Other than Al Jazeera in English, the best news source on the food crisis has been Bloomberg. You can be fairly sure that when you see Alison Fitzgerald and Jason Gale in the byline, you’re getting quality reporting. Here’s the latest article from a series that Bloomberg are doing on hunger and famine. Original here.< !-break-->
The good people at IATP, who consistently get it right on trade and wrong on agrofuels, have come out with a new report. They trace the extent to which speculation was responsible for the food crisis.
Dan sends along this link to an excellent Observer article on the bloody consequences of lot-fed meat. And Dan’s introduction is spot on:
The global village turns out to be a global farm as well. The livestock raised in, say, England or the U.S. are fed on grain, in this instance soya, which is raised in, say, Paraguay, and the results are devastating.
The splendid Jacques Depelchin, whose Silences in African History is well worth a read and with whom I work at the Ota Benga Alliance, has written a lyrical overview of the food and financial crisis. It’s up at Pambazuka and you can read more below the fold.
It’s Thanksgiving here in the United States. Sarah has shared some tips about how to survive the season sustainably. But, as I’ve mentioned already, a growing number of people in the US are going hungry. This story, which ran in the Chronicle this week, tells of how gleaning is alive and well in the twenty-first century.
Two urgent actions with which to conclude today’s flood of articles. The first, in California, comes from the United Farm Workers. They’re fighting to give 200 families access to water, from a pipeline that could serve them well, but which the Department of Fish and Game refuses to make available. Write to Schwarzenegger’s bureaucrats and give em hell.
This, I thought, was a very well written article. It’s one thing to read, in PLoS Medicine, that in some US counties, life expectancy is falling. It’s quite another to read what it means in practice. The “$10 Kentucky Fried Chicken Challenge” below is a warning, if ever there were, about quite how ass-backwards we’ve managed to set prices for food, and for everything else.
The Unhealthiest City in the US: Huntington, West Virginia
In case you thought that the whole baby milk saga was over, WomensENews has a article reminding us that corporations are still encouraging women to switch to infant formula, despite abundant evidence that mothers’ milk is invariably better. Is it a coincidence that, as Molly M. Ginty notes below, “half of the infant formula sold in the U.S. is distributed by the government to low-income mothers”? Read and decide.
The excellent Tom Philpott has posted a story at Grist Magazine about the move to fix the pollution caused in the United States by Concentrated Animal Feed Operations (CAFOs) through the simple expedient of moving the production to the Global South. It has worked well with toxic waste (check out this fine report by Al Jazeera on the political economy of toxic waste in Somalia), so I imagine it’ll bring in cash for its pioneers in the meat industry.
The Indian government is pissing about on climate change, seeming somehow to think that because it wasn’t responsible for it, that it will remain unaffected. The extent to which the Indian Government has got this very wrong is something to which the Indian press is starting, slowly, to wake up, as this article on the disappearance of Himalayan glaciers shows. The consequences of this for food production in Asia are profound, as Lester Brown notes here. With most of the planet’s rice irrigated by glacier melt, what will people eat when the water runs out?
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