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food security

ALTERNATIVES

Farming for a small planet: Agroecology now!

5th June 2016

Frances Moore Lappé writes: The primary obstacle to sustainable food security is an economic model and thought system, embodied in industrial agriculture, that views life in disassociated parts, obscuring the destructive impact this has on humans, natural resources, and the environment. The emerging alternative, relational approach —agroecology— has already shown promising success on the ground….

ECOCIDE/EXTINCTION

From the Green Revolution to GMOs: Living in the shadow of global agribusiness

2nd June 2016

Colin Todhunter writes: Powerful corporations hold sway over a globalised system of food and agriculture from seed to plate. The narrative about farming has been shaped to benefit this handful of influential corporations. With major mergers within the agribusiness sector in the pipeline, power will be further consolidated and the situation is likely to worsen….

ALTERNATIVES

Series: Combating drought – 3: Traditional methods to the rescue

30th May 2016

India is reeling under a back-to-back drought, with 10 states declared affected and nearly 2,00,000 villages affected, and shredding the social fabric in affected areas. In this concluding part of our series on combating drought, we present examples where traditional methods for water harvesting have been successfully put to use by communities to drought-proof themselves….

ALTERNATIVES

Life in Syntropy: The story of a transformation

26th May 2016

“Life in Syntropy” is a short film that was screened at the Paris climate talks. It tells the story of Brazilian farmer Ernst Gotsch, who bought 1,200 acres of completely deforested land on the edge of the rainforest in 1984 and transformed it into a remarkably biodiverse farm that reverses climate change by sequestering carbon….

ALTERNATIVES

Series: Combating drought – 2: Success stories

23rd May 2016

As India reels under a back-to-back drought, with 10 states declared affected and nearly 2,00,000 villages affected, it’s time to ask whether the present situation could’ve been avoided. And yet, here are examples from across India where, armed with little more than determination and imagination, ordinary people have turned things around to create little oases….

Sea level rise has washed away more than 50% of Ghoramara island, Sunderbans

Daesung Lee

CLIMATE CRISIS

India’s perfect storm: Environmental and demographic stresses building up

21st May 2016

Kanti Bajpai writes: India’s water crisis is a clear sign that a storm of epic proportions is on its way. India’s per capita water availability is now below the threshold level of 1,400 cubic metres per person. If so, India is heading from ‘water stress’ to ‘water scarcity’ and the possibility of internal water wars….

Morvarid Fernandez

Food/Farming

With cultivable land shrinking steadily, food surplus India stares at food deficient future

19th May 2016

Maninder Dabas writes: With 35% of agricultural households having less than 1 acre of land, the shrinking of agricultural land holdings in India is a worrying trend. Since 1995-96, the average size land holding has decreased from 1.41 hectares to 1.15 hectares which accounts for the decrease of 30,000 hectares of cultivable land each year….

Digests/Specials

Series: Combating drought – 1: What the experts say

18th May 2016

As India reels under a back-to-back drought, with 10 states declared affected and nearly 2,00,000 villages affected, it’s time to ask whether the present situation could’ve been avoided. As many expert voices presented here point out, it’s not the weather alone that creates a drought, but bad planning and an often corrupt and apathetic administration….

ALTERNATIVES

Bastar: Conservation in the time of conflict

Madhu Ramnath reports: Unknown to the rest of the country, a small group of adivasis from the forested villages in central Bastar have been busy doing work that would make conservationists proud. People from Sandh Karmari, Kakalgur, Kangoli and nearby villages have been gathering native seeds and raising them in nurseries in fairly large numbers….

Development/Growth

Varun Gandhi: Insure farmers against climate change

14th May 2016

India ranks in the top 20 in the Climate Change Vulnerability Index. Our average surface temperature, over the past four decades, has risen by 0.3° Celsius, accompanied by a rising incidence of floods, droughts and cyclones. With the majority of all landholdings measuring less than a hectare, farmers face a steep decline in household income….

