The New York Times recently carried an article on how the world can be saved by potatoes. But I much prefer the seasoned scepticism of Joan Obra, who wrote this article a month or two back, in the Fresno Bee (despite my toe-curling metaphor choice at the end of the article).
Dan sends in this nugget from South Africa, about the constraints that huge farms face there. By way of background, “one farmer, one bullet” is an Anti-Apartheid slogan that was directed rather pointedly at the large land-owning rural whites, who where the instruments and beneficiaries of Apartheid.
50 Percent More US Kids Hungry in 2007
By Michael K Sniffen
WASHINGTON (Nov. 17) – Some 691,000 children went hungry in America sometime in 2007, while close to one in eight Americans struggled to feed themselves adequately even before this year’s sharp economic downturn, the Agriculture Department reported Monday.
Yep, it has been nigh on three weeks since I managed to update things here. I’ll try by get through the huge backlog of material I’ve accumulated. But I can’t promise that it won’t happen again.
Things are going to change a little on this site. I’ll not be generating what passes for original thoughts about food politics for the front page, at least not quite as frequently as I used to. Instead, I’m trying to use what little brain and time I have for work on my next book (more about that in a few weeks).
A reminder, the morning after, that there’s still work to be done…
Image credit:Mitchell Siporin
Why do sensible people make irrational choices? In this fantastic IPS report on why small farmers plant GM seed in South Africa, the answer is “desperation”.
The last in today’s bumper posting marathon – a piece by the French intellectual Eric Toussaint, explaining the connections between our two recent crises. Tomorrow, depending who wins, we’ll see if the number of crises can be kicked up to three…
Dan Moshenberg, who has done a previous guest post on the anniversary of Katrina, is a regular sender of Things That Appear on this Blog. He writes far too rarely at Women In and Beyond the Global, and it was his idea to write the letter to the New York Times that has been a minor hit, republished as far away as Kenya.
First of two round-ups on gender and the food crisis. The first from the excellent Foreign Policy In Focus (to whom I still owe a piece on the Doha WTO round which, while apparing irrelevant, is as urgent as ever).
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