When those who rant against The Nanny State are pressed about what they’d like to see instead, they often point to philanthropy as their preferred model of social progress and uplift. Proven, effective, and – most of all – voluntary, they’d offer. The billionaire Giving Pledge, in which ultra-wealthy individuals promise to give more than half their loot to ‘good causes’ after they die, hit the headlines earlier this month to the usual cooing from those fulminating against progressive taxation. See? The rich can redistribute their wealth without the state doing it for them. The rich aren’t just rich – they’re generous too!
Farmer suicides sit low in the list of “unlikely subjects for satire’. But if Brasseye can successfully lampoon the moral panic around paedophilia, it’s not a stretch to think that someone might do something similar with agrarian despair. What’s surprising, at least according to the reviews and interviews, is quite how successfully Peepli Live has skewered almost every venerated Indian institution, from media to state to religion. The film’s out soon, and the trailer’s here now.
The good people at the Takeaway invited me on this morning to talk about a recent NY Times article in which India’s Congress party is reported to be pushing for the right to food to be written into its constitution.
Like most folk I know, I’ve a few friends and comrades who manage somehow to read everything before breakfast, and send out the distilled wisdom of the day’s news. (I’m thinking of you, BK, DM, JH, JC, KN, IHL.) In an occasional series of posts here on the blog, I’ll forward the best of these without comment. Just FYI.
In haste, here are a few resources I’ve found useful in understanding that the current food crisis, sparked by drought and fire in Russia, isn’t so much a re-run of the 2008 disaster as an extension of it.
Today’s Financial Times has a preview of a much-awaited World Bank report on land grabs. The Bank has, for months, been promising the arrival of a report that makes a cast iron case for why allowing rich foreign investors to buy land in poor countries is win-win-win-win. The release date for the report keeps slipping because it appears that even the Bank is struggling to massage the facts to fit its case. From a leaked version of the report: Keep Reading »
It’s all here – transnational capital flows, land grabs, Chinese investment, Brazilian regional hegemony, and water wars. Twenty first century concerns if ever there were. And, right in the middle, a very nineteenth century name. The first sentence from a recent Financial Times article demonstrates why globalisation is always old and always new. Keep Reading »
One day, I’ll find time to write at length about Jamie Oliver but for now, an observation widely shared: when he ran into the food service regulations in his recent US school meal adventures, it was clear he was outgunned in ways he couldn’t fathom. That’s not his fault. School meal regulations in the US are almost deliberately unfathomable. A small legion of food activists and journalists are trying to get to the bottom of it, though – the Time for Lunch campaign is trying to transform school meals, for instance, but two new bits of investigation, across the US and in DC, suggest the scale of the task. The kickback agreements that industrial caterers have with brand suppliers is something that they’ll fight very hard to keep, even if it means that the fresh, local and sustainable produce needed to head off the US obesity epidemic remains off the menu. [Via Jenny Huston]
As someone who gets a little more ALL CAPS email than he’d like, it’s good to find a source that is both fully upper-case and entirely sensible: Feminist Hulk. HULK SAY FUCK PATRIARCHY. HULK NOT HAVE PROBLEM WITH “FUCK.” ONLY BAD WORDS ARE ONES USED TO MAKE PEOPLE FEEL SMALL.
