Here’s something I’ve been keeping an eye on – the rising price of food in Mexico. There’s a great deal more going on than recent coverage suggests. It’s not simply a case of corn biofuel purchasing in the US causing a price rise in Mexico. The market isn’t operating that straightforwardly. Here’s one of the better analyses about it in English. It’s up at Portside but I’ve re-posted it here, in full. I’m hoping to be able to plug the gaps in this analysis, with articles in La Jornada like this one by Alejandro Nadal. In the meantime, though, here’s the basic 411.
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The Financial Times yesterday carried this announcement, on the expansion of the empire of supermarkets in India.
India opens western-style supermarkets
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It’s a sign. As I write this post, two of Michael Pollan’s books – The Botany of Desire and The Omnivore’s Dilemma have randomly been spat out into the right column there by the LibraryThing widget.
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Microsoft has now launched its new operating system – Windows Vista. Within a year, 100 million computers will be running it. The code underneath the hood of the operating system is a tightly kept secret. There’s no way to fix it if it’s broken, other than to wait for Microsoft to come out with a patch. Indeed, most users won’t have a choice about whether they want it – it’ll come standard with new computers. Unlike free, open source software, Vista will depends for its adoption on market domination, heavy advertising, and unforgiving software license contracts that force businesses to upgrade to it.
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The good folk on the Retort mailing list sent around this BBC article on street children at the World Social Forum. I responded by rejigging a previous blog posting. Since the reply was a little funnier than the original, and has a few more details on how food was a central feature of life at the World Social Forum, I thought I’d post it here. Apologies for the repetition. Keep Reading »
Following up on this posting, the daily newspaper here at the World Social Forum has a front page article on how the poor broke into the forum.
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Here’s a brief newsy post from the Via Campesina’s first day of activities at the World Social Forum – expect a tidied up version of this on the Via Campesina site soon…
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What a difference a day makes. Yesterday, I posted a newswire report about thousands marching for social justice at the World Social Forum. As ever, there’s more to protest than meets the eye, and now that I’m here in Nairobi, I’m getting a slightly better sense (no doubt one to be revised and qualified tomorrow).
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It’s important to have moments of collectivity, to remember that another world *is* possible. And yesterday at the World Social Forum, over five thousand people marched to remind each other, and the world, of exactly that. Here’s a report from the AFP newswire.
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