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African Farmers Displaced as Investors Move In
Neil MacFarquhar, New York Times
… Across Africa and the developing world, a new global land rush is gobbling up large expanses of arable land. Despite their ageless traditions, stunned villagers are discovering that African governments typically own their land and have been leasing it, often at bargain prices, to private investors and foreign governments for decades to come.
Organizations like the United Nations and the World Bank say the practice, if done equitably, could help feed the growing global population by introducing large-scale commercial farming to places without it.
But others condemn the deals as neocolonial land grabs that destroy villages, uproot tens of thousands of farmers and create a volatile mass of landless poor. Making matters worse, they contend, much of the food is bound for wealthier nations.
(21 December 2010)
Review of “This Hungry World” – US revolutionized agriculture to advance its foreign policy
Katherine Maher, Book Forum
“The Hungry World”
by Nick Cullather
Since humanity emerged from nomadism, the cultivation of food has been a key component of our culture. It’s a reflection of wealth, an indication of mechanical prowess, and an instrument of war. And as historian Nick Cullather reminds us, food was also the basis for some of the most charged encounters of the cold war, as played out in the developing political and market systems of Asia. In The Hungry World, he argues that such efforts amounted to a technocratic seduction of the Asian peasantry—a wide-scale effort of social and technological engineering intended to showcase the fruits of the capitalist-democratic model of agricultural development.
The United States at midcentury was in many ways ideally suited to produce the ideology behind agricultural modernization. As Cullather recounts in capacious detail, the invention of the edible calorie in the final decade of the nineteenth century—a major breakthrough in American ideas about optimal food production—foretold the coming fundamental shift in the world’s relationship with food. Early in the twentieth century, the United States found a willing test case in Mexico. Seeking to deter Communist activity south of the border, the US government supported the Rockefeller Foundation’s efforts to design a prototype for comprehensive agricultural reform. Here, Cullather argues, America could effectively export its exceptionalist vision of democracy sustained through technological advance, inventing new “optimal” measures for population and resource scarcity.
The US push for stability through agriculture took on fresh urgency after the great upset on the eastern front of the cold war: Mao Tse-tung’s seizure of power in China. No longer would bureaucrats in Washington deride the “fatal passivity” of the Asian peasantry; China—along with the more than 80 percent agrarian population of the surrounding continent—now posed an existential threat nearly on par with the Soviet Union. Urgently seeking alternate models of influence, the Truman administration settled on the Mexican model of development as the basis of a new approach to containing the Communist threat in Asia.
(December 2010 – January 2011)
Idea #4: Create a Local Food Bill
Colleen Kimmett, TheTyee.ca
Emulate Illinois and pass a Local Food, Farms and Jobs Act. Wannabe party leaders, take note!
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… Facing an economy devastated by the recession and collapse of the auto industry, the state has actually embraced its strong agricultural base as an economic life raft. The city of Detroit’s burgeoning urban farming scene has been widely covered by major publications like the New York Times and Fast Company.
And in August 2009, the Illinois House of Representatives passed a less publicized but indeed landmark piece of legislation that could help create a whole bunch of Detroits across the state.
It’s called the Local Food, Farms and Jobs Act (House Bill 33990) and it put into law three main policies to help create a strong state-wide food system. First, the law creates a council that is funded to implement a “grown-in-Illinois” certification and labelling program. Second, the law creates an arms-length agency to help identify gaps in, and support, the infrastructure requirements of an in-state food distribution system. Third, the law directs all state agencies (hospitals, schools, prisons) to purchase 20 per cent of their food locally by 2020, even if they have to pay a premium for i
(23 December 2010)
Food Swaps
Nichole Ross, Permaculture Research Institute (Australia)
Like a typical pregnant woman, I woke up this morning with food on my mind. However, it wasn’t the stereotypical indulgences and strange combinations like bon bons or peanut butter and pickle sandwiches. Instead, I was thinking about the idea of small-scale food swaps, something I believe could become the future of how people might obtain the majority of their food needs.
The idea came to me as a result of experiences I had during the recent 4-course series the Permaculture Research Institute USA (PRI USA) held on the small Island of Molokai, Hawaii. …
In exchange for sponsorship, local students contributed whatever resources they had access to toward running the courses, including a site to hold classes, tools, machinery, temporary housing for staff and students, transportation, cultural experiences, humorous and insightful stories and lots of local food.
Many of our students were avid hunters and gardeners. Every morning they would arrive with different combinations of fresh venison, fish, sweet potatoes, yams, salad and cooking greens, breadfruit, avocados, papayas, mangos, oranges, pomelos, pomegranite, coconuts, tomatoes, local honey and baked goods. We also had access to the course site’s garden, plentiful with taro, hot peppers, bananas and a variety of herbs.
… This is when the idea of food swaps popped into my head. And, I’m not talking about farmers’ markets or Community Supported Agriculture (CSA) delivery services, which are generally based on money-exchange. What I’m talking about is a small group of people getting together to regularly trade what they grow, hunt, gather or make — in equal exchange.
Perhaps it’s already being done elsewhere, but to me the concept is new. The process could function something like this:
Get 10 local people in a community together who each have some type of local food to offer, which is surplus to them. Have each person separate quantities into increments of $5 value. The group meets once a week at one member’s home. Each person brings ten $5 units of their surplus. Everyone trades their goods for what they need. They all come in with only 1 or 2 varieties. But, they go home with a mixed variety of purely-local goods that will make up the majority of the upcoming week’s food supply for them and their family.
(22 December 2010)
