I know I bang on a lot about food sovereignty on this blog, but it's not all hot air. I've just guest edited a section of The Journal of Peasant Studies (really the most hard-hitting academic journal of its kind) and was lucky enough to pull together some excellent papers and interviews. Although the JPS can get dry in parts, the section I edited was the Grassroots Voices bit, which is intended as a forum and resource for activists. And they've decided to make it available free (as opposed to the $100+ individual subscription rate).

Update The section is attached below, or head straight here for the full issue. ... read more »

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Posted on 5 November, 2009 - 23:15

One of the central ideas in my new book, The Value of Nothing, is that there are other ways of governing ourselves than either the free market or central government. While there’s plenty of evidence that the state-market dichotomy is a false one, it’s always good to have more data.

One of the latest nuggets comes from the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences. ... read more »

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Posted on 26 October, 2009 - 18:59

The preeminent thinker about food and hunger, Amartya Sen, learned about famine from direct experience. In his work, notably in Poverty and Famines, he argues that democracy and a free press can ward off famine.

Test this hypothesis in his native India, the world's largest democracy, and the results aren't terribly encouraging. As he notes, India has worse malnutrition rates than many countries in which democracy is observed only in the breech. But Sen's encouraged by a new Right to Food Act in India. ... read more »

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Posted on 27 August, 2009 - 08:36

At President Obama’s inauguration, Bruce Springsteen and Pete Seeger thumped out this splendid tune, a rendition of Woodie Guthrie’s classic This Land Is Your Land. The most delightful verse appears at around 2:25 -

There was a big high wall there that tried to stop me;
Sign was painted, it said private property;
But on the back side it didn't say nothing;
That side was made for you and me.

As one commentator has noted, this isn’t the version of the song that gets sung at the Democratic National Convention, preferred as a less chauvinist substitute for Irving Berlin’s God Bless America.

The Democratic Party doesn’t like to mess around with the fundamentals of private property – land in particular - and its obfuscating habits are being propagated internationally by the current administration, at an immense human cost. ... read more »

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Posted on 10 August, 2009 - 08:31

I finally got to see The Anthropologists' Give Us Bread on Thursday. On paper, a project to write a play about the 1917 food riots in New York City has the potential to become painfully earnest and preachy. It would almost certainly end up that way if I were to try my hand at playwriting, and it's best for everyone that I don't start.

Luckily, the women behind this particular play have talent in spades. It's gripping pretty much from the start, with fantastic characters, subtle acting, and a plot that grips you from the first scene and never insults your intelligence. ... read more »

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Posted on 13 June, 2009 - 22:36

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Posted on 15 May, 2009 - 17:56

Once again, apologies for the lengthy intermission between posts here at Stuffed and Starved. I’ve been working my next book, which has taken a little more time and travel than I’d have liked. But the results will, I think, be worth it. My most recent research trip involved going to visit the Zapatistas in Chiapas, which means that your intrepid writer has recently returned from Mexico. There are many stories to share, and if you’re in New York, you can hear me talking about it on WBAI tomorrow morning, or at the Brooklyn Food Conference on Saturday.

If you’re not, here’s the roundup of articles that nicely pull the different strands of what’s happening together. ... read more »

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Posted on 1 May, 2009 - 04:46

Friday was International Day of Peasant's Struggle, and in over one hundred actions around the world, the day was celebrated (see, for instance, this lovely piece by Jim Goodman), and commemorated.

The day is a memorial to nineteen Brazilian landless activists, members of the MST who were massacred by paramilitary forces in Brazil as they made their way to present their demands for land to the government. These activists were among a group of 1500 workers marching to Para, the regional capital. ... read more »

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Posted on 20 April, 2009 - 04:30

JJ Tiziou Photography - please donate!

I’m back from a trip to visit the Coalition of Immokalee Workers in Florida, as part of a delegation of food justice activists. For a full report, do read the thoughts of the excellent Tom Philpott. To supplement his report, though, I thought I'd jot down a couple of impressions.

Although I’d never been there before, our guided tour around the town of Immokalee felt familiar. Immokalee means ‘my home’ in Seminole. And it was peoples’ homes that I’d seen before, in another country. The trailers where tomato-pickers sleep reminded me of South African townships, filled with densely packed low-income houses, built by the government to keep the supply of black labour close, but not too close, to the cities where their work was required.

Except that the conditions in Apartheid era township houses were better than in Immokalee. ... read more »

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Posted on 7 March, 2009 - 17:15

This, the first in of two human-rights-related posts today, is for policy wonks only. It's a report that I helped Diane Elson and Radhika Balakrishnan with, and the aim is to bring together macroeconomic policy makers and human rights activists. There's a great deal of guidance in the Universal Declaration of Human Rights about what governments should and shouldn't be doing to promote human rights. Providing basic healthcare to everyone - yes. Place pensions into the private sector- not so much.

Of course, most macroeconomic policy is made without a care for human rights - but since the foundations of macroeconomic policy have so comprehensively crumbled, it's not a bad time to think about replacements. Human rights can help. ... read more »

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Posted on 7 March, 2009 - 17:07