Chuck Hassebrook as Deputy Secretary of USDA? A great idea!

Who Will Vilsack Name Deputy Secretary at USDA? | Daily Yonder | Keep It Rural

Food needs 'fundamental rethink'

BBC NEWS | Science & Environment | Food needs 'fundamental rethink'

(the following are some short excerpts from the much longer article by Mark Kinver. it's well worth reading the whole article.)

A sustainable global food system in the 21st Century needs to be built on a series of "new fundamentals", according to leading food expert, Professor Tim Lang:

• Oil and energy: "We have an entirely oil-based food economy, and yet oil is running out. The impact of that on agriculture is one of the drivers of the volatility in the world food commodity markets."
• Water scarcity: "One of the key things that I have been pushing is to get the UK government to start auditing food by water," Professor Lang said, adding that 50% of the UK's vegetables are imported, many from water-stressed nations.
• Biodiversity: "Biodiversity must not just be protected, it must be replaced and enhanced; but that is going to require a very different way growing food and using the land."
• Urbanisation: "Probably the most important thing within the social sphere. More people now live in towns than in the countryside. In which case, where do they get their food?"

Professor Lang said that in order to feed a projected nine billion people by 2050, policymakers and scientists face a fundamental challenge: how can food systems work with the planet and biodiversity, rather than raiding and pillaging it?

"We are going to have to get biodiversity into gardens and fields, and then eat it."

"We have to do this rather than saying that biodiversity is what is on the edge of the field or just outside my garden."

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.”