It’s World Food Day and the focus this year is on food security within the context of soaring world food prices. To mark the occasion, here’s a short report on a food and community conference I attended recently. Good, healthy food. Local food. Organics. Food security. Food and climate change. Urban agriculture. Food from farms to cafeterias. All of these topics, and more, were on the menu at the Community Food Security Coalition’s annual conference held in early October in Cherry Hill, New Jersey. Food’what, how and who we eat and from where’is fast making its way up the list of priorities for groups and individuals working on global warming, land and water pollution, biodiversity protection, improved public health, and issues of equity and social justice. Seven hundred people traveled from around the U.S. and a few from overseas to Cherry Hill, about a half an hour outside of Philadelphia, to further the discussion.

“Grow food everywhere,” was one of the recommendations offered by Deb Habib, director of a Massachusetts family farm and non-profit called Seeds of Solidarity, as a direct way of limiting “food miles.” That’s the distance food travels from farm or production center to plate, consuming fossil fuels all the way. “Where,” she asked, “are available open spaces?” such as lots, community spaces, school yards, house of worship grounds, interstitial areas where vegetables or fruit can be grown.

Maria Jose Bezerra from the Landless Workers’ Movement/Via Campesina, in Brazil described her group’s efforts to resettle poor Brazilians on abandoned or unused land. Read More

New York-based policy action tank Brighter Green’s new report, Skillful Means: The Challenges of China’s Encounter with Factory Farming (PDF) explores the emerging superpower’s “livestock revolution,” which is having serious impacts on public health, food security, and equity in China—and the world. The Beijing Summer Olympics are showcasing a resurgent nation, which only two generations after a devastating national famine is eating increasingly high on the food chain. In the past ten years, consumption of China’s most popular meat, pork, has doubled. In 2007, China raised well over half a billion pigs for meat.

Given that every fifth person in the world is Chinese, even small increases in individual meat or dairy consumption will have broad, collective environmental as well as climate impacts. Increasingly, what the Chinese eat, and how China produces its food, affects not only China, but the world, too.
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Flash points over food are getting more common. In the last week or so, protests over food prices and availability have roiled Burkina Faso, Cameroon, Indonesia, Egypt and now Haiti, where already several people have died. Peaceful marchers rallied outside the Presidential Palace, shouting angrily and plaintively, “We’re hungry.” For growing numbers of the world’s poor people, rising food prices are putting staples—mostly grains—out of reach. World food prices have been climbing for more than a year, but 2008 has seen even steeper increases (including in the U.S.) In just a year, global food prices overall have ticked upward by nearly 25%, grain prices by 42%.

What’s driving the increases, and the unrest? Demand for grain to produce biofuels, increasingly urban and affluent populations seeking out more meat and dairy products, most notably in China, which is driving up the price of feed grains to fatten all those animals, and record-high oil prices (industrial agriculture is heavily dependent on oil for transport and to produce chemical fertilizer). Climate change has also played its part as both drought and floods bedevil crops. Read More

Animals and war may sound like a strange pairing: while we know from Jane Goodall’s research that chimpanzee groups do in fact go to “war” with each other, armed conflict is a distinctly human activity. Yet given our species’ reach on the planet, it’s not surprising that all manner of animals are affected by our raging battles and their aftermath. Recent news hasn’t been good: In the Democratic Republic of Congo, rebels have set up a virtual government inside a national park that’s home to more than 200 mountain gorillas. Now, the guerrillas are running tours to see the gorillas. They’re also warning that if the park rangers charged with protecting the gorillas return, the guerrillas will kill them. Earlier this year, several gorillas were killed in the park, most likely by other rebels who are running a successful charcoal syndicate. The gorillas, and the rangers, got in the way of their business.

This new business poses moral dilemmas on many levels: should tourists pay guerrillas for a service the park rangers are mandated to provide and in doing so, helping support the rebel movement? Read More

News about food—and its consequences—has been coming fast and furious. The World Food Program warns that demand for biofuels and meat is pushing up food prices, threatening more people in the global south with acute hunger. (See previous blog). A new report from Friends of the Earth-Brazilian Amazon has this alarming news: despite many efforts to dissuade purchasers of “rainforest beef” the Brazilian Amazon is becoming an epi-center of cattle production. In 2007, for the first time, 10 million Amazonian cattle were slaughtered for meat. The total cattle population in the rainforest reached 73 million, according to the report. Brazil is now the world’s 2nd largest beef producer, after the U.S. (which buys significant amounts of Brazilian beef). Cattle numbers have risen by a third since 1996 and, at 200 million, outstrips Brazil’s human population.
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