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Posted on 15 May, 2009 - 17:56

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

First of two round-ups on gender and the food crisis. The first from the excellent Foreign Policy In Focus (to whom I still owe a piece on the Doha WTO round which, while apparing irrelevant, is as urgent as ever). ... read more »

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Posted on 4 November, 2008 - 05:36

The mad travel schedule just doesn't seem to let up. So here are a couple of post-cards from the road. First, I was lucky enough to join some of the finest US food justice activists at an event in New York City last week. There were many highlights, all of which you can see here, but the most sustained and deserved applause went to Gerardo Reyes Chávez, a leader and organizer for the Coalition of Immokalee Workers (CIW). You can hear his speech below.

... read more »

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Posted on 23 October, 2008 - 05:06

Next week sees World Food Day. Some of us will be trying to draw some indication about food policy out of the McCain and Obama camps by holding a big event in New York City. But in Asia, the Pesticide Action Network is telling it how it is, for nearly a billion people. Below, the press release for World Foodless Day. ... read more »

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Posted on 8 October, 2008 - 18:54

Here's something on the WTO now up at Comment is Free.

When the World Trade Organisation talks collapsed in Seattle in 1999, there were parties in the streets, and a wailing and renting of clothes in the corridors of power. The failure of the Doha round of WTO talks in Geneva this week has drawn a more muted reaction from both its boosters and critics. In Seattle, it was possible to tell a story in which the voices of people on the streets mattered, and in which the disenfranchised had scored a victory against an unaccountable front company for international capital. This week's failure had less to do with global justice, and much more to do with the growing pains of international capitalism. ... read more »

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Posted on 30 July, 2008 - 18:41

When advocates of free trade policies pick a developing country poster-child, they often go for Brazil and Argentina. Which is why a new report, below, is especially useful in undermining the myths around agricultural trade liberalisation. The most important observation:

South America's soybean industries are winners from global trade liberalization, but few of the benefits go to rural communities. Based on high-input, industrialized monoculture farming, employment and wages have both declined despite dramatic increases in production.

Now read on... ... read more »

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Posted on 18 July, 2008 - 21:41

Couple of articles at odds with one another on the prognosis for free trade, given the current political climate, and the food crisis. The Washington Post has editorialised about why "an obscure Frenchman" - Pascal Lamy, current head of the World Trade Organization - "might be able to save the world. The only question is when he should do it."

Away from the free-trade leg-humping comes a more sober article from Bloomberg on the fading enthusiasm for free trade. ... read more »

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Posted on 17 June, 2008 - 05:25

The Financial Times is doing what it usually does - providing concise and honest insight into how the elite bosses think, this time around genetically modified crops. The recent op-ed by John Gapper follows a logic that I've been bumping into increasingly.

1. We need to increase food production to feed the world.
2. Yield-increasing science has worked before.
3. The nay-sayers want to reduce output through organic agriculture.
4. Monsanto, on the other hand, is investing in science.
5. Therefore we ought to embrace GM technology to fight the food crisis.

Almost everything about this argument is wrong. ... read more »

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Posted on 13 June, 2008 - 17:36

My friend Patrick Wilkinson has put together a fine video about the upcoming spraying of large parts of California in the ongoing war on the Light Brown Apple Moth (LBAM, pronounced el-bam).

As Patrick's film suggests, there'd better be something mighty scary about this moth to warrant monthly aerial spraying over most of Northern California over the next five years.

So what's the danger? Will the moth summon forth the apocalypse? No. Is it the harbinger of some strange Africanized disease? Not even. Will it ravage California's agriculture? Kinda. But not actually by eating anything or laying anything or causing anything to be damaged.

The reason LBAM is a menace is, er, NAFTA. ... read more »

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Posted on 31 May, 2008 - 04:03