Brighter Green served as a partner of the 2012 Brooklyn Food Conference and hosted a workshop panel.

Mia MacDonald moderated a panel tonight at NYU titled, "Global Equity and Animal Agriculture." She was joined by Professor Lori Gruen, Chetana Mirle, and Professor Peter Li.

Mia MacDonald joined Peter Li, Associate Professor of Social Sciences at the University of Houston, at a screening and discussion of "What's for Dinner?", as part of NYU Earth Week.

Mia MacDonald spoke at the State of the World 2012: Moving Toward Sustainable Prosperity release celebration today, along with other co-authors of the report and Worldwatch researchers. Mia contributed a chapter to this year's report, titled, "Food Security and Equity in a Climate-Constrained World."

Brighter Green is pleased to announce a new associate, Eve Feng. Eve is a media and communications consultant for various international organizations, and shares our interest in climate change, animal welfare, sustainable development, and equity.

Mia MacDonald attended a tree-planting ceremony, organized by Columbia University Professor Gayatri Spivak. More details here.

Today, Mia MacDonald spoke at Stanford University's Environmental Humanities Project for a special lecture titled, "Sustainability, Equity, and Rights: Human-Animal Nature Interactions & Intersections".

Brighter Green was on the host committee of the event, International Women's Day Celebration, organized by Oxfam Action Corps NYC.

Yesterday, Mia MacDonald spoke at the event, Rural Grassroot Girls and Women as Agents of Climate Justice: Living Testimonies of Wangari Maathai's Legacy, honoring the memory of Brighter Green Advisory Board member, Wangari Maathai, in the specific context of rural agriculture and women farmers.

Brighter Green's policy paper, Veg or Non-Veg? India at the Crossroads has been featured in a recent article in the Daily Mail India.

The five Tanzanian girls participating in the East African Girls' Leadership Initiative went back to school recently to start the first term of their new academic year.

The Kenyan girls participating in the East African Girls' Leadership Initiative went back to school this week, the first term of their last year. The Tanzanian girls go back later this month.

Happy New Year from Brighter Green! Please take a look at our most recent newsletter for a summary of what Brighter Green has accomplished this year.

The highly anticipated India policy paper, Veg or Non-Veg? India at the Crossroads is now available for download.

The East African Girls' Leadership Initiative is holding a workshop in Morogoro, Tanzania.

Brighter Green participated in an official side event at the UN climate summit with partners Humane Society International and Compassion in World Farming. Mia MacDonald's presentation from the event on December 2 is posted here.

Should a "work program" on agriculture be launched by the scientific and technical body of the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC)? Governments' perspectives on agriculture were shared vocally during a morning session at the UN climate change talks in Bonn today (longer texts were submitted earlier this year; civil society organizations also had a chance to weigh in in writing). As with many meetings at the climate talks, this one started late and ran long. And as with many meetings here, too, a distinct difference emerged in the positions of Annex I (read industrialized) and non-Annex I countries (all the others). In the main, the Annex I submissions focused on the potential for mitigation (i.e. reducing greenhouse emissions) in the agricultural sector; some also referenced the "synergies" between mitigation and adaptation (adjustments to the realities of climate change, including erratic rainfall, drought, and warmer temperatures); a few confirmed their concern for ensuring food security as a priority.

Developing countries, speaking in regional blocs and a few individually, stressed the urgent need for adaptation in their agricultural sectors—and financing, technical support, and technology transfer to make this possible. Most also rejected any notion of achieving reductions in their agricultural emissions given domestic food needs and global warming's negative impacts on agricultural productivity and reliability—already broadly evident. Interestingly, when the Annex countries speak of mitigation, their implicit (even if unstated) focus is developing countries. I didn't hear any industrialized country (and among those speaking were the U.S., Canada, New Zealand, and Japan) say or even allude to adopting a program to mitigate their own agricultural emissions, which, in most, are very large, including because they have large livestock populations and consistent, intensive production of meat, dairy products, and eggs.

