San Francisco, being a techie sort of town, televises and makes available its proceedings online. You can see how the Civic Center farmer’s market discussion all went down here (begins at 04:14:00). If televised local government is something that floats your boat, you can also watch the public comment period too.

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Photo Credit: trp0

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Esther Vivas sent in this fine analysis of the FAO’s summit in Rome. More below the fold.

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The high level summit of the Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations (the FAO) held in Rome on Food Security ended on June 5th. The conclusions of the gathering do not indicate a change in the policy trends which have been in force these last years and which have led to the current situation. The declarations of good intentions made by various governments and the promises of millions of euros to end hunger in the world are not capable of ending the structural causes that have generated this crisis. On the contrary, the proposals made by the general secretary of the UN, Ban Ki-Moon, to increase food production by 50% and to eliminate the export limits imposed by some of the countries affected, only reinforces the root causes of this crisis rather than addressing and guaranteeing the food security of the majority of the people in the global South.

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Yep. Not a typo (though that’d hardly be unusual for me). But seriously. This time it’s true. The 100 centimetre diet. Here. via Christine.

Another winner from Portside: this time, it’s a behind-the-scenes story about the salmonella outbreak in tomatoes in the United States. To blame is the systematically underfunded Food and Drug Administration – against which I’ve tilted in the past. Read more about the organisation that’s supposed, and is utterly unable, to protect public health and food safety.

The excellent German magazine, Der Spiegel, has an expose on the Great African Land Grab. Check it out here. Via Portside.

Couple of articles at odds with one another on the prognosis for free trade, given the current political climate, and the food crisis. The Washington Post has editorialised about why “an obscure Frenchman” – Pascal Lamy, current head of the World Trade Organization – “might be able to save the world. The only question is when he should do it.”

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Source: Ted Taber

The floods in the Midwest have already killed four people. Thousands have been evacuated, and the bill for clean-up will surely run into the hundreds of millions (the Red Cross alone is spending $15 million) – the estimate for Cedar Rapids’ clean up just in: $700 million.

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It’s not all GM crops and food crises here at Stuffed and Starved. From time to time, I’ll kick back with a glass of something nice. And Mark Bittman over at Bitten has just posted one of my favourite booze-recipes. My favourite Gin-related poem is here, btw.

The Financial Times is doing what it usually does – providing concise and honest insight into how the elite bosses think, this time around genetically modified crops. The recent op-ed by John Gapper follows a logic that I’ve been bumping into increasingly. Keep Reading »