Not for nothing is gender one of the most frequent tags here at Stuffed and Starved. The modern food system is tilted against women, in everything from land ownership to life expectancy because of poor diet to, now, access to the biofuels market. The road ahead is long. ... read more »

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Posted on 29 April, 2008 - 19:29

From the African Biodiversity Network comes a tale of plunder, opportunism, and greed, a story of how biofuels are providing a pretext for privatisation. Full story below the fold. ... read more »

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Posted on 21 April, 2008 - 03:41

Food First, the Institute at which I'm a Fellow in Oakland, California, has come out with some fine material over the past week. First, they've put out a fantastic take-down of biofuels (more properly agrofuels), in a report with the perfect title: When Renewable Isn't Sustainable.

They've also got this handy list of food riots, to which we can add the travails in Argentina (thanks to Mary Robertson for sending news about this). I'll be writing about the other omission from this list in the next post: rice riots. ... read more »

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Posted on 5 April, 2008 - 22:49

Source

Eric Holt Gimenez over at Food First sent along this wee nugget from Grand Island, Nebraska.

It's a story about biofuels, based on a report from, er, the American Meat Institute, which ascribes the rise in the price of meat to biofuels. The estimates per animal are striking: "the costs [are] 53 cents per chicken; $3.40 per turkey; $38 per hog and $117.50 per fed beef animal." These are the costs associated with higher corn-feed for the animals, the price of which has been driven up by the US governments hare-brained biofuels schemes.

But statistics, like love, is a battlefield. ... read more »

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Posted on 20 March, 2008 - 22:32

All credit to him. Mike Huckabee has a sense of humour about his prospects in the US election.

So now that Mitt Romney has dropped out there are only three candidates worth taking seriously. Since this is Stuffed and Starved I ought probably to find a food related angle to the candidates, rather than posting a couple more suprisingly good Saturday Night Live clips like this one ... read more »

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Posted on 28 February, 2008 - 16:41

As the New York Times points out, here and here, biofuels aren't all they're cracked up to be. The revelation was prompted by an article in Science which breaks it down quite nicely. Here's the abstract: ... read more »

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Posted on 10 February, 2008 - 05:59

Palm oil is to South East Asia what sugar-cane is to Brazil: a license for some to print money, and for others to become landless, while at the same time sacrificing the environment for chimerical carbon savings. Not good. Not good at all. The full BBC Story is pasted below.

Losing land to palm oil in Kalimantan
By James Painter
BBC News, West Kalimantan

Barto is more sad than angry. He is a leader of a Dayak Kanayan community in a remote part of the rainforest in deepest Borneo. ... read more »

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Posted on 3 October, 2007 - 00:18

The Tablet magazine has just published a piece I wrote explaining who wins and who loses from the rising price of food. Here's the full piece.

Bitter Harvest

The switch from fossil to biofuels is being encouraged by governments to combat global warming but emissions in their manufacture are worse than burning diesel. Now the quantity of land required is contributing to a worldwide shortage of food. ... read more »

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Posted on 7 September, 2007 - 20:36

My mate Eric Holt-Gimenez, exec director at FoodFirst, has just published a splendid piece in the International Herald Tribune (original here in which he knocks down the following lies:

• Biofuels are clean and green.
• Biofuels will not result in deforestation.
• Biofuels will bring rural development.
• Biofuels will not cause hunger.

It's a fine take-down, and one that I know he won't mind if I repost here.
_____________________

The Biofuel Myths ... read more »

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Posted on 11 July, 2007 - 08:05

Grain is a tremendously useful home for research and thinking about genetic erosion, by which they mean:
the loss of biological diversity, [which] undermines the very sense of "sustainable development" as it destroys options for the future and robs people of a key resource base for survival. Genetic erosion means more than just the loss of genetic diversity. In essence it is an erosion of options for development. Central to our approach is the conviction that the conservation and use of genetic resources is too important to leave to scientists, governments and industry alone. Farmers and community organisations have nurtured genetic diversity for millennia, and continue to do so. Any effort in this field should take their experience as a starting point. ... read more »

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Posted on 6 July, 2007 - 18:53