Food Crisis Links
For too
long, humans have been spared, mainly by the cheapness of the fossil fuels,
from the universal necessity of local adaptation. It is ultimately an inescapable biological imperative that
human land use economies should correspond as closely as possible to the
ecological mosaic. To this, we no
longer have even the illusion of a second choice. The increasing cost of energy and the vulnerability of long
distance transportation in an age of violence show the importance of local food
and forest communities and the reasonable extent of local economic
self-sufficiency everywhere. — Wendell Berry, Slow Food Nation
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The
writing has been on the wall for decades, as the links on this page
reveal. Perhaps our soul searching should
focus on how and why we colluded in the delusions that resulted in worldwide
crisis. The context for this page is Positive Disintegration on this website.
Food
Democracy Now - Food Democracy Now! is a grassroots movement initiated by farmers, writers,
chefs, eaters and policy advocates who recognize the profound sense of urgency
in creating a new food system that is capable of meeting the changing needs of
American society as it relates to food, health, animal welfare and the
environment.
Food Declaration - A healthy food system is necessary to meet the urgent
challenges of our time. Behind us stands a half-century of industrial food
production, underwritten by cheap fossil fuels, abundant land and water
resources, and a drive to maximize the global harvest of cheap calories. Ahead
lie rising energy and food costs, a changing climate, declining water supplies,
a growing population, and the paradox of widespread hunger and obesity. These realities call for a radically different approach to food and
agriculture. The food system must be reorganized on a foundation of health: for
our communities, for people, for animals, and for the natural world. The
Declaration offers twelve principles to frame food and agriculture policy to
ensure that it contributes to the health and wealth of the nation and the
world.
The Oil Intensity
Of Food by Lester R. Brown 6/25/09 - The prospect of peaking oil production has direct
consequences for world food security, as modern agriculture depends heavily on
the use of fossil fuels. Most tractors use gasoline or diesel fuel. Irrigation
pumps use diesel fuel, natural gas, or coal-fired electricity. Fertilizer
production is also energy-intensive. With higher energy prices and a limited supply
of fossil fuels, the modern food system that evolved when oil was cheap will
not survive as it is now structured.
http://www.earthpolicy.org/Books/Seg/PB3ch02_ss3.htm
As Population Grows We
Fail To Protect Our Children by John
James 11/19/08
- Two trends are crashing against one another. Both are well-known. They are that world population is getting larger
while food and water is getting less. The cause of the first is out-of-control fertility producing a flood of
babies. The second is rampant consumption that makes the pollution that causes
warming, which is reducing the earth's capacity to grow more food.
Seafood: Expanding
Marine Protected Areas To Restore Fisheries by Lester R. Brown 11/13/08 - As
population grows and as modern food marketing systems give more people access
to these products, seafood consumption is growing. Indeed, the human appetite
for seafood is outgrowing the sustainable yield of oceanic fisheries. Today 75
percent of fisheries are being fished at or beyond their sustainable capacity.
As a result, many are in decline and some have collapsed.
Dear Mr. Next President -- Food, Food, Food by Michael Pollan 10/14/08 - We must move into the post-oil era to improve the
health of the American people and to mitigate climate change.
Grain piles up in ports: Canada next in inability
to finance shipments by John Greenwood 10/08/08 - The credit crisis is spilling over into the grain industry as
international buyers find themselves unable to come up with payment, forcing
sellers to shoulder often substantial losses.
Scientists
Behind 'Doomsday Seed Vault' Ready The World's Crops For Climate Change 9/19/08 - As
climate change is credited as one of the main drivers behind soaring food
prices, the Global Crop Diversity Trust is undertaking a major effort to search
crop collections for the traits that could arm agriculture against the impact
of future changes.
The New Facts of Life: Connecting the Dots on
Food, Health, and the Environment by Fritjof Capra Summer 2008 - A discussion of the
interrelations between food, health, and the environment is extremely topical
today. Rising food prices together with the price of oil and a series of
so-called "natural" catastrophes dominate the news every day. All these problems, ultimately, must be
seen as just different facets of one single crisis, which is largely a crisis
of perception. It derives from the fact that most people in our society, and
especially our political and corporate leaders, subscribe to the concepts of an
outdated worldview, a perception of reality inadequate for dealing with our
overpopulated, globally interconnected world.
