I’m just finishing work on an academic article about the return of food riots, which I’m co-writing with my good friend Phil McMichael. As part of that work, one of Phil’s finest graduate students, Mindi Schneider, prepared a research report on 2008’s food riots.
Here’s an article that I recently put together for the Americas Policy Program. It’s just a heads up on the World Trade Organisation – because while everyone else had a head full of Obama, the negotiators at the WTO had heads full of something else entirely. If some of the rumours are to be believed, the round is much closer to completion than it was in July. Here’s why. Entire article below, or here.
If I were anywhere near New York City next weekend, I’d be going to Give Us Bread, a reading of a play about the 1917 Food riots. The crew who put it together, the Anthropologists, have a splendid research blog on which they’ve been collecting materials about the riots. On it, you’ll find everything from the City’s response to the riots (eat rice!) to a racial classification of NYC push-cart vendors. If the research for the project is so surprising, challenging and entertaining, it can only speak well for the reading of their production. And, if any of y’all end up there, please do share your thoughts!
Other than Al Jazeera in English, the best news source on the food crisis has been Bloomberg. You can be fairly sure that when you see Alison Fitzgerald and Jason Gale in the byline, you’re getting quality reporting. Here’s the latest article from a series that Bloomberg are doing on hunger and famine. Original here.< !-break-->
The good people at IATP, who consistently get it right on trade and wrong on agrofuels, have come out with a new report. They trace the extent to which speculation was responsible for the food crisis.
Dan sends along this link to an excellent Observer article on the bloody consequences of lot-fed meat. And Dan’s introduction is spot on:
The global village turns out to be a global farm as well. The livestock raised in, say, England or the U.S. are fed on grain, in this instance soya, which is raised in, say, Paraguay, and the results are devastating.
The splendid Jacques Depelchin, whose Silences in African History is well worth a read and with whom I work at the Ota Benga Alliance, has written a lyrical overview of the food and financial crisis. It’s up at Pambazuka and you can read more below the fold.
It’s Thanksgiving here in the United States. Sarah has shared some tips about how to survive the season sustainably. But, as I’ve mentioned already, a growing number of people in the US are going hungry. This story, which ran in the Chronicle this week, tells of how gleaning is alive and well in the twenty-first century.
Two urgent actions with which to conclude today’s flood of articles. The first, in California, comes from the United Farm Workers. They’re fighting to give 200 families access to water, from a pipeline that could serve them well, but which the Department of Fish and Game refuses to make available. Write to Schwarzenegger’s bureaucrats and give em hell.
This, I thought, was a very well written article. It’s one thing to read, in PLoS Medicine, that in some US counties, life expectancy is falling. It’s quite another to read what it means in practice. The “$10 Kentucky Fried Chicken Challenge” below is a warning, if ever there were, about quite how ass-backwards we’ve managed to set prices for food, and for everything else.
The Unhealthiest City in the US: Huntington, West Virginia
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 3.0 Unported License