Farm Economics
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No Farms, No Food
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Baltimore City Is First “Meatless Monday” School System
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The House Food Safety Bill in Brief
Ag in Africa: Foreign 'Feudal Lords' and 'Diabolical' Seed Companies
Published November 18, 2009 @ 06:00AM PT
In looking at the world leaders gathered at this week's World Summit on Food Security in Rome, one does not except to see the eccentric Muammar Gaddafi as a beacon of logic in the storm. The unusual ruler, after all, spent part of his weekend in Italy's capital trying to convert 500 women he hired from an escort service to Islam — after, that is, he arrived in a white limo to speak to them, reports the UK's Mail Online.
He might not have persuaded very many of his female quarry to convert — "I thought we were going to a party - we didn't even get a glass of water or some salty snack," one woman reportedly said — but on the issue of global agriculture he was entirely convincing. He warned the other assembled leaders that foreign companies that are procuring massive tracts of farmland in Africa are becoming the continent's “new feudal lords," reports Reuters.
“In Africa, foreign investors buy farmland, transforming themselves into new feudal lords against whom we must fight,” Gaddafi said at the summit. Indeed many are calling the ominous development a massive "land grab," and the UK's Times Online went so far as to dub it "modern imperialism."
How You Can Help Women Get Land Rights
Published November 12, 2009 @ 06:00AM PT
Earlier this week I wrote about how women grow the majority of the world's food but own a tiny fraction of the world's land. This major imbalance makes women — and thus families — more insecure and effectively leaves a major segment of daily natural resource users out of our global conversations on issues such as global warming, sustainable agriculture and food crises.
Alert reader David Mastroianni asked what we can all do to help fix this situation. Here are some ideas.
Global Warming's Evil Twin: Agricultural Land Use
Published November 06, 2009 @ 06:00AM PT
The world is stuck on the tracks and there are trains coming in both directions. One headlight represents climate change. The other light is us, a booming global population that needs more and more food every year. One train demands that we preserve our forests, the other that we slash and burn them. One demands that we decrease pollution, the other that we add more and more fossil fuels to our soil.
At least unless we change things -- a lot of things -- very drastically. We are already yanking on the brake of the climate train, though not nearly hard enough. The other train, though, is barreling forward unfettered. Few of us realize the train is being driven by a madman. Few of us realize the massive crisis our global society's inattention to agricultural priorities promises to become unless something is done.
The problem, according to a new essay by Jonathan Foley, professor and director of the Institute on the Environment at the University of Minnesota, is that we will need to double or even triple our agricultural output over the next several decades unless we want a whole heck of a lot of starving people on our hands. But we have to do that without completely destroying our environment.
Local Food Initiatives Earn Accolades
Published November 04, 2009 @ 06:00AM PT
Everyone likes a winner (except, perhaps, the losers), so it is wonderful to see that some local-food efforts have been recognized with prizes in non-food-oriented competitions. The more friends and admirers the local food movement accrues, the more attention local food systems will receive and the more progress we can make in encouraging local consumption and developing the infrastructure to enable it.
I bring news of three exciting victories:
- Urban Farming, a Detroit-based NGO that commandeers unused urban land to grow food, has received second place in the Drucker Awards for Nonprofit Innovation. This plucky, green-thumbed organization plants things in unlikely places such as rooftops and in vertical gardens on "edible green walls." The group also won a MySpace IMPACT AWARD, and founder Taja Sevelle was named Grand Prize winner in the 2009 Garden Crusaders Awards from Gardener's Supply Company.
- Tim Will, 61, a retired telecommunications executive from Rutherfordton, North Carolina, was named one of the winners of the 2009 Purpose Prize, which recognizes the efforts of seniors who use the second chapters of their lives to help their communities in inspiring and ambitious ways. Will is honored for establishing a Web-based service that allows local farmers to sell produce directly to the restaurants of Charlotte.
- Joel Salatin of Omnivore's Dilemma fame has been named a winner of the prestigious Heinz Award in recognition of his success in demonstrating to the nation that sustainable, organic farming practices can be effective and lucrative. His 550-acre Polyface Farm in Virginia employs a complex rotational system involving beef, sheep, chickens, pigs, rabbits, turkeys and, most importantly, grass.
Farming is Back
Published November 03, 2009 @ 06:00AM PT
As I mentioned, Bill Gates is investing in farmers around the world, aiming to empower them after decades of neglect from domestic policies and measly international aid. Some assert that he's going about it all wrong, but the fact remains: the spotlight is focused on farmers.
Apparently, according to an article in Time Magazine, Gates is at the head of a new trend: the international community and national governments are again focusing on supporting agriculture. The article's author, Michael Shuman, describes how farmers came to be so ignored:
Governments equated economic progress with steel mills and shoe factories. While urban centers thrived and city dwellers got rich, hundreds of millions of farmers remained mired in poverty. Agriculture in many developing nations stagnated.
"Now," he writes, "the farm is back."
Bill Gates Enchanted by the GMO Idol
Published October 27, 2009 @ 06:00AM PT
I wrote last week about the Gates Foundation's efforts to help improve agricultural systems in the developing world. Gates's conclusion: the Foundation's investment should empower poor farmers to grow more crops and get them to market, which will help them pull themselves out of poverty.
Sounds like a plan, right? Not so fast, says alert reader and fellow blogger Greg Plotkin, who pointed out an important thread underlying the story: "Gates is hoping to prompt a second Green Revolution and has shown very little concern about the potential negative impacts that [genetically modified (GM)] crops could bring."
This is a crucial point to bring to light, not least because the architect of the Gates Foundation's plans, Rajiv Shah, is now a part of the Obama Adminstration. In April, he became Under Secretary of Research, Education and Economics and Chief Scientist at the USDA, a position in which he can work to entrench this particular "green revolution" agenda into national policy priorities.
In Response to "The Omnivore's Delusion" Part 2
Published August 28, 2009 @ 02:45PM PT
(This is the second in a two-part response to "The Omnivore's Delusion" article written by Blake Hurst, a self-admitted "industrial" farmer from Missouri, a few weeks back for The Journal of American Enterprise Institute. The first part of my response can be found here.)
To continue my critique of Hurt's article, I'd like to now discuss the way he characterizes the acute need for the continuation of industrial animal agriculture. I purposely chose not to deal with this topic in my first post as I knew it would require its own space and time.
Part of the problem with agriculture today, as Nicholas Kristof points out in his recent New York Times Op-Ed, is that the profession has largely lost its soul over the past several decades as industrial farming practices have taken hold. This is not to say that there aren't any family farming operations in this country--in fact, there are many--but the way that we view the production of food has changed dramatically. There is no place where this is more true than in animal agriculture.
It's quite clear from Hurst's article that he is no animal rights activist. In his view, animals are commodities that are to be raised in a manner that maximizes the financial return for farmers with very little (legitimate) concern paid to the environmental and food safety costs incurred by this kind of production.
This is part of the lost soul of American agriculture. Where once farmers treated animals well in order to ensure a long, healthy and productive life, now many farmers choose to treat their animals as badly as possible while still turning a profit. We have lost respect for the key role animals have played (and always will play) in the history of our agricultural progression.
