A year after America voted for the change-agent they saw in Barack
Obama, advocates hoping for deep improvements in our food system can
point to only a few successes, while other policies that could lead to
food insecurity are brewing in back rooms.
Nearly two years ago, candidate Obama said the following in a speech at the Iowa Farmer's Union:
There is an old
African saying "Whether elephants make love or war, the grass suffers."
The two elephants in the agricultural seed business are now making real
war, although they have been wary of each other for years. Monsanto,
a relatively recent entry into the business, has become the "dominant
male" in the battle after moving to acquire a large number of formerly
independent seed companies. Pioneer,
content for years to be the premiere corn breeder in the world, has
"Let us not talk falsely
now, for the hour is getting late."
Bob Dylan,
"All Along the Watchtower"
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Tomorrow is World Food Day and since I can't invite you all over
for dinner, I thought I'd serve up a smorgasbord of facts and figures about the
way the US
and the world eat or don't eat, as the case may be.
"The day the (palm) seeds arrived in our country on the plane, I wondered, `what are these seeds?'" Matilda Pilacapio told us at a meeting in late September. Pilacapio is a human rights advocate from Milne Bay, Papua New Guinea and she stopped by our Minneapolis office on the way to a meeting with
Cargill—the largest palm oil importer in the U.S.
Last month, the world lost a Nobel laureate. In the many tributes following his death, Norman Borlaug was credited with saving more lives than any man in history. Borlaug’s legacy was the Green Revolution – bringing industrial agriculture to Mexico, India, and Pakistan. Pesticides, ammonia fertilizer, irrigation, and hybrid seeds resulted in a predictable outcome: lush green fields full of high-yielding crops. At last, mankind had the tools at its fingertips to overcome hunger.
GEM, Ind. - Most evenings, Gary Mithoefer can be found at the end of a long gravel driveway off a busy highway, tending two garden plots filled with white sweet potatoes, squash, cabbages and a dozen other vegetables still thriving in early fall.
The 62-year-old, who gardens after his workday ends at his state highway job, is one of a growing number of Americans rolling up their sleeves and digging into the dirt to raise crops or livestock on a small scale.
This week, Sens. Barbara Boxer (D-Calif.) and John Kerry (D-Mass.) introduced a new piece of climate legislation, and agriculture once again is expected to be at the center of debate as the bill moves forward. The new legislation is a complement to the Waxman-Markey climate bill the House passed last June, a bill that placed agriculture in a potentially perilous position. The Boxer-Kerry legislation now threatens to do the same, a move that could be bad for farmers, eaters, and the planet.
UXBRIDGE, Canada - Rocketing food prices and hundreds of millions more starving people will be part of humanity's grim future without concerted action on climate change and new investments in agriculture, experts reported this week.
The current devastating drought in East Africa, where millions of people are on the brink of starvation, is a window on our future, suggests a new study looking at the impacts of climate change.
MADRID — Environmentalists dressed as giant ears of corn Tuesday
asked for "agricultural asylum" in the French embassy in Madrid in a
protest over genetically modified crops.
The environmental
organisation Friends of the Earth organised the symbolic act to protest
Spain's "large-scale" production of genetically modified corn, which is
banned in France.
Around 20 protesters from several European
countries and dressed as corn cobs demonstrated outside the French
embassy in central Madrid.
