Our Good Earth

Just stumbled upon this wonderful homage to the foundation of our agricultural systems: soil. The final line? "We're simply not going to be able to keep treating it like dirt." Highly recommended.

The Good Earth, Charles Mann, National Geographic, September 2008.

food crisis? what food crisis?

Remember the food crisis from the first half of 2008? It's evaporated, at least for the moment. U.S. farmers are struggling to figure out how to pay the bills, which are even bigger now as seed companies and fertilizer manufacturers worked hard to siphon off as much of that high-price income as they could.

Fields of grains and losses, New York Times, 20 November.

Finding a solution to soil's carbon problem

Soil is a natural carbon sink but its ability to store it is being compromised. Could a return to organic farming be the answer?

General Assembly President calls for ‘food democracy’ in face of global crisis

19 November 2008 - General Assembly President Miguel D’Escoto today called for a new politics “that starts from the bottom up, not the top down” in the face of the current global food crisis of soaring prices and mass hunger.

“Without innovative and broad changes in our food policies, we will see hunger once again spread across the world like a mediaeval plague,” he told a conference on the politics of food at Columbia University in New York.

“The shameful reality is that, despite the fact that we have the knowledge, the financial and technological means to prevent it, half of the human population subsists at levels of malnutrition and poverty completely incompatible with their inherent dignity and rights. This is not only shameful – it is, to use religious terminology, downright sinful.”

Mr. D’Escoto called for an end to the dominance by the monoculture of industrialized food giants and the birth of a multi-functional policy focused on the poor and their right to food.

“In food politics, I would advocate food democracy,” he said. “We can move our food provisioning away from dominance by a few very large corporations to the control of people-oriented food systems that respect communities and their right to food sovereignty, and localized and regionalized food systems at the local and regional levels.”

But for many, solutions are coming too late. “Hunger and malnutrition, exclusion and poverty are taking thousands of lives each day,” he said. “We must stop deluding ourselves and face up to the fact that the ‘haves’ of this world must change their way of life, the patterns of consumption that show little or no regard for the disastrous impact of their lifestyle on the wellbeing of their neighbours, our brothers and sisters, and our shared home, the planet Earth.”

Diouf appeals for a new world agricultural order

Proposes 2009 Summit to reform present system, find $30 billion

19 November 2008, Rome - FAO Director-General Jacques Diouf today appealed to world leaders to meet together next year to design a new agricultural order and find $30 billion a year to eradicate hunger from the Earth once and for all.

Addressing a special session of the FAO’s 191-member-nation governing Conference, Diouf declared the World Summit was needed because, “After more than 60 years [since FAO’s foundation] it is essential to create a new system of world food security”.

The Director-General continued: “We must correct the present system that generates world food insecurity on account of international market distortions resulting from agricultural subsidies, customs tariffs and technical barriers to trade, but also from skewed distribution of resources of official development assistance and of national budgets of developing countries”.

The Summit, proposed for the first half of 2009, “should lay the ground for a new system of governance of world food security and an agricultural trade that offers farmers, in developed and developing countries alike, the means of earning a decent living,” he said. “We must have the intelligence and imagination to devise agricultural development policies together with rules and mechanisms that will ensure not only free but also fair international trade.”

more thoughts on the future US secretary of agriculture

An interesting blog post on possible, probable, and wish list candidates for the US secretary of agriculture. My favorite from the list -- Mark Ritchie, currently Secretary of State in Minnesota. Mark has a long, amazing history in progressive agriculture politics. That coupled with his current experience in a top government administration position make him a realistic candidate as well. I do greatly admire Michael Pollan but would rather see him continue writing those provocative tomes.

why vilsack is a bad choice for secretary of agriculture

So I knew the Obama honeymoon wouldn't last that long. He's going to appoint centrists like himself. And you don't win the presidency without incurring a few debts. Iowa is a pretty important place for Obama, not least of all because it was where his presidential journey began. But that doesn't mean that the former governor of Iowa is a good choice for the secretary of agriculture. Far from it.

I want an agriculture secretary that's a visionary, or at least capable of some vision -- towards a different agricultural production system for the 21st century. Obama's shown extraordinary vision to reshape presidential politics. Can we have that sort of vision for our agriculture as well? A recognition of how broken agricultural production is: that farmers don't receive cost of production for the crops they produce; that synthetic fertilizers destroy our soil, are creating a massive dead zone in the Gulf of Mexico, and are the principal contribution our agriculture makes toward climate change; the list goes on.

Why not Vilsack? In one example: pharmaceutical-producing corn. He's a huge proponent of producing drugs in Iowa cornfields. Never mind the high possibilities of cross-contamination. Never mind that this is a technology that benefits only a handful of farmers and a handful of drug companies. Never mind that the costs of the inevitable contamination will be socialized to all farmers who grown corn in the U.S., when export markets reject our crops.

Maybe he doesn't care, maybe he thinks we can just turn that corn into ethanol and forget the rest of the world. That's not the approach of a 21st century visionary. It's just more of the same American imperialism, shove it down their throats agricultural policy of the last decades. I want change.