Insight and inspiration in turbulent times.
Many people think hunger is about too many people and too little food, but that is not the case. At Oxfam, we know that hunger is about power. Its roots lie in inequalities in access to resources and opportunities.
So what really interests me is whether we may be entering another ‘Machiavellian moment’ when smallholder republicanism may, at least in some places, arise as a response to new times and challenges.
To Brown, it’s not about increasing the yield, it is about maximising the profit per acre. One Family’s Journey into Regenerative Agriculture, is the subtitle to his book which summarises his insight that everything on the farm hinges on the health of its soils.
So while there’s much to be said for population control, I think the notion that population control is the most important precursor to economic development and environmental protection is problematic.
The Center for Ecoliteracy recently released a suite of free digital resources: videos, original animations, interactive pages, photography, and sample activities to help explore the relationships between food and climate change.
Will hi-tech save agriculture from its otherwise intractable problems? Certainly technological stakeholders want it to appear so, as digitisation increases both in the fields and in the policy documents and future plans for the sector.
A good stint at home cooking should be a prerequisite for anyone who’s a city food policy practitioner. Home cooking deserves to be on the front burner of good food policy.
Silicon Valley meets Hollywood. That is the best description of how we will get food in the future if we would believe the impressive number of food tech start-ups which will produce food without soil or animals. But few of them deliver on their exaggerated promises.
Let me begin by saying that we leftists do often struggle with the issue of the environment. One member of our tribe recently told me proudly on Twitter that the left was ‘against nature’ (yes, really), and it’s true that historically we’ve had a bit of a thing about trying to keep the messy world of the natural, the organic and the rural at arm’s length…
At farms like Cosechas Tierra Viva in Las Piedras, run by Eduardo Burgos and Franco Marcano, where they grow kale, arugula, green beans, and eggplant for local farmers’ markets, the storm kicked them into high gear. Just a month after Maria’s landfall, they converted the farm to run exclusively on solar energy and shifted their irrigation system’s source to rainwater.
In addition to fighting specific environmental encroachments, the Nation is bracing for climate change by building cultural resilience—especially by preserving and adapting its food heritage.
The Land Institute, based in Salina, Kansas, remains the only U.S.-based research institute devoted to developing perennial grains and multi-species farming systems — but institutions around the world have now joined the effort.
