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 »

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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.

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Posted on 9 December, 2008 - 06:37

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

When the pesticide industry takes its gloves off, people get hurt. Below is a press release from Via Campesina about a recent killing by men with guns hired by Syngenta in response to a protest against genetically modified food.

To write to the authorities condemning this brutal attack, see the Food First Urgent Action (scroll down past the Michael Pollan article...

PRESS RELEASE

21/10/07

Attack of Syngenta?s armed militia results in deaths and wounded in Brazil

During an attack of an armed militia with around 40 gunmen on the peasant? camp at the experimental field trial of Syngenta Seeds multinational, at Santa Teresa do Oeste, at 13:30h of today (October 21st), a Via Campesina member, Valmir Motta, 32 years old, father of 3 children, was executed with two shots to his chest. Other six rural workers are severely wounded and a gunmen was possibly killed. ... read more »

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Posted on 25 October, 2007 - 17:33

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

Here's a story well worth reading, one that gives the lie to the 'biofuels boom' promoted by, among others, The World Bank as a balm to poverty. As if further evidence were needed.

Brazil's ethanol slaves: 200,000 migrant sugar cutters who prop up renewable energy boom

Tom Phillips in Palmares Paulista
Friday March 9, 2007
The Guardian ... read more »

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Posted on 23 April, 2007 - 21:20

In writing Stuffed and Starved I was lucky enough to interview farmers and movement activists across the world. This meant travelling, and this means CO₂ emissions. A generous totting up of the distances travelled puts the figure involved in writing Stuffed and Starved at around 60,000 miles which, using the carbon calculator here means that I put 24 tons of CO₂ into the atmosphere.

I've been trying to find out a little about how best to offset it. First, here's a range of carbon calculators. Then you need to figure out how to offset. My good friend Anirvan Chatterjee shopped around and found out that there's a considerable price range in the offset market: ... read more »

The New Anatolian, the Turkish English-language daily, carries a story today about agribusiness giant Cargill. Since the 1990s, Cargill has been operating in the Orghazi district illegally. Its ties with the government have helped it to win, from a court in Bursa, a ruling that would give them an amnesty and a mild fine for unpermitted activity. Cargill's not out of the woods yet - President Sezer might still veto the amnesty.

But Cargill's got a solid history of managing the law, adopting a tactic of build-first-worry-about-the-legality-later. In Brazil, it has built an entire, and entirely illegal, port complex while waiting for appropriate permits to be issued, and then howled when Greenpeace pointed this out to the media. ... read more »

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Posted on 5 December, 2006 - 08:51

Brazil’s Landless Workers Movement, or in Portuguese Movimento dos Trabalhadores Rurais Sem Terra (MST), is the largest social movement in Latin America with an estimated 1.5 million landless members organized in 23 out 27 states. The MST carries out long-overdue land reform in a country mired by unjust land distribution. In Brazil, 1.6% of the landowners control roughly half (46.8%) of the land on which crops could be grown. Just 3% of the population owns two-thirds of all arable lands.

The organisation's Portuguese language website is here and the US-based Friends of the MST can be reached through ... read more »

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Posted on 1 December, 2006 - 22:00