeding postpartum women, and to infants and children up to age five who are found to be at
20 Apr 08
Informed Comment
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' A U.N. World Food Program initiative called Emergency Food Needs Assessment showed that 51 percent of Palestinians are food insecure in the occupied territory as a whole, with 70 percent food insecure in Gaza.
The main factors affecting Palestinians' access to food, exacerbated by the second intifada, are Israeli imposed restrictions on their internal and external movement. Limited Palestinian control over their natural resources -- in particular water and agricultural land -- is another major factor.
Furthermore, chronic malnutrition and dietary-related diseases are slowly increasing, WHO has reported.
Anemia amongst children age nine to 12 months stands at 69 percent in Gaza and 47 percent in the West Bank, with 33 percent of women of childbearing age affected. The number of cases of stunting, low birth weights and premature deaths is also increasing.
Some 70 percent of Palestinians are estimated by the United Nations Children's Fund to be living below the poverty line. According to UNRWA and the Palestinian Ministry of Social Affairs, the number of chronic poor has risen sharply. ' -
Although the primary stated goal of US campaigns in places such as Qaim is to root out guerrillas using them as bases, the massive force employed clearly announces that a subsidiary goal is to terrify the Sunni Arab population and to "encourage" them to report on the guerrillas from now on. Jane Arraf of CNN when reporting on the al-Qaim campaign showed a picture of what looked like a large community center being blown up by American planes. I thought to myself that it couldn't possibly be necessary to destroy that nice building. And, at the same time, the US is talking to the guerrilla leaders. Saddam called this sort of policy "tahrib wa taqrib": first you terrify your subjects, then you find ways of pulling them close to you. It does not reflect well on the US that the techniques it is now using look so familiar.
19 Apr 08
Tackling World Food Crisis: Agricultural Reform
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When the candidates aren't fending off questions of vital importance to the survival of the planet like why they don't wear a flag pin on their lapel, they've occasionally discussed huge issues such as energy and global warming. What hasn't been discussed much is a related and often neglected question: agriculture policy. In fact, because of the importance of Iowa, candidates have to pledge their fealty to our policy of subsidizing the production of ethanol produced with corn. Our ethanol policies are having unintended consequences, contributing to the kinds of problems that led to the "tortilla riots" in Mexico, and the worldwide move toward biofuels is contributing to the worldwide spike in food prices. Let's hope that when the media is done with flag pins, they try to pin down the candidates on their plans for agriculture, in the US and around the world.]
It took more than 400 scientists and three years of haggling, wrangling and heated arguments to come up with the report by the International Assessment of Agricultural Science and Technology for Development (IAASTD) as dire warnings from the World Bank, the IMF and the UN's World Food Programme splashed the front pages of the world press in the last few weeks (the Executive summary, the Global summary and all its regional summaries are here in both pdf & HTML forms, a great trove of information for those who are interested). I have read all summaries and will endeavor to read the regional pieces as well in the next few weeks.
The 2,500 pages report concluded that while advances over the last fifty years had resulted in the world's food production increasing at a much faster rate than its population, the present system of production and trade meant the benefits were spread unevenly, and as we know, at intolerable price paid by the small farmers, workers and rural communities and of course, the environment.
17 Apr 08
Solve food crisis by changing policies | The Progressive
We need a national food policy.
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Food riots are erupting all over the world. To prevent them and to help people afford the most basic of goods, we need to understand the causes of skyrocketing food prices and correct the policies that have fueled them.
World food prices rose by 39 percent in the last year. Rice alone rose to a 19-year high in March – an increase of 50 per cent in two weeks alone – while the real price of wheat has hit a 28-year high.
As a result, food riots erupted in Egypt, Guinea, Haiti, Indonesia, Mauritania, Mexico, Senegal, Uzbekistan and Yemen. For the 3 billion people in the world who subsist on $2 a day or less, the leap in food prices is a killer. They spend a majority of their income on food, and when the price goes up, they can’t afford to feed themselves or their families.
Analysts have pointed to some obvious causes, such as increased demand from China and India, whose economies are booming. In the last thirty years, developing countries that used to be self-sufficient in food have turned into large food importers.
Rising fuel and fertilizer costs, increased use of bio-fuels and climate change have all played a part.
But less obvious causes have also had a profound effect on food prices.
12 Apr 08
General William Odom on Iraq: Immediate Withdrawal the Only Option that Makes Sense
General William Odom on Iraq: Immediate Withdrawal the Only Option that Makes Sense
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"Those who link instability with a US withdrawal have it exactly backwards."
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