Slow Food Nation will hit San Francisco this weekend. The City’s already fluttering with SFN posters, and the Victory Garden, planted on the land outside City Hall, looks very handsome indeed. To prepare for the jamboree, I thought I’d go back to Carlo Petrini’s book of the same name, and to Geoff Andrews’ new book, The Slow Food Story. Together, these writers offer a corrective to the hoity toity food culture that has become synonymous with the organization. Although it’s often forgotten, Slow Food’s roots are radical.
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One of the premises of this blog is that there’s a deep connection between food and poverty. So it’s not too much of a tangent to start talking about poverty directly.
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Haiti is the poorest country in the western hemisphere – three quarters of the population lives on less than two dollars a day.
Haitians have company – more than anyone thought. The news from the World Bank is that, cough, poverty might be more pervasive than they thought. Looking back at their figures, they’ve revised up their estimates of the number of people living in poverty from 985 million to 1.4 billion, a more than 40% increase.
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George Monbiot writes below, eloquently as ever, about the rapaciousness of the European Union. In particular, he trains his sights on how EU policies are harming African fisheries. (Veteran Stuffed & Starved readers will remember the BBC covering this from a slightly different angle.)
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Here’s a piece with which I’m particularly pleased, which just came out as a commentary in this month’s Radical Philosophy. It gets much of its punch from the excellent and patient editorial suggestions of Peter Hallward. Keep Reading »
Photo Credit: Limonada
I think what disturbs me about this Reuters news piece even more than the Let them Eat Mud story that I posted about mud cake consumption in Haiti, is that the government in Bihar, India, is actively promoting it.
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Here’s another fine article from Walden Bello, reposted from Business Daily Africa
Africa’s food crisis the handiwork of IMF, World Bank
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The title of this post is an economics and public health pun in very poor taste. But the story behind it is fairly unsavoury too.
Two academics, David Stuckler at Cambridge University and Sanjay Basu at Yale recently looked into the effects of the IMF’s policy impacts on public service reform in the former Soviet Union, using tuberculosis as an indicator. Their full results are here, but here’s the bottom line: Keep Reading »
There are a number of theories going around about the demise of the WTO talks. Mine are here but a couple of others worth noting are by Martin Khor, here and Devinder Sharma. I particularly like Devinder’s take – which shifts the blame entirely toward the US reluctance to give up cotton subsidies. It’s something we got to discuss a little when Devinder helped to launch Stuffed and Starved in Delhi last week (thanks Devinder!). I’m not sure I agree that the elections in India has nothing at all to do with the outcome, but we’re both agreed that soon enough, the talks will be back from the dead. Indeed, if the Third World Network is to be believed, the corpse of the talks is already being revivified by Lula and Lamy.
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