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

I’m a little disappointed with The Observer today. I’d been holding back on posting all my thoughts about food riots so that I could pull them out of the hat today with a comment piece in their pages. My article began with worries about globalisation and the consequences of food riots in Haiti.

The piece was bumped yesterday afternoon.

Yesterday evening it was announced that the Haitian Prime Minister, Jacques Edouard Alexis, had been fired in a special session of the Haitian Senate because of the food riots.

Then Dominique Strauss-Kahn, the head of the International Monetary Fund, announced imminent global disaster from food price rises.

Since I’m still hoping that the piece will still appear somewhere, and since it now needs rewriting, I’ll not post it quite yet. But here’s what the stories of the price rises leave out, and why there’s reason to fear that Haiti’s fate is likely to be that of many other countries. ... read more »

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Posted on 13 April, 2008 - 19:38

The Financial Times again distinguishes itself by being the only major newspaper to take the global food price rises at all seriously. On Monday, front page above the fold, an article on the UN's call for $500m in food aid to avoid famine. Yesterday, on rice rationing in the Philippines. Today, front page again, the announcement that the price of rice, a staple for over 2.5 billion people, rose 30% in a single day. ... read more »

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Posted on 28 March, 2008 - 21:51

Frances Moore Lappé has a fine piece in The Nation this week, reminding us of The New Deal. She points out that

The first two economic rights [in the New Deal] assured a “useful” job that paid enough to provide “adequate food and clothing.” The third guaranteed farmers a high enough return for their crops to provide their families with a “decent living.” To begin, [Roosevelt] asked Congress to pass a “cost of food law,” putting a price floor under farmers and a price ceiling on the cost of food necessities for all. ... read more »

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Posted on 24 March, 2008 - 17:39

An important part of the arguments I make in the book are about how poor people are denied access to food, even when they're not being denied access to food.

Take, for instance, the food stamp programme in the United States, where 36 million people went hungry last year. Food stamps are designed to ensure that working families don't run out of basic foodstuffs. Given the redlining of communities of poor people, supermarkets aren't going to come in and provide fresh fruit and veg. But processed food giants are only too happy to offer product that can sit on the shelves of corner stores for months before they're bought. ... read more »

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Posted on 4 February, 2008 - 20:08

You can tell that I'm catching up on the posting of things here today. Mainly I've just been running around a little too much, but this story, sent in by a reader, left me a little too stunned to know what to do. It's a stark coda to the Week in Food and agroflation stories.

One of the better accounts of what's going on is in The Hindu. ... read more »

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Posted on 4 February, 2008 - 19:55

So what are we to make of the interweb phenomenon of the FreeRice word game? It's run by the same outfit that brought us The Hunger Site, 'where your clicks give bowls of food to the hungry', using much the same business model - sell ads and use the revenue to buy food. ... read more »

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Posted on 18 November, 2007 - 07:15

Here's something that ought to give the free trade crowd something to chew on. Free trade in rice and the subsequent dumping of cheap rice into rice-growing economies hurts rice farmers, who aren't terribly well off to begin with. I believe the technical term for this observation is "No, duh". ... read more »

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Posted on 9 November, 2007 - 05:25

Articles in the nutritional science journals tend to be fairly bloodless. So it was nice to receive, through a correspondent, the text of this splendid article on the nutrition transition in Africa. It's a piece that puts the blood right back into nutrition.

Click for full size image. ... read more »

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Posted on 3 November, 2007 - 16:33