Bless them, the Guardian have published the internal World Bank document that suggests that biofuels are responsible for up to three quarters of the recent food price increases. It has so dramatically pushed up the estimate of the share of biofuels in the current crisis that even Robert Zoellick has said
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The San Francisco Victory Garden is well underway, as you can see here. For me, one of the most exciting parts of this lies in the thinking behind the planting.
So the San Francisco Victory Garden is underway. Above, the breaking of ground and the removing of sod. It’ll start getting more interesting as the beds are prepared and laid out. Ultimately, it’ll look like this:
The ever thoughtful Walden Bello tells the long history of the destruction of African agriculture, via Foreign Policy In Focus.
Destroying African Agriculture
Roger Burbach, whose 1980 book Agribusiness in the Americas blew open the story of corporate power and food on this continent, has sent his latest thoughts on agribusiness and Bolivia.
This urgent action just in from FIAN. Time to get scribbling.
Brazil: Increasing repression and criminalization against the Landless
People Movement (MST)
Last June 17, about 300 landless (the vast majority of them women, children and elderly) were forcibly evicted from two camps of the “Movimento de Trabalhadores Sem Terra” (MST), located on leased and private land -therefore legally occupied- in the vicinity of Fazenda Guerra, in Coqueiros do Sul, Northern region of the state of Rio Grande do Sul. The judiciary of Carazinho issued the eviction order after the Attorney General’s office of Rio Grande do Sul filed a complaint against MST on June 11. In this complaint, the Attorney General accuses MST of crimes against the national security and characterizes MST as a para-military organization which ought to be dismantled.
The excellent ETC Group has just come up with a fine bit of social science that cuts through the guff of the recent FAO Food Summit in Rome.
It took tens of thousands of people, dollars and hours to fight back the ambitions of a few agricultural capitalists, but good sense has at least temporarily prevailed here in California. After making their water-tight case for spraying most of Northern California with an untested pesticide to kill a harmless moth, the state government has backed down.
It has a clunky title, but Stan Cox’s latest piece in Alternet is something I can get behind. It’s called Turning Your Lawn into a Victory Garden Won’t Save You — Fighting the Corporations Will.
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