It has been called “a rallying cry“, and has even spawned a movie, but it’s still not entirely clear to folk what food sovereignty really means. One of the reasons that I’ll be a delinquent blogger over the next couple of weeks is because I’ll be at a conference trying to get to the bottom of what food sovereignty might mean if we were to take it seriously. But in the meantime, Grassroots International have some good Food Sovereignty 101 materials. These’ll be useful in trying to persuade the next administration, Obama’s unless the Republicans successfully rig it again, to sort their shit out when it comes to food. The excellent Tom Philpott has surveyed what to applaud and what to be afraid of in the candidates’ positions on agriculture. The ideas behind food sovereignty will help keep democratic vigil, once the voting has stopped.
Daryll Ray is a Professor at the University of Tennessee, and one of the minds behind the Agricultural Policy Analysis Center, from which weekly he sends out consistently splendid missives on food and the food system. He’s a source whose induction into the Blogroll and Newswire is long overdue, and his thoughts on the Doha Round of WTO Negotiations and Country of Origin Labelling are good ways to dip your toe into his analytical style.
Bill at Toplab has been sending on a good few pieces on water and water politics, of which a few of my favourites are:
- Zimbabwean water wars, which makes the case that Zimbabweans are merely the canaries in the mineshaft of global water shortages. Which is ironic because
- the population of nearby Namibia could drink the water that Starbucks wastes every day. And Seattle’s coffee imperium is at the trivial end of the
- New Corporate Threat to Water. Decades of under-investment in public infrastructure make it easy for water supplies to be privatised sub rosa.
A couple of sites I’ve been meaning to write about at length, but will have to write about in haste. Since they’re both in the early stages, I’m sure I’ll have cause to revisit them as they blossom. First, Fighting FTAs. It’s a site that’ll be collecting information on Free Trade Agreements around the world, together with news on the fights against them. It already has a fine map of where they’re at, and more’s coming soon. Second, Greenerati looks like it’ll be an interesting combination of food and architecture – more on that as it fulfills its promise. It’s certainly an urgent question, as we face tough questions about how cities will be able to feed themselves.
It has been a while since supermarkets reminded us why they’re so pernicious. So this article, from Workday Minnesota, is very welcome. Even more welcome is the covering of this issue by HumanRightsWatch who have links to some of Wal-Mart’s Red-Scare training videos. It’s almost like they’re trying to tamp down their workers by calling unions “Socialist”. More below the fold.
Update
Seems as if the British government is going to be spanking a few supermarkets after they shared pricing plans with their buddies.
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It’s not often that a President of the United States admits to, and regrets, commodity fetishism. But, apparently everyone’s reading Marx these days and when Bill Clinton admits that food oughtn’t to be treated like a commodity, he’s making a Marxist observation. Of course, the ultimate end point of Clinton’s analysis should be that no commodity should be treated like a commodity, but we can hope that he’ll get there in time.
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The New York Times ran a special food-themed issue of its Sunday magazine a week back. It was kicked off by a fine piece by Mark Bittman, who observed quite rightly that the conversation being had in the magazine’s pages reflects America’s new, and healthy, interest in what they’re eating.
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The mad travel schedule just doesn’t seem to let up. So here are a couple of post-cards from the road. First, I was lucky enough to join some of the finest US food justice activists at an event in New York City last week. There were many highlights, all of which you can see here, but the most sustained and deserved applause went to Gerardo Reyes Chávez, a leader and organizer for the Coalition of Immokalee Workers (CIW). You can hear his speech below.
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I’ve worried before about my mammoth carbon footprint, particularly as I flit across North America giving talks. I’m convinced that the solutions to climate change proposed by George Monbiot in Heat are among the most sensible, with individual carbon accounts for everyone, and trading between each of us to balance out the disproportionate damage caused by people like me.
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