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Complete date: 2009-01-08 13:13:22 2009.01.08 China's food economy benefits small farmers
A new study in the Review of Agricultural Economics reveals that the recent changes in China’s food economy have contributed to an improvement in poverty reduction and betterment of small farmers. However, there exists a great challenge to ensure delivery of a safe product. Jikun Huang, Yunhua Wu, Huayong Zhi, and Scott Rozelle used a dataset that they collected themselves in 2007 of a representative sample of fruit farmers in Shandong province to describe the emergence of the production and marketing structures. The researchers explored who is entering the different types of market channels and whether these channels guarantee food safety.
added by Breadfly Breadfly  tag  Agriculture Hunger and Food Security / Fair Trade and Economics / Nutrition and Eating / Urban and Rural Development
Complete date: 2009-01-07 13:45:13 2009.01.07 Agriculture: Under-invested and over-subsidised?
Agriculture has sometimes been referred to as the sick child of the Indian economy, holding back the country's growth. At other times, it has been hailed as a great success, having the capability to not only feed the country, but to also export grain. It is true that we did move from a precarious "ship to lip" existence (a reference to the dependence on imported foodgrain arriving by ships) in the 1960s to a time of overflowing granaries; yet, it is also a fact that growth in agricultural output has been very low - barely keeping up with the growing population.
added by Breadfly Breadfly  tag  Agriculture Hunger and Food Security / Fair Trade and Economics
Complete date: 2009-01-06 10:34:32 2009.01.06 For sustainable farming, persistence is more important than profit
Sustainable farms provide the fundamental human need of food, and they provide for it in a way that is healthy for the land and people—it’s free of harmful chemicals, builds up the soil where it is eroding, and provides habitat and beauty on the landscape. If the dominant economy does not reward farmers who work in these ways, then the economy is not aligned with right action.
added by Breadfly Breadfly  tag  Agriculture Hunger and Food Security / Fair Trade and Economics / Capacity Building and Collaboration
Complete date: 2009-01-05 06:40:32 2009.01.05 How to Go Green: Coffee and Tea
Coffee is the world’s most commonly traded commodity after crude oil, and tea is the world’s most consumed beverage after water. So if tea and coffee are up there with oil and water on the world stage, we know there must be a lot at stake here. One thing that’s definitely at stake is our desire to get a tasty, healthy, perky, fairly-traded, and eco-friendly brew to sip. Read on for a spin through some of the finer points of green coffee and tea connoisseurship.
added by Breadfly Breadfly  tag  Agriculture Hunger and Food Security / Environment and Sustainable Development / Fair Trade and Economics
Complete date: 2009-01-04 08:54:34 2009.01.04 The Intention Economy
This idea becomes exquisitely clear during psychedelic journeys, when your state of mind gets intensified and projected kaleidoscopically all around you. As our contemporary world becomes more and more psychedelic, we are receiving harsh lessons in the power of intention on a vast scale. Over the last decades, the international financial elite manipulated the markets to create obscene rewards for themselves at the expense of poor and middle class people across the world. Using devious derivatives, cunning CDOS, and other trickery, they siphoned off ever-larger portions of the surplus value created by the producers of real goods and services, contriving a debt-based economy that had to fall apart. Their own greed — such a meager, dull intent — has now blown up in their faces, annihilating, in slow motion, the corrupt system built to serve them.
added by Breadfly Breadfly  tag  Fair Trade and Economics / Mental Health
Complete date: 2008-12-30 20:39:55 2008.12.30 What do you foresee in the foodie firmament for 2009?
We'll eat out less often, eat more cheaply, spend less on wine and become more demanding. That means we'll be eating in more often. We'll also discover (or rediscover) the joys of cheap cuts. Ox cheek will take over from pork belly as the fashionable cut on fashionable menus of fashionable restaurants and belly pork will step down from the menus of gastropubs and make it onto the domestic agenda. Shin of beef and skirt will be rehabilitated.
added by Breadfly Breadfly  tag  Agriculture Hunger and Food Security / Nutrition and Eating / Environment and Sustainable Development / Fair Trade and Economics
Complete date: 2008-12-30 20:33:26 2008.12.30 BK serves up cultural imperialism
It was hoped that Americans would be fascinated to see the reactions of such 'foreign' people tasting the homogenous staple of American fast-food -- the hamburger. In some cases, participants were also engaged in a taste-test to compare McDonald's Big Mac with the BK Whopper. While it was likely not the intention of BK or its hired PR firm, the Whopper Virgins campaign has revealed the sheer ignorance of Western culture, and has managed to proudly celebrate the cultural imperialism that North Americans have become so famous for.
added by Breadfly Breadfly  tag  Agriculture Hunger and Food Security / Fair Trade and Economics
Complete date: 2008-12-29 05:15:41 2008.12.29 The painful cost of a small victory for white farmers in Zimbabwe
Etheredge this year became one of dozens of white farmers to challenge the government's right to confiscate their land, and they sought relief in an unusual place: a tribunal of African judges established by the 15 nations of the Southern African Development Community regional trade bloc. The case is rooted in one of the most fraught issues facing not just Zimbabwe, but other nations in the region, especially South Africa: the unjust division of land between whites and blacks that is a legacy of colonialism and white minority rule.
added by Breadfly Breadfly  tag  Agriculture Hunger and Food Security / Environment and Sustainable Development / Fair Trade and Economics / Human Rights and Conflict
Complete date: 2008-12-27 05:37:48 2008.12.27 Oikocredit
Oikocredit offers loans, credit lines, equity investments and guarantees to Fair Trade organisations*, which are organisations promoting a trading relationship based on commitment to social justice in which employees and producers are treated and paid in a fair manner, sustainable environmental practices are followed, and long-term trade relationships are fostered.
added by Breadfly Breadfly  tag  Fair Trade and Economics / Microcredit
Complete date: 2008-12-25 17:31:02 2008.12.25 Is a new food policy on Obama's list?
Ruth Reichl, the editor of Gourmet magazine, wants a new high-profile White House chef who cooks delicious local food. Wayne Pacelle, head of the Humane Society of the United States, wants policies requiring better treatment for farm animals. Parents want better public-school lunches. Consumer groups are dreaming of a new, stronger food safety system. Nutrition reformers want prisoners to be fed less soy. And a farmer in Maine is asking the president-elect to plow under an acre of White House lawn for an organic vegetable garden. Although Obama has proposed changes in the nation's farm and rural policies and emphasizes the connection between diet and health, there is nothing to indicate he has a special interest in a radical makeover of the way food is grown and sold.
added by Breadfly Breadfly  tag  Agriculture Hunger and Food Security / Nutrition and Eating / Fair Trade and Economics / Environment and Sustainable Development