Taking Back
Our Food by
Miguel A. Altieri - Communities
surrounded by populous small farms experience less social problems and have
healthier economies than do communities surrounded by depopulated large,
monoculture, mechanized farms. Thus it should be obvious to city dwellers that
eating is both an ecological and political act; that buying food at local
farmers markets will support the type of beyond-peak oil agriculture that is
urgently needed; and that buying food in supermarkets perpetuates an
unsustainable agricultural path.
Africa’s food crisis the handiwork of IMF, World
Bank by Walden Bello 8/18/08 - Despite being a net food exporter at independence, Africa now imports
25 per cent of her food from donors. Agriculture
is in deep crisis, and the causes are many, including civil wars and the spread
of HIV-Aids. However, a very important part of the explanation was the phasing
out of government controls and support mechanisms under the structural
adjustment programmes to which most African countries
were subjected as the price for getting IMF and World Bank assistance to
service their external debt.
Eaten Up
by Ed
Pilkington 7/29/08 - Much of the broad
argument in Stuffed and Starved will be familiar to those who have followed
the debate on globalisation - how the liberalisation of trade has created a vast global market
for heavily subsidised American and European
agricultural products at the expense of local growers in the developing world;
how relentless pressure to drive down food prices over 30 years has seen rich
ecosystems replaced by monocultures that rely on oil-powered machines, chemical fertilisers and pesticides to drive up yields; and
how international corporations and supermarkets that control the flow of
technologies and of food itself have been the beneficiaries. It is a portrait
of the agro-economics of the madhouse.
Civilization's
golden era is teetering on collapse: New millennium has brought a turning point in history,
yet we ignore meltdown
Seeds
of change: cabbages and carrots could replace flowers in royal parks by Sam Jones 6/30/08 - Vegetable seed
sales outstripped flower seeds sales for the first time. Economics play a big part in Britains’ budding taste for horticulture. Rising oil, gas and food prices have
all conspired to make urban agriculture a very topical issue.
You Will Not Be Able to Get Food: a
Report on Trends by Jan Lundberg 6/20/08 Culture Change
Letter #189 - The empire of cheap
food is crumbling. It is time to consider that the
stage has been set for petroleum-induced famine.
Food,
Water And Fuel: Three Fundamental Necessities Of Life In Jeopardy by Michel Chossudovsky 6/6/08 (24 p) - We are dealing with a complex and centralized constellation of
economic power in which the instruments of market manipulation have a direct
bearing on the lives of millions of people. The prices of food, water, fuel are
determined at the global level, beyond the reach of national government policy.
The price hikes of these three essential commodities constitute an instrument
of "economic warfare", carried out through the "free
market" on the futures and options exchanges. These hikes in the
prices of food, water and fuel are contributing in a very real sense to
"eliminating the poor" through "starvation deaths". With charts/graphs.
Falling Water Tables, Falling Harvests by
Lester R. Brown
The Looming Food Crisis by Peter Russell 6/08 - More and more
people will not be able to afford to eat, or not afford much else. Instead of
rising out of poverty they will sink back in. Increasingly, the problem will be
seen as economic; the food is there, it just costs too much. The
laissez-faire free market ideology that lies beneath rising food prices will
have to be overridden.
Peak Food And Peak Water by Shepherd Bliss 5/29/08 - Peak Oil theorists such as Richard Heinberg,
James Howard Kunstler, Matthew Simmons, and others
turn out to be correct. The pace
quickens. The signs are more numerous. We need even more than food security; we
need food sovereignty. Who controls your food? Growing at least part of one's
own food--and having something to trade--will be essential to survival.
Global
Famine by Michel Chossudovsky 5/2/08 - Humanity is undergoing in the post-Cold War era an economic and
social crisis of unprecedented scale leading to the rapid impoverishment of
large sectors of the world population. National economies are
collapsing, unemployment is rampant. Local
level famines have erupted in Sub-Saharan Africa, South Asia and parts of Latin
America. This "globalization of poverty" was initiated in the Third
World coinciding with the debt crisis of the early 1980s and the imposition of
the IMF's deadly economic reforms.
