File under: You Can't Make this Shit Up.

I'm in Seattle at the moment, for the first time since the protests against the World Trade Organization in 1999. And a friend at the Community Alliance for Global Justice passed on this little nugget.

PepsiCo's Mountain Dew brand is deciding which of three new flavours of soda to unleash on the market: Revolution, Voltage or SuperNova. You, dear consumer, can decide in a process that they've dubbed "DewMocracy". ... read more »

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Posted on 10 May, 2008 - 22:54

I've been a very delinquent blogger of late, and am likely to be so for the next couple of weeks. Quite unexpectedly, I've been asked to testify in front of the House Financial Services Committee in a couple of weeks time about the food crisis, and the World Bank's role in it. Veterans of this blog will know that I've already said, in print, that the head of the World Bank makes me gag and, on Canadian telly, that the World Bank is full of shit. I'll be reining in my potty mouth and putting together some pointed testimony over the next few days, so I'll be not spending quite as much time here as I'd like. I blame the government. ... read more »

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Posted on 3 May, 2008 - 19:13

Civil Penalties of Fraud Assessed by the United States Internal Revenue Service against corporations
Source:TracIRS

Those crying out for food prices to be fixed should be careful what they wish for. In many countries, dozens of corporations are under investigation for price fixing. In South Africa, the Competition Commission is going after milk producers. In Spain, the National Competition Commission has gone after retailers selling milk, eggs and bread. In the UK, the Office of Fair Trading has gone after major retailers like Tesco and Asda/Wal*Mart in a widespread investigation into price fixing in milk, food and toiletries.

The United States seems peculiarly immune to this kind of behaviour, though, and stands as a beacon for corporations in other parts of the world. The trend from 1999 to 2004 is that civil penalties both for fraud and negligence have halved. This could mean that companies are now twice as well behaved as they were under Clinton ... read more »

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Posted on 29 April, 2008 - 14:21

If Josette Sheeran, head of the United Nations World Food Programme, is to be believed the current food crisis is “a silent tsunami which knows no borders sweeping the world.”

That’s just wishful thinking.

If the tsunami were really silent, then it’d be much easier for cretins to propose trade liberalisation as a remedy, or for Gordon Brown to support genetically modified crops as a way of responding to the disaster.

If the tsunami were silent, these ideas would float unopposed and uncontested. ... read more »

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Posted on 24 April, 2008 - 16:06

Two important bits of news from the world of agricultural technology. First, we've a report that genetically modified soy beans yield less than ordinary ones. The study was motivated by a professor who heard soybean farmers asking "how come I don't get as high a yield as I used to?". A good question indeed. One answer - it wasn't designed to yield more, it was designed to withstand a herbicide sold by the same company that sells the seed.

But there's a bigger answer to the question of the future of agricultural technology. It comes with a report of the International Assessment of Agricultural Science and Technology for Development (IAASTD). Snappy title? No. Bed-time reading? Hardly. It's hundreds of dense pages long (and I'll be reading it over the next week, so you won't have to).

But already, the IAASTD is an acronym to remember. ... read more »

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Posted on 21 April, 2008 - 03:11

Source: Via Campesina

Today’s the International Day of Peasants’ Struggle, and there’ll be over 60 actions taking place around the world to celebrate it.

The day is as good as any to write about a concern that every writer about social movements has to face. It’s a question about representation. While I’ve certainly got some ideas about the structure of the modern food system, and am happy to share them, the voices of the people most directly involved can often get muffled by voices like mine.

So, on the contact form, I’ve wangled a way for folk (particularly the media) to get directly in touch with farmers and peasant movements in Via Campesina. Can’t think of something more appropriate for today than for me to get out of the way of farmers and landless people speaking for themselves. ... read more »

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Posted on 17 April, 2008 - 16:36

[From the Comment is Free section of The Guardian.]

For anyone who understands the current food crisis, it is hard to listen to the head of the World Bank, Robert Zoellick, without gagging. ... read more »

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Posted on 15 April, 2008 - 02:27

I’m a little disappointed with The Observer today. I’d been holding back on posting all my thoughts about food riots so that I could pull them out of the hat today with a comment piece in their pages. My article began with worries about globalisation and the consequences of food riots in Haiti.

The piece was bumped yesterday afternoon.

Yesterday evening it was announced that the Haitian Prime Minister, Jacques Edouard Alexis, had been fired in a special session of the Haitian Senate because of the food riots.

Then Dominique Strauss-Kahn, the head of the International Monetary Fund, announced imminent global disaster from food price rises.

Since I’m still hoping that the piece will still appear somewhere, and since it now needs rewriting, I’ll not post it quite yet. But here’s what the stories of the price rises leave out, and why there’s reason to fear that Haiti’s fate is likely to be that of many other countries. ... read more »

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Posted on 13 April, 2008 - 19:38