The folk from the Association for India’s Development recently held a vigil outside the US Embassy in Washington DC, in support of farmers in India. Here’s a press release from their event.
In writing Stuffed and Starved I was lucky enough to interview farmers and movement activists across the world. This meant travelling, and this means CO2 emissions. A generous totting up of the distances travelled puts the figure involved in writing Stuffed and Starved at around 60,000 miles which, using the carbon calculator here means that I put 24 tons of CO2 into the atmosphere.
Via Campesina the international peasant movement has called for an international day of action at Mexican embassies around the world on 10 December in protest at the increasingly savage repression of peasant leaders in Oaxaca. In their words:
The New Anatolian, the Turkish English-language daily, carries a story today about agribusiness giant Cargill. Since the 1990s, Cargill has been operating in the Orghazi district illegally. Its ties with the government have helped it to win, from a court in Bursa, a ruling that would give them an amnesty and a mild fine for unpermitted activity. Cargill’s not out of the woods yet – President Sezer might still veto the amnesty.
A posting at the Monthly Review Zine tells of the new NAFTA supercorridor. If you’ve not heard of it, that’s partly the point. Surreptitiously, construction has begun on the proposed route, which will link the port of Lazaro Cardenas in Mexico to Duluth at the US Canada border on Lake Superior (download map from MR).
Singur is a fertile and vibrant farming area in the Hoogly district of West Bengal, India. On December 2, it becamethe scene of brutal repression, as armed police beat men, women and children to evict them from their land.
I was doubly pleased to see this report up at the BBC. Not only does it break with the “immigrants: string ‘em up” tone endemic to British journalism on the subject, but it makes direct connections between the food system and migration. Keep Reading »
The Meatrix turned over 10 million people on to the dangers of industrial agriculture. Even if its final message (‘buy organic’) didn’t quite get to the heart of the trouble with the food system today, it was vastly entertaining, and a great Food System 101 course in just over two minutes.
The killing in computer games isn’t all ‘blast’em with your BFG’ or ‘cast a spell with the Blade of Thringgarrr’. You can now administer an unpleasant end using nothing more than some misplaced pig shit.
Two new games have brought food system politics to cyberspace. In Bacteria Salad, your mission is to produce spinach and tomatoes without poisoning your consumers. And chances to poison there are a-plenty, what with your fields ravaged by loose-bladdered cows, pigs and ‘agroterrorists’. The politics of the game are pretty raggedy, and it gets dull quickly, but worth having a look at just to hear the priceless line Keep Reading »
In China, a supermarket has introduced a brand new, whizzbang up to the minute supermarket format – one in which shoppers sit in an electric rollercoaster car and are whizzed around the store, slowing to pluck goodies from the aisles.
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