Shattering Myths: Can sustainable agriculture feed the world?
For years, critics and proponents alike have worried that the related methods of organic, low-input, low- or no-pesticide, integrated, small-scale, and sustainable production may address environmental concerns, but cannot produce sufficient food to sustain the large and growing human population. Such skepticism was understandable—the so-called Green Revolution of the 1940s, 50s, and 60s had been credited with averting widespread hunger crises by drastically increasing agricultural production, while the downsides of its technological advancements only began to enter the popular consciousness in the years after Rachel Carson's Silent Spring in 1962. Questioning the source of the cornucopia that provided plenty to people throughout the world seemed downright ungracious and backward. How could we be critical of the Green Revolution when it had staved off so much hunger?
Biofuels: Myths of the Agro-fuels Transition
by Eric Holt-Giménez, Ph.D., Executive Director,
Food First/Institute for Food and Development Policy
Organic Coffee Crisis? Backgrounder Volume 13, Number 1 Spring 2007
by Eric Holt-Giménez, Ian Bailey and Devon Sampson
Coffee Crisis—Take Two
“The Coffee Crisis” used to refer to the disastrous plunge in world coffee prices in the 1980s and 1990s that bankrupted hundreds of thousands of smallholders around the world. The USDA’s National Organic Program (NOP) is now poised to bring us the “Organic Coffee Crisis.” With a breathtaking disregard for transparency, consultation and public debate, the NOP is moving to make it prohibitively expensive and logistically impossible for small-scale organic coffee growers.
The 2007 Farm - and Food - Bill
Across the U.S., farm, food, and conservation advocates are consulting and providing comments on the upcoming Bill. Many family farmers and rural business people are calling for farm policy reform, voicing opposition to costly and unfair USDA crop subsidy payments, and demanding support for organic farming, farmland conservation, rural development, and support for young and minority farmers.1 The Farm Bill is an Agri-food Bill that determines the function (or dysfunction) of the entire U.S. food system. The economic fate of family farmers and the food security of low-income consumers-both high-risk sectors in the U.S.'s food system-are affected by the Farm Bill, which funds Food Stamps and School Commodity Programs (50% of entitlements), Emergency Food Assistance, Commodity Supplemental Food, and Community Food Projects, among other programs. Community food activists point out that this aid (approximately $50 billion) is insufficient to address the needs of the nation's 36 million food insecure citizens.
12 Myths About Hunger
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Updated by Holly Poole-Kavana based on the book World Hunger: Twelve Myths
Why so much hunger?
What can we do about it?
To answer these questions we must unlearn much of what we have been taught.
Only by freeing ourselves from the grip of widely held myths can we grasp the roots of hunger and see what we can do to end it.
Myth 1:
Not Enough Food to Go Around
US Farm Subsidies and the Farm Economy: Myths, Realities, Alternatives
The market for farm goods, if left to regulate itself, is built to put farmers out of business, and further states that market controls — including much-despised agricultural subsidies — are essential to the health of a market that cannot correct itself.
Going Local on a Global Scale: Rethinking Food Trade in the Era of Climate Change, Dumping, and Rural Poverty
Rights Fight: Local Democracy vs. Factory Farms in Pennsylvania
When big agribusinesses decided the small townships spread out between Pittsburgh and Philadelphia were perfect new homes for their factory farms, they thought they could slip in without much bother.
But they forgot Pennsylvania's heritage of democracy and citizen participation.
A new backgrounder "Rights Fight: Local Democracy vs. Factory Farms in Pennsylvania," shows how the small communities targeted by these farms fought back, fending off the threat of polluting factory farms through the fighting spirit of civic participation.
Shredding the Safety Net: Welfare Reform As We Know It
On August 22, 1996 in the Rose Garden of the White House, President Clinton signed into law the Orwellian-sounding Personal Responsibility and Work Opportunity Reconciliation Act, better known as Welfare Reform, the most sweeping change in our welfare system in sixty years. With his signature, Clinton's talk of "not punishing or preaching" became indistinguishable from the Republican Party's poor-bashing Contract with America. How Mr. Clinton slid from a welfare plan that would have added about $10 billion more in spending to embracing one that would cut $54 billion is a sad tale of American politics. Furthermore, it raises the specter of systematic violations of basic human rights here in the United States of America, if we are judged by the international standards of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, adopted fifty years ago by the United Nations General Assembly.
In this report we tally the impact of welfare reform, expose seldom reported corporate profit-taking, and conflict of interest in privatizing parts of the system, and examine the human rights implications of current policies.