Other NGOs here read between the lines: the Annex I countries want to "offset" their emissions (agricultural and non-) by supporting GHG mitigation through "carbon sequestration" in soils in the global South. Many Southern governments and NGOs are skeptical about who would benefit and who would pay . . . even more than they have for climate change already. The chairperson will reconvene the "contact group" (sorry, more UN-speak) on Friday morning. He'll summarize and then the statements will begin again. Adaptation? Mitigation? Synergies? Commitments? Action? Inaction? All are still on the table here in Bonn. More views on the potential "work program" on agriculture soon.

The New York Times' ethicist, Ariel Kaminer, has announced the results of her Ethical Meat-Eating Contest. Turns out eating meat is ethical when it's ethical (More about the winner below). Fortunately, Ms. Kaminer addressed some of the criticism she got for the contest: "Some critics insisted that even contemplating a life without meat was an indulgent luxury, a silly game for a wealthy first-worlder. I found this puzzling — as if the poor feast nightly on roast suckling pig and only the 1 percent eat boiled tubers." True, the majority of the world's population is not eating roast suckling pig. What meat-eaters are eating is for the most part malnourished, mistreated, factory-farmed pork, beef, and chicken by the ton. And actually, I think it is true that the "1 percent" can probably freely decide to plant, harvest and boil their organic tubers with much greater ease than the "99 percent." Some folks, like the people who submitted to the ethicist's competition, can decide to eat a pig or to eat potatoes every day for the rest of their life, and others cannot.

The competition winner, for example, decides not to buy beef from an industrial farm, and also has the option of maintaining a small farm with legal rights in place to prevent land-usurpation from governments and corporations, pollution by nearby industry, and pressure from GMO seed companies like Monsanto. Some omnivores do not have that option, which means their choice to eat meat is not quite like the winner's. Many of the contests' submissions recognize the general problem with the way meat is produced. It is the production, not the ethics of meat, that requires mainstream attention and action.

The New York Times launched a contest last month that asked its readers to ethically defend their meat-eating. Six finalists have been chosen by a panel of (all-star and, some have noted, all white male) judges, and the winner was chosen Wednesday. The contest is obviously an interesting challenge, since it is usually vegetarians and vegans who have to defend their eating habits, but as some of the readers of the initial article pointed out in their comments, the question of ethics in meat-eating is a "first-world problem." The ethics of meat-eating is only discussed in a very small circle, while nutrition, status, convenience and other less choice-driven factors are the more pervasive culprits of meat production on a massive scale.

All of the articles (except the two that don't technically defend eating meat as it is traditionally defined) make excellent arguments for the conscientious eating of meat -- and 'in moderation,' when not explicit, is implied. Most of them make arguments along the lines of: eating meat is natural, the cycle of life depends on animal farming, with thoughtfulness and moderation meat-eating is morally correct, etc. And of course, this all may be true, and the farmers, environmentalists, and conscientious humans who have written these winning essays clearly have given extra-ordinary amounts of thought to this question.

An estimated 7 billion people are living on this planet, and that number is expected to reach 9 billion by 2050. In any situation in which sharing is involved, issues of equity and distribution arise. USAID recently released an infographic related to population growth and the need to improve our agricultural practices in order to feed 9 billion mouths by 2050. It is evident that the only way to feed a growing population is to increase our food production, but at what cost?

This blog was originally posted on Brighter Green partner A Well Fed World's blog on April 13, 2012. This is the second of two parts.

What made KFC’s entry into the Kenyan market possible was securing a reliable supply chain. That is, finding a producer of chicken that could ensure consistency to KFC’s specifications, meet demand, and provide refrigeration and traceability from “farm to fork” as Kenchic, the largest poultry integrator in east and central Africa defines it. Kenchic, which runs hatcheries, “farms,” slaughterhouses, and processing plants, as well as its own quick serve restaurant chain in Kenya, “Kenchic Inn,” fit the bill. The company’s tag line is “We are ‘kuku’ about chicken.” Kuku is Swahili for chicken; in English, the spoken word conveys an almost loopy enthusiasm.