Hou Xueying, a mother from Shanghai, was tired of food safety scares and of a city life disconnected from the land. So she moved her family to the country to learn about sustainable farming. Her parents disapproved; they had struggled to give her a comfortable life in the city — they could not understand why she would throw it away. When she got to the country, she found that the older generation of farmers could only tell her how to grow as they did, using chemical fertilizers, toxic … [Read more...]
Saving Japan’s seed heritage from “free trade”
I recently had the opportunity to interview Masahiko Yamada, formerly Japan´s Minister of Agriculture and now one of the country´s foremost food sovereignty activists. We met at an international Economics of Happiness Conference in Prato, Italy, where Yamada delivered a keynote speech about the birth of a new citizens’ movement to protect Japan´s food-crop heritage from corporate take-over.Keen to learn more, I ask Yamada for an interview before he departs Italy. With only an hour to spare, … [Read more...]
Tosepan: Resistance and Renewal in Mexico
Since the mid-1980s, Mexico has been a poster child for globalization. Through free trade treaties and structural adjustment policies imposed by international financial institutions, the country has been “liberalized” – opened up to unfettered corporate investment and imports – to an extent matched by few other countries. Though the North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA) is the most well-known trade treaty to affect Mexico, it is but the first and largest of numerous multilateral and … [Read more...]
Unlike a Globalized Food System, Local Food Won’t Destroy the Environment
If you’re seeking some good news during these troubled times, look at the ecologically sound ways of producing food that have percolated up from the grassroots in recent years. Small farmers, environmentalists, academic researchers and food and farming activists have given us agroecology, holistic resource management, permaculture, regenerative agriculture and other methods that can alleviate or perhaps even eliminate the global food system’s worst impacts: biodiversity loss, energy depletion, … [Read more...]
Mending a History of Discrimination through “Person-to-Person Reparations”
Although systemic economic forces make it difficult for anyone to survive as a farmer — and even harder to acquire enough land to start a farm — institutional racism and other forms of discrimination have made it all but impossible for people of color. That’s why Soul Fire Farm, a people of color led community farm near Albany, New York , has launched a project meant to deal with the lasting effects of discrimination in a way that both empowers POC farmers to grow the food their communities … [Read more...]
Cooking fresh for the planet
How often do you cook a meal from scratch? For 11% of British people, the answer is never. But subsisting entirely on processed food and ready meals is not only bad for your health, it is also bad for the planet. It makes little sense financially, either: it is cheaper to create a meal using whole foods and fresh ingredients than it is to buy a substandard supermarket version. Eating well shouldn’t be a luxury reserved for the well-off, everyone can do it: it is part of the Economics of … [Read more...]
Agriculture and Autonomy in the Middle East
Editor’s Note (March 29th, 2018): An earlier version of this article incorrectly described MEM as operating in Rojava. In fact, MEM only operates formally in North (Turkish) Kurdistan, though its goals and principles are also being pursued by groups in Rojava, including the Internationalist Commune of Rojava.In the predominantly Kurdish regions of Syria and Turkey, known respectively as Rojava and North Kurdistan, a groundbreaking experiment in communal living, social justice, and ecological … [Read more...]
Farming for a Small Planet
People yearn for alternatives to industrial agriculture, but they are worried. They see large-scale operations relying on corporate-supplied chemical inputs as the only high-productivity farming model. Another approach might be kinder to the environment and less risky for consumers, but, they assume, it would not be up to the task of providing all the food needed by our still-growing global population.Contrary to such assumptions, there is ample evidence that an alternative approach—organic … [Read more...]
To Find Alternatives to Capitalism, Think Small
In the aftermath of Donald Trump’s shocking election victory, a shattered Democratic Party and dazed progressives agree on at least one thing: Democrats must replace Republicans in Congress as quickly as possible. As usual, however, the quest to recapture power is focused on tactical concerns and political optics, and not on the need for the deeper conversation that the 2016 election should have provoked us to have: How can we overcome the structural pathologies of our rigged economy and toxic … [Read more...]
Eating Well is a Revolutionary Act
“We all need nourishment for our psyche. It is impossible to find such nourishment in urban tenements without a patch of green or a blossoming tree. We need a relationship with nature. I am just a culture-coolie myself, but I derive a great deal of pleasure from growing my own potatoes.” — Carl Jung If you don’t have a few fruit flies in your house, you may not be enjoying the harvest as much as you could. Life tries to abound around us as it has during all of human evolution. Only recently … [Read more...]