Farewell Jean Ziegler, whose tenure as the United Nations Special Rapporteur on Food came to an end on April 30. He was an outspoken advocate of the right to food, and his denouncing of biofuels as “a crime against humanity” was every bit as forceful as it needed to be.
Here’s something to savour amid the nightmare of the food crisis. Faced with the nightmare of high food prices, many working families are recovering ways of eating (victory gardens, for instance) that had almost entirely been forgotten. This is knowledge that the Southern Food Alliance is keen to preserve, and their oral history project is tremendously exciting.
So, as part of the article roundup, there are some fine cartoons here and here, and some very good writing about the crisis from Fred Magdoff Monthly Review, and Ian Angus.
I’ve been a very delinquent blogger of late, and am likely to be so for the next couple of weeks. Quite unexpectedly, I’ve been asked to testify in front of the House Financial Services Committee in a couple of weeks time about the food crisis, and the World Bank’s role in it. Veterans of this blog will know that I’ve already said, in print, that the head of the World Bank makes me gag and, on Canadian telly, that the World Bank is full of shit. I’ll be reining in my potty mouth and putting together some pointed testimony over the next few days, so I’ll be not spending quite as much time here as I’d like. I blame the government. But check out the blog for the best articles from other writers, now that the food crisis has become something of a hot topic….
Not for nothing is gender one of the most frequent tags here at Stuffed and Starved. The modern food system is tilted against women, in everything from land ownership to life expectancy because of poor diet to, now, access to the biofuels market. The road ahead is long.
Great overview article at the BBC on the effects of rice price rises in Asia. Thanks dad!
Civil Penalties of Fraud Assessed by the United States Internal Revenue Service against corporations
Source:TracIRS
As the media turns to face the food crisis, few pieces strike me as particularly thoughtful. One of the ones that does is this one by Claire Melamed on the profiteering behind the price rises.
Just by way of coda to the previous post, there are many folk who will not be silenced. Check out one group (whose t-shirts I’m proud to wear) here.
If Josette Sheeran, head of the United Nations World Food Programme, is to be believed the current food crisis is “a silent tsunami which knows no borders sweeping the world.”
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