CLIMATE CRISIS

Drought Digest: Dry planet: In every continent, flashing red

27th April 2016

The Indian Express reports: The Global Integrated Drought Monitoring and Prediction System (GIDMaPS) map shows large patches of dry areas in every continent, indicating droughts of varying severity. The GIDMaPS is a drought monitoring and prediction system that provides near real-time drought information based on multiple drought indicators and input data sets, mostly from NASA….

Bookshelf

Bookshelf: Farmageddon – The True Cost of Cheap Meat

22nd April 2016

Martin Simpson writes: It is impossible to read Farmageddon without coming to the conclusion that the world’s food and agriculture system is screwed. This is a system that produces enormous quantities of food, yet wastes up to a third of it… What it also produces is environmental disaster, ill health in humans and stressful and unhealthy animals….

Amit Verma/Forbes India

Economy

Famines and Public Distribution System in India

18th April 2016

Debarshi Das writes: The neoliberal State seeks to cut down welfare expenditure, hence it is against PDS. It also relies on the market. Although contemporary advocates of free market are not motivated by extraction of colonial revenue, in terms of policy prescription they do not differ from the advocates of free market of colonial era….

Bookshelf

Bookshelf: Shattering: Food, politics, and the loss of genetic diversity

17th April 2016

Billy Brack writes: Shattering: Food, Politics and the Loss of Genetic Diversity by Fowler and Mooney is one of the important books of our times, explaining how agribusiness is putting the world at risk by limiting the world’s food crops to a few genetic strains. Quite literally we are putting our eggs in one basket….

ALTERNATIVES

Seven projects around the world that protect soil

15th April 2016

Rocco Pallin writes: Thirty-three percent of soil worldwide is degraded, and 50,000 square kilometers of soil are lost each year. Soil is not a renewable resource and “isn’t recoverable within a human lifespan,” but sustainable practices could increase the world’s food production by 58 percent. Here are seven projects helping to restore the world’s soil….

Economy

Is agriculture a business?

11th April 2016

Harish Damodaran writes: Is farming really a business? If so, to what extent? Is there something about agriculture that makes it fundamentally different as a business? Farmers suffer rules other businessmen never encounter. There are at least four “laws” of business operating only in farming, of which the last two are probably unique to India….

NEWS ARCHIVE

NEWS UPDATE #90

6th April 2016

Nikhil Dey & Aruna Roy writes: The cynical attitude towards the MGNREGA is an example of how policymakers are deliberately — by squeezing funds and subverting the legal mandate of the law — causing immeasurable misery and suffering. Through the fund squeeze, the government has consciously crippled the MGNREGA’s ability to help people facing drought….

CLIMATE CRISIS

Industrial civilisation can’t wean itself off fossil fuels painlessly

4th April 2016

Chris Martenson writes: The data seems to confirm this: Humanity is not going to painlessly wean itself off of fossil fuels. Instead, we will hit some sort of a wall: a food/population crisis, a climate crisis, or a debt/fiscal/economic crisis. Each of those candidates has its roots in our global society’s addition to fossil fuels….

ALTERNATIVES

Organic agriculture, agroecology and the parallel reality of the GMO evangelist

27th March 2016

Colin Todhunter writes: GMO enthusiasts insist that agroecological farming could never feed the world. But it has been feeding us all for millennia – and it’s the only way to continue while enriching the soils on which all farming depends. Gandhi once called industrial agriculture a nine-day wonder. And its time will soon be up….

ALTERNATIVES

How WeFarm connects small farmers without the Internet

25th March 2016

Pierce Nahigyan reports: Founded in 2014, WeFarm is a free, peer-to-peer service designed for farmers around the world. It enables farmers to share information with each other via SMS, or text messaging. WeFarm translates and connects queries from continent to continent, and has thus far provided more than 100,000 answers to its 43,000 registered farmers….