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

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

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

Irin sends news of the latest food summit, this time in Madrid. The Food and Agriculture Organization estimates that in 2008, 40 million more people were added to the rolls of the hungry. This seems a low-ball estimate, particularly given the galloping pace of the Depression at the end of the year. (The world's hungry went up by 50 million from 2006 to 2007, when things were comparatively rosy.) But whatever the outcome of the summit (and I suspect it'll be more of the same "we must try harder to increase world trade" message we saw from the FAO and G8 meetings last year) it's certain that the consequences will be felt for years to come. [Via DM] ... read more »

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Posted on 25 January, 2009 - 19:30

From the ever-important InterPress Service comes this news in the wake of Haitian food riots. It's a reminder that, above all, the riots had a political origin, and will need a political solution. And it's a reminder that the politics won't come from above, but from the grassroots.

New Peasant Alliance Demands Action on Food Crisis

... read more »

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Posted on 16 January, 2009 - 18:48

The Financial Times ran an op-ed with a fine title, Rhodes Redux. It covers the latest in a series of land-grabs in Africa, by China, Kuwait, Sweden, and major multinationals around the world. Guess who doesn't get to grab land in Africa? Women. ... read more »

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Posted on 15 January, 2009 - 02:52

An IFPRI report, released in October 2008, has this wee accompanying widget. Drag the flag to find out the hunger index in your country. As with all these indices, it's important to remember that it's a national average - countries with low averages might still have pockets of high hunger, particularly if the country's wealth is unequally shared.

Teasing this apart is an important InfoChange article from India, which not only provides nuance about regions within the country, but also the increasing hunger rates since India adopted its free market policies. So, go figure. Free market policies increased death rates in Russia, and it's causing hunger in India. Turns out that the free market isn't quite as liberating as it pretends. ... read more »

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Posted on 15 January, 2009 - 02:42

Eric at Food First told me about this article, from the Chicago Tribune, which outlines the Democrats' case for appointing an agribusiness insider to run the USDA. It's basically a manifesto for agricultural imperialism, with the US on a mission to feed the world and, while they're at it, reduce the trade deficit. This isn't the first time that a worthy mission and a domestic policy consideration have been aligned - the Cold War food aid program was also both a mission to save the world from communism, promote US interests, and prop up agribusiness. It's just surprising to see how very little the language has changed over the past sixty years. Looks like we're beginning 2009 in 1948. ... read more »

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Posted on 5 January, 2009 - 00:50

Other than Al Jazeera in English, the best news source on the food crisis has been Bloomberg. You can be fairly sure that when you see Alison Fitzgerald and Jason Gale in the byline, you're getting quality reporting. Here's the latest article from a series that Bloomberg are doing on hunger and famine. Original here.

World Bank’s ‘Wrong Advice’ Left Silos Empty in Poor Countries
2008-12-10 00:01:00.2 GMT
By Alison Fitzgerald and Helen Murphy

Dec. 10 (Bloomberg) -- Inside and out, the rusted towers of El Salvador’s biggest grain silo show how the World Bank helped push developing countries into the global food crisis. ... read more »

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Posted on 11 December, 2008 - 02:08

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