Vidarbha farmers, widows to protest Obama’s visit
IANS, November 4 2010

Nagpur – Farmers all over Vidarbha in eastern Maharashtra will stage candle-light protests on the eve of US President Barack Obama’s visit Friday, seeking to draw his attention to the plight of agriculture sector in the region, an official said.

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Amid the madness of election night, a small victory went largely unreported: San Francisco’s supervisors passed the Healthy Food Initiatives Ordinance. So, fewer toys with food, less chance of kids pestering parents for meals that are unhealthy. It’s a small victory in the larger war over advertising to children. But it’s one worth savouring.

With President Obama on the way to India, it’s time for a couple of India-themed posts. First, while the President may be leaving a country in which the Tea Party activists have a symbiotic relationship with Fox news, he’ll be arriving in a country where the media and the mob are in far closer cahoots. Goonda Raj, roughly, is ‘mob rule’. Arundhati Roy has been threatened with arrest for her ’seditious’ analysis of India’s state violence in Kashmir. Here’s her account of a recent attack on her home by India’s far-right goon squads.

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The Guardian’s excellent Felicity Lawrence has put together a podcast on global food security (and its decline). Among the contributors – Jayati Ghosh and Olivier De Schutter. As far as I can tell, there isn’t a way to comment on the podcast at the Guardian’s site, but feel free to pile in below.

Three books that I’m excited to read:

• Love in the Time of AIDS, by Mark Hunter. It has been acclaimed as the best book about HIV/AIDS in South Africa, and I’m not surprised. I was in South Africa when Mark was doing his fieldwork, working within a community over the course of years, trusted enough to be given access to love letters. When he presented his findings, it was always dynamite.

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Here’s a short piece I wrote for a recent issue of Foreign Policy, which led to a brief segment on NPR.

My new friend Ananya Roy was on DemocracyNow! yesterday, talking about the links between microfinance, sub-prime lending, the recent news of farmer suicides assisted by microcredit lenders, and the transformation of poverty into global big business.
Her latest book, Poverty Capital, is fantastic. I’m learning not just about the ambiguities of microfinance, but about the organisations that promote it. For instance: the largest microfinance lender and urban developer in the Middle East? Hezbollah. Find out more here.

What’s responsible for 5% of human impact on the climate, shoddily regulated, and has just concluded two weeks’ wrangling with some bad news? Anirvan Chatterjee of The Year of No Flying tells all, in this guest post…. Keep Reading »

If you’re in the Bay Area, there are two major ways you can get involved this week to shape a better food system here. One’s fun, the other’s just a click away.

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The Coalition of Immokalee Workers today launch a new phase of their struggle, by taking on some of the country’s largest supermarkets. To help, they’ve produced a splendid two minute video. It’s worth a watch, not least because twenty seconds in, the campaign video has a cracking dissolve, taking us from supermarket aisle to tomato field in a handful of frames. It’s  a leap that most of us still find hard to comprehend. Perhaps seeing it makes it easier both to believe, and to remember. Check out the actions below, and save the dates.

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