Consuelo Castillo, a community organizer in Lempira, a land reform settlement in Bajo Aguán, Honduras, said, “Our goal is for everyone who is part of the land occupations to have access to land. Land is our first mother. For us farmers, we don’t have life without land.”
Tag: Food Crisis
Harvesting Justice 23: Inherit the Earth – Land Reform in Brazil
In recent years, the voice and visibility of movements opposing land grabs and displacement, and demanding land reform, are increasing. Though relatively little land has been redistributed, organized movements of small farmers, indigenous peoples, and landless people are developing in size, strength, and organization. They are uniting across borders to break the nexus between land, agriculture, power, and profit.
Harvesting Justice 22: Land to the Tillers – Response to Land Grabs
Land reform movements, organizations of indigenous peoples, small farmers, and other citizens are responding to the increased sacking of land and other natural resources throughout the global South, and resultant spikes in landlessness and poverty.
Mixed Messages in the Latest Data in the FAO Food Price Index
On Thursday (6/7/12), the Food and Agriculture Organization of the UN (FAO) released it’s indices for food prices in international trade. Most of the news coverage was upbeat because May showed the largest drop in some time. For instance, the allAfrica website had a headline, “FAO Food Price Index Drops Sharply.” It was a 4% drop; however that comes after several months where the index stayed flat and failed to show the sort of major correction that occurred after the last spike (2007-9). Even with the drop in May, the index is still nearly as high as it’s highest level in that previous spike.
Anatomy Of A Food Price Spike
The current food price spike is looking an awful lot like the similar rise in prices that occurred in 2008-09.
Are High Global Food Prices A New Norm?
FAO (The food and agriculture organization of the United Nations) released their June estimate of global food price indices yesterday. The new numbers were mixed, but not encouraging overall. [ … ]
Food Price Spike Continues But Slows
Today, the UN Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO) released it’s food price indices for May 2011. It was a mixture of somewhat encouraging news and not so encouraging news. There [ … ]
Biofuels For Transportation: Been There, Done That
There is a great deal of controversy about the wisdom of diverting a significant percentage of the US corn crop into the production of ethanol to fuel cars. Something like [ … ]
Third Update On Rising Food Prices for 2010/11
The FAO released its monthly indices for food prices in international trade today. For the first time in many months, most of the indices retreated slightly. Experts warn that this [ … ]
Update On Rising Global Food Prices
Last month I started a series of monthly updates on the rising prices of food in international trade. As you can see from the graph above, the trend is continuing [ … ]
Rising Global Food Prices – Why You Should Care
The chart above shows that global food prices, as measured by the FAO indicies, are spiking, much as they did in 2008. At the end of January, the overall food [ … ]
US Organic Farming: Digging into the Numbers
In 2008, the National Agricultural Statistics Service of the USDA (USDA-NASS) conducted a first-time, in-depth survey of the US organic farming sector. A summary was published in 2010 from which [ … ]
Concern and Encouragement In The News About Climate Change and Food
Last week, the United Nations Food and Agriculture Organization released a report which described the current upswing of global food prices (see chart above). They characterized it as a “polite [ … ]