Food crisis -
capitalism to blame 5/08
From the Pump to
the Plate: Rethinking & relocalizing our food and
fuel systems by Julian Darley 5/1/08
Food Crisis And The
Failure Of The Capitalist Model by Ian Angus 4/29/08
An
Alternative Agriculture is Possible: The Politics of Food is Politics by De Clarke and Stan Goff 4/24/08 (19 p) - The fossil/extractive
industries and the money economy have built fences all around the food supply,
from production to consumption. We play their game or we don't eat. Now their
game is coming apart at the seams.
World Facing Huge
New Challenge On Food Front: Business-as-Usual Not a Viable Option by Lester R. Brown 4/16/08 - The challenge is
not simply to deal with a temporary rise in grain prices, as in the past, but
rather to quickly alter those trends whose cumulative effects collectively
threaten the food security that is a hallmark of civilization. If food security
cannot be restored quickly, social unrest and political instability will spread
and the number of failing states will likely increase dramatically, threatening
the very stability of civilization itself.
Food
Price Inflation Changes How We Shop 3/31/08 - Steadily rising food costs aren't just causing
grocery shoppers to do a double-take at the checkout line - they're also
changing the very ways we feed our families. The worst case of food inflation
in nearly 20 years has more Americans giving up restaurant meals to eat at
home. We're buying fewer luxury food items, eating more leftovers and buying more
store brands instead of name-brand items.
Seeds
of destruction by Stephen
Hume 3/19/08 - The concentration of
more and more of the world's crop seeds in fewer and fewer hands is a threat to
global agriculture and everyone's food supply. So it's fascinating to observe how we appear to be
collectively sleepwalking toward precisely such a potential catastrophe with
that most strategic of all things, a sustainable, secure, equitably distributed
global food supply.
Scientists Warn That A Food Crisis Will Take Hold Before Climate
Change 3/8/08 - from Guardian UK
Warning To The World: Fatal Famine Warning
from Survival Acres
Financial
Times: The next crisis will be over food by Gillian Tett
"Doomsday
Seed Vault" in the Arctic by F. William Engdahl 12/4/07 - Bill Gates, Rockefeller and the GMO giants know
something we don’t.
Threats of
Peak Oil to the Global Food Supply by Richard Heinberg 6/05 - Food is energy. And it takes energy to get food. These two facts,
taken together, have always established the biological limits to the human
population and always will.
Where Agriculture Meets Empire by Robert Jensen 7/1/03 - Agriculture
isn't the only system we live with that is unsustainable -- empire and
capitalism also come to mind. How are these systems connected to each other?
How long can such systems continue before they give way to something new? Can
they be replaced before they take the planet down with them? Who and what will
suffer in the meantime? And, what can movements do to change all this? Wes
Jackson has some provocative ideas about -- though he'd be the first to admit,
no definitive answers to -- these questions.
Documentaries
Food Inc.– You’ll never look at dinner the same
way.
Hijacked Future - Canadian documentary examines the increasingly
fragile base of the North American industrial food system in order to bring
consumers to a better understanding of what’s at stake with our daily
bread. It asks us to question the wisdom of a system precariously based
on oil and corporate seeds while we’re witnessing the impact of climate change.
HOMEGROWN – A documentary that follows the Dervaes family who run a small organic farm in the heart of urban Pasadena, California. While “living off the
grid”, they harvest over 6,000 pounds of produce on less than a quarter of an
acre, make their own bio diesel,
power their computers with the help of solar panels, and maintain a website
that gets 4,000 hits a day. The film is an intimate human portrait of what it’s
like to live like “Little House on the Prairie” in the 21st Century.
The Real Dirt On Farmer John - Noticing the ongoing multinational
takeover of American farming and betting instead on the future of organic
produce, Peterson turned his enterprise into an organic operation, naming the
farm Angelic Organics. He was soon invited to become a community supported
agriculture (CSA) farmer: “I realized that my whole life had been about
community—enabling people, bringing them to the farm, working and playing
together, sharing the farm experience.” The story of Angelic Organics’ success
as a CSA farm over the last 15 years is the final delight of THE REAL DIRT ON
FARMER JOHN. A multi-faceted enterprise, the farm now provides fresh organic
produce for 1,200 shareholder families, on-site educational programs,
employment opportunities for people who truly want to get back to the
earth—including Farmer John. 2006 83 min.
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Bread Line |
©
2009 Suzanne Duarte