Food & Water

The dilemma of poverty in the South: equity or transformation

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The Transition Movement in the ‘West’ (and therefore North) has for the most part been unable to conceptualise a response to the human development and social justice needs of the South. Much of this lack has to do with the very formidable inertness which western societies inherited from the transformations wrought by the Industrial Revolution, and the apparently incontrovertible ideas of ‘progress’ and ‘growth.’

Human power on the river for locally grown grain

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On August 19, 2010 a fleet of twenty human powered boats will leave Eugene, Oregon to pick up locally grown grain and beans in Harrisburg and carry them to Corvallis. This is a nod to the history of using the river as transportation and distribution for the products grown in the valley as well as a promotion of the rich variety of grain and beans raised today in the Willamette Valley.

Starving Africa’s future?

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In what may be President Obama’s most significant foray into changing U.S.-Africa policy since his election in 2008, the United States is embarking on a new initiative to boost agricultural production in the global south. Feed the Future (FTF) came out of the G8 summit in L’Aquila in 2009 where developed country leaders committed to acting to “achieve sustainable global food security.” Obama pledged $3.5 billion over three years toward this goal, in hopes that other rich nations would also make significant investments in agricultural development.

Peak predictions: mixing water and oil as global resources dwindle

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Oil and safe drinking water are on parallel courses to depletion – a scarcity that will lead to starvation, disease and warfare. The issue here is drinking water. And there is a lot less of that than seawater. Due to a number of management issues, made worse by climate change, drinking water is fast becoming a geopolitical resource to rival oil – a flashpoint at various places around the globe.

The story of Here begins

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In a “powered down” future—the one almost certain to follow the end of the era of “Hydrocarbon Man”—the practical size of my collapsed world (and yours) could well be defined like this: How far can we walk away from home and back again in a single day?
My own answer? About ten miles. And that’s optimistic…This is the pivotal moment when the story of my life officially becomes the story of this place.

Good hoes/bad hoes

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On the good hoe, the angle of blade to handle is more acute, so that when the hoer chops down, the blade meets the earth at a slicing angle— more easily skims through weeds or soil surface. The muscular effort involved is appreciably less. The old hoe makers knew a thing or two about hoeing that has evidently become lost to new hoe makers.

Lester Brown on rising temperatures and rising food prices

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Prices for basic farm commodities – wheat, corn, and soybeans – are actually somewhat higher in August of this year than they were in August of 2007 at the start of the record-breaking 2007-08 run-up in grain prices that led to food protests and riots in some 30 countries. Meanwhile, it is estimated that Russia could lose nearly 30 million tons of grain this summer.

What are you breeding for?

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The idea that the genius of the place and farmer and local economy might arise together to produce something enormously valuable, not just even if its merits are not universal, but because its merits are not universal, is a very strange one in modern culture, and particularly in modern agriculture. Instead, the show ring and the meat processor and the idea that “bestness” is a universal, rather than a specific, have produced an overwhelming pressure towards there being, say, one kind of milk cow – Holstein-Friesien, and a small smattering of a few other secondary varieties, all pretty much with one kind of dairy body conformation. It has reduced the number of livestock varieties dramatically, as many breeds have died out over the years.