Canadian Dimension magazine, July/August 2008

In recent months major international banks, financial newspapers and mass media have been forced to recognize that there is a major food crisis and that hundreds of millions of people face hunger, malnutrition and outright starvation. World conferences have been convoked and national emergencies have been declared, as millions riot in nearly fifty countries, threatening to overthrow regimes. In North America and Europe, skyrocketing food prices, combined with stagnant wages, home evictions and debt payments threaten incumbent regimes and increase pressures on all governments to take urgent action. (Keep reading…)

Canadian Dimension magazine, July/August 2008

Soy consumption in North America and Europe is increasing exponentially, these days, for reasons ranging from health consciousness to animal rights to a more mainstream acceptance of tofu. The incredible landmass devoted to soy, however, won’t make the hippies happy. While soy is increasingly promoted as a healthy alternative to animal products in the North, the soy industry is destroying homes, livelihoods, health and the environment across South America. In the context of a global food crisis, in both the North and South large-scale agribusinesses are tightening their grip and local alternatives are espoused as the only saving grace. (Keep reading…)

Canadian Dimension magazine, July/August 2008

Rapidly rising food prices are casting millions of the world’s poor into increasingly desperate circumstances of malnourishment and hunger. Various food-centred scenes of suffering and associated social tensions have become regular fixtures in the news in 2008: people staving off hunger pangs by eating mud in Haiti; guarded warehouses and grain shipments in the Philippines; export prohibitions in India; food rationing in Pakistan; and food-price riots in more than thirty countries across the Global South. Josette Sheeran, head of the UN’s World Food Programme (WFP), recently likened the scale and suddenness of this humanitarian crisis to the 2004 tsunami in Asia, while noting that it is a crisis in which poor people still can often see “food on shelves, but … are priced out of the market.” (Keep reading…)

Focus on the Global South
Friday, 16 May 2008

ERODING THE MEXICAN COUNTRYSIDE (Keep reading…)

Rachel’s Democracy & Health News #958 May 8, 2008 www.rachel.org –

Global food prices have risen 83% in the last 3 years. This spring, as prices rose steeply, food riots broke out in Haiti, Egypt, Cameroon, Ivory Coast, Mauritania, Ethiopia, Uzbekistan, Yemen, the Philippines, Thailand, Indonesia and Italy, among other places. Because U.S. energy policy subsidizes farmers to grow corn to make ethanol (alcohol that can supplement gasoline), the U.S. is being accused of feeding its sport utility vehicles (SUVs) instead of feeding people. There is some truth to this charge, but it’s more complicated than that.[1] (Keep reading…)

The future of our seas has never been more precarious. Ninety years of industrial-scale overfishing has brought us to the brink of an ecological catastrophe and deprived millions of their livelihoods. As scientific guidelines are ignored and catches become ever bigger, Alex Renton tells why the international community has failed to act (Keep reading…)

~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~(((( T h e B u l l e t ))))~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~ A Socialist Project e-bulletin …. No. 107 …. May 12, 2008 _____________________________________________________________ (Keep reading…)

~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~(((( T h e B u l l e t ))))~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~ A Socialist Project e-bulletin …. No. 102 …. April 28, 2008 _______________________________________________________________ (Keep reading…)

CounterPunch April 24, 2008

In recent days, we have seen the rising price of oil and the devaluation of the dollar create two quantum shifts in the economy: the beginning of the collapse of the air travel industry and a global crisis of food-price inflation. These are related in ways that are crucial to understand — because we are seeing the outlines of an historic opportunity to change the terms of theory and practice for a politics of resistance. As air carriers have gone bankrupt, the knock-on effects on travel agents, airports, airport-colocated hotels, “package” vacation resorts, etc. are considerable. (Keep reading…)

April 28, 2008 The Nation

The only surprising thing about the global food crisis to Jim Goodman is the notion that anyone finds it surprising. ‘So,’ says the Wisconsin dairy farmer, ‘they finally figured out, after all these years of pushing globalization and genetically modified [GM] seeds, that instead of feeding the world we’ve created a food system that leaves more people hungry. If they’d listened to farmers instead of corporations, they would’ve known this was going to happen.’ Goodman has traveled the world to speak, organize and rally with groups such as La Via Campesina, the global movement of peasant and farm organizations that has been warning for years that ’solutions’ promoted by agribusiness conglomerates were designed to maximize corporate profits, not help farmers or feed people. The food shortages, suddenly front-page news, are not new. Hundreds of millions of people were starving and malnourished last year; the only change is that as the scope of the crisis has grown, it has become more difficult to ‘manage’ the hunger that a failed food system accepts rather than feeds. (Keep reading…)