Month: June 2011

The Food and Agriculture Organization will have a new director-general, José Graziano da Silva. Among Graziano’s accomplishments is the Zero Hunger programme, which has been partly responsible for getting 40 million people out of hunger. But you don’t get to run an international organisation without the support of your home country, and you don’t get that support in Brazil without deep debts to agribusiness. At his first press conference, Graziano started to pay them off, announcing that biofuels should not be “demonised” for their role in driving up food prices. That this contradicts the latest evidence is only surprising for as long as it takes to remember quite how big Brazil’s biofuel industry is.

Before Graziano’s remarks on biofuels were made public, Joao Pedro Stedile from the Brazilian Landless Rural Workers Movement gave this interview, which gives some helpful context, and puts agrofuels in their place. More below the fold. Continue reading “Blazing Brazilian Biofuel Beatdown”

San Francisco Art and Politics – a free newspaper that I don’t remember picking up, but pleased me to find in my slush pile this afternoon – presented some excellent covers from the 1970s periodical “Turnover: Newsletter of the People’s Food System”
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Continue reading “A is for Apple, I is For Imperialism”