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I’m back from a trip to visit the Coalition of Immokalee Workers in Florida, as part of a delegation of food justice activists. For a full report, do read the thoughts of the excellent Tom Philpott. To supplement his report, though, I thought I'd jot down a couple of impressions.

Although I’d never been there before, our guided tour around the town of Immokalee felt familiar. Immokalee means ‘my home’ in Seminole. And it was peoples’ homes that I’d seen before, in another country. The trailers where tomato-pickers sleep reminded me of South African townships, filled with densely packed low-income houses, built by the government to keep the supply of black labour close, but not too close, to the cities where their work was required.

Except that the conditions in Apartheid era township houses were better than in Immokalee. ... read more »

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Posted on 7 March, 2009 - 17:15

This, the first in of two human-rights-related posts today, is for policy wonks only. It's a report that I helped Diane Elson and Radhika Balakrishnan with, and the aim is to bring together macroeconomic policy makers and human rights activists. There's a great deal of guidance in the Universal Declaration of Human Rights about what governments should and shouldn't be doing to promote human rights. Providing basic healthcare to everyone - yes. Place pensions into the private sector- not so much.

Of course, most macroeconomic policy is made without a care for human rights - but since the foundations of macroeconomic policy have so comprehensively crumbled, it's not a bad time to think about replacements. Human rights can help. ... read more »

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Posted on 7 March, 2009 - 17:07

Here's a guest post from Wayne Roberts, whose No Nonsense Guide to World Food is, as I've said before, a cracking introduction.

Hopeless Romantics Do Valentine’s Day Chocolate One Better
Oaxaca, Mexico
By Wayne Roberts

Traipsing through the jungles of Mexico in January with Michael Sacco, a Toronto-based fair trader partnering with Indigenous people in Oaxaca, I got a taste of the bittersweet romantic adventure behind the romantic and sweet treat recently branded to symbolize Valentine’s Day.

Chocolate goes to the heart of the Indigenous experience in Mexico, a testimony to the high level of agriculture and civilization developed before Columbus sailed the ocean blue. Aside from chocolate, now the world’s most talked-about treat, about two-thirds of the planet’s most common fruits and vegetables, including corn, tomatoes, chilies and potatoes, were domesticated in this region, some before the era of ancient Greece and Rome. ... read more »

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Posted on 25 February, 2009 - 06:18

I'm in Ohio at the moment, at Miami University, meeting with some exceptionally bright students. One of the conversations, with students who were tasked with developing a post-peak-oil agricultural plan for Iran, reminded me of this fine video. ... read more »

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Posted on 10 February, 2009 - 15:47

Pambazuka News has published another winner, this time from William Aal, Lucy Jarosz and Carol Thompson. It's a response to a particularly bad Foreign Affairs article in which Collier, author of The Bottom Billion, suggests that what we need to combat hunger is to throw the peasant off the land, bring machinery to bear on agriculture, and plant GM crops.

It is, as Aal et al note, a full-speed backward vision of agriculture, filled with wild fantasies of infinite production and zero environmental or social consequences. Frankly, it's a Stalinist vision, one that owes more to the dreams and delusions of the 1950s than anything else. In the next issue of Foreign Affairs, Paul Collier presents his solution to the transportation crisis: nuclear-powered flying cars. ... read more »

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Posted on 6 February, 2009 - 14:16

From the Coalition of Immokalee Workers in Florida comes this appeal. Click here to do the needful, and see the full appeal below.

If you could help end modern-day slavery in Florida's fields with an email, would you?

Please take a moment to send an email to Florida Governor Charlie Crist, asking him to take a stand against modern-day slavery in our food system.

Just this past December, farm labor supervisors were sentenced in federal court for enslaving tomato pickers, including beating, chaining, and locking them inside a truck at night. Unfortunately, this case is not the only one; since 1997, the U.S. Department of Justice has successfully prosecuted seven cases of slavery involving well over 1,000 farmworkers in Florida. Additional cases are currently under investigation. ... read more »

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Posted on 6 February, 2009 - 13:07

Irin sends news of the latest food summit, this time in Madrid. The Food and Agriculture Organization estimates that in 2008, 40 million more people were added to the rolls of the hungry. This seems a low-ball estimate, particularly given the galloping pace of the Depression at the end of the year. (The world's hungry went up by 50 million from 2006 to 2007, when things were comparatively rosy.) But whatever the outcome of the summit (and I suspect it'll be more of the same "we must try harder to increase world trade" message we saw from the FAO and G8 meetings last year) it's certain that the consequences will be felt for years to come. [Via DM] ... read more »

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Posted on 25 January, 2009 - 19:30

Brazil hopes to supply drivers worldwide with the fuel of the future -- cheap ethanol derived from sugarcane. It is considered an effective antidote to climate change, but hundreds of thousands of Brazilian plantation workers harvest the cane at slave wages.... Read more at Truthout [via PW].

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Posted on 25 January, 2009 - 19:11