Here's another excellent report from Grain, about the agricultural 'aid' to Afghanistan. In Stuffed and Starved I wrote about how, after the Korean War, the US sent large quantities of wheat to Korea. Since wheat had never been part of the Korean diet, the US had to invest in 'education', so that a taste for everything from pasta to bread might be planted in the barren Korean palate. And successfully too. Consumption today is four times higher, per person, than it was in 1961. And much of that wheat is now purchased from the US.

Can we expect something to happen in Afghanistan? To borrow a campaign slogan: Yes we can. [via DM].

Here's why:

Soya has never been grown in Afghanistan and it doesn’t form part of the country’s culinary tradition, but a new programme, supposedly devised to combat malnutrition, plans to change all that. USAID has funded Nutrition and Education International (NEI), set up by Nestlé, to teach Afghans to sow and eat soya beans. ... read more »

Raj's blog | 20 comments

Posted on 10 March, 2009 - 14:53

Dan sends along this link to an excellent Observer article on the bloody consequences of lot-fed meat. And Dan's introduction is spot on:

The global village turns out to be a global farm as well. The livestock raised in, say, England or the U.S. are fed on grain, in this instance soya, which is raised in, say, Paraguay, and the results are devastating.

More here.

Raj's blog | 1 comment

Posted on 9 December, 2008 - 06:37

Roger Burbach, whose 1980 book Agribusiness in the Americas blew open the story of corporate power and food on this continent, has sent his latest thoughts on agribusiness and Bolivia.

The Rise of Food Fascism:
Allied to Global Agribusiness, Agrarian Elite Foments Coup in Bolivia

By Roger Burbach

Like many third world countries Bolivia is experiencing food shortages and rising food prices attributable to a global food marketing system driven by multinational agribusiness corporations. With sixty percent of the Bolivian population living in poverty and thirty-three percent in extreme poverty, the price of the basic food canasta--including wheat, rice, corn, soy oil and potatoes, as well as meat—has risen twenty-five percent over the past year with prices gyrating wildly in the local markets. ... read more »

Raj's blog | 3 comments

Posted on 30 June, 2008 - 16:58