Nick Mathiason | Nov 3

The Guardian - New code of conduct could limit aggressive moves by China, South Korea and Gulf states who have been buying vast tracts of agricultural land

Aggressive moves by China, South Korea and Gulf states to buy vast tracts of agricultural land in sub-Saharan Africa could soon be limited by a new global international protocol.

A scramble for African farmland has in recent years seen the equivalent of Italy's entire arable land hoovered up by businesses from emerging economies.

The Food and Agriculture Organisation, the UN Conference on Trade and Development (UNCTAD) and the World Bank are now discussing a new code of conduct for land buyers in Africa. Amid increasing concerns over food security, it could include ensuring consent is given prior to selling land from local people as well as ensuring smallholders do not lose out. A first draft is expected to be released next spring.

Alex Wijeratna, Action Aid's food rights campaign officer, said: "There's a new scramble for land in Africa. It's growing at an incredible rate. There's massive secrecy, poor communities can't get information and they're not being consulted. There's an argument for a moratorium on sales until there's a proper framework to assess them. We are concerned that an agreement will not come fast enough."

Earlier this year, legendary hedge fund speculator George Soros highlighted a new farmland buying frenzy caused by growing population, scarce water supplies and climate change. South Korea bought huge areas of Madagasca recently while Chinese interests bought up large swathes of Senegal to supply it with sesame.

That just about sums up the Agricultural Industrial Complex's effort to take over the Ohio Constitution on Tuesday, so they can self-regulate, because, you know, it worked out so well on Wall Street and with Enron (to name 2 of, oh, a trillion examples)...

In any case, Facebook group here. Video below. Happy Monday all!

On November 3rd, there will be a Constitutional Amendment on the ballot in Ohio. This is no ordinary ballot initiative. Its very existence and marketing has been bought and paid for--to the tune of millions of dollars-- by national and international agri-business corporations and their front groups, such as Pioneer Hi-Bred International (owned by DuPont and grantee of 100K to the effort),the National Pork Producers Council (113K), and the United Egg Producers (200K!).

(You can join the anti-Issue 2 Facebook Group and help us stop this underhanded effort)

Eli Clifton | Pittsburgh | Sept 27

IPS - World leaders at the two-day G20 Summit in the U.S. city of Pittsburgh agreed to work cooperatively to recover from the global economic crisis and create structural reforms with long-term growth as the goal.

In their end of meeting statement, the heads of the world's biggest economies also vowed to reform banking sectors and raise capital standards, replace the G8 with the G20 as the primary forum for international economic diplomacy, endorse a World Bank-led food security initiative for the world's poorest countries, and commit to phasing out fossil fuel subsidies.

Catching most observers by surprise was the announcement that the G8 would now be supplanted by the G20, a more representative body of the world's most powerful countries but a far cry from the inclusive global governance called for by the world's poorest countries and development NGOs.

The G8 comprises Canada, France, Germany, Italy, Japan, Britain, Russia and the United States. The G20 adds Argentina, Australia, Brazil, China, India, Indonesia, Mexico, Saudi Arabia, South Africa, South Korea, Turkey and the European Union.

"The G20 is more representative than the G8 but there is still no seat at the table for the poorest countries," said Oxfam senior policy adviser Max Lawson. "South Africa is the only African country included in this club. That means when the G20 talks about growth and stability, they are leaving the poorest countries in the cold."

Stephen Leahy | Uxbridge | Sept 24

IPS/Tierramérica - Millions of trees, especially from the developing countries of the South, are being shipped to Europe and burned in giant furnaces to meet "green energy" requirements that are supposed to combat climate change.

In the last two months alone, energy companies in Britain have announced the construction of at least six new biomass power generation plants to produce 1,200 megawatts of energy, primarily from burning woodchips.

At least another 1,200 megawatts of wood-fired energy plants, including the world's largest, in Port Talbot, Wales, are already under construction.

Those energy plants will burn 20 to 30 million tonnes of wood annually, nearly all imported from other regions and equivalent to at least one million hectares of forest.

"Europe is going to cook the world's tropical forests to fight climate change; it's crazy," Simone Lovera, of the non-governmental Global Forest Coalition, which has a southern officed in Asunción, Paraguay, told Tierramérica.

Gustavo Capdevila | Geneva | Aug 7

IPS - Noma, an ulcerous disease whose name comes from a Greek word that means "to devour" because it literally eats away at malnourished children's faces in just a few months, is found in the developing world, mainly in Africa.

It attacks small children among the poorest of the poor. And although it can be easily treated by common antibiotics if caught in the early stages, 70 to 90 percent of its victims die. The disease is closely linked to malnourishment.

"The mere existence of this disease demonstrates that the right to food of the most vulnerable is being violated," said Jean Ziegler, vice-chairperson of the United Nations Human Rights Council Advisory Committee, a group of experts created a year ago that held its third session in Geneva Aug. 2-7.

Ziegler told IPS that "noma is absolutely dreadful…Families in Africa are ashamed by it, and hide away their sick children" because of the stigma attached to the disease.

Noma or "cancrum oris" is an infective gangrene that generally starts as gingivitis or another kind of ulcer in the mouth. If treatment is delayed, it rapidly destroys the hard and soft tissues of the mouth and often the face, leaving its victims – mainly children between the ages of one and five – "horribly disfigured," the expert said.

In his report to the Advisory Committee, Ziegler states that there are some 30,000 cases a year of noma worldwide.

Roberta Rampton | Washington | July 28

Reuters - The U.S. meat sector on Tuesday urged Congress to lift a ban that effectively prevents Chinese poultry imports in order to avoid retaliation on their own exports to China.

U.S. law allows any of the other 152 countries that belong to the World Trade Organization to be able to apply to export meat to the the United States, and it is unfair that China has been singled out, a coalition of meat companies and trade groups said in a testimony to a House committee that has championed the ban.

"We will not be able to avoid a serious trade confrontation with China if Congress does not reconsider" the measure, trade lawyer Kevin Brosch said, speaking for the coalition in remarks prepared for the House agriculture appropriations subcommittee.

China has launched a WTO complaint about the ban, and trade groups said China recently stopped issuing import permits for U.S. chicken in retaliation, threatening the largest market for U.S. poultry, worth almost $700 million per year.

Peter Popham | July 7

The Independent - The choice of L'Aquila to host this week's summit of world leaders has highlighted Italy's failure to help the victims of the quake

Silvio Berlusconi switched the location of the G8 summit to the city of L'Aquila as a way of focusing world attention on Italy's most disastrous earthquake for 30 years.

But as Hu Jintao, the General Secretary of the Chinese Communist Party, touched down in Rome yesterday, the first of 40 world leaders to arrive for the summit, residents were sceptical that the presence of so many grandees on their doorstop would do them much good.

...

But progress now appears to have ground to a halt, with attention more focused on cosmetic makeovers for the arrival of Barack Obama, Gordon Brown, Nicolas Sarkozy and the rest, according to Massimo Manieri, a spokesman for the Association for the Reconstruction of L'Aquila.

"The first phase of the emergency was great," he said. "But then the authorities made a massive mistake: instead of building temporary housing to get the homeless out of tents as fast as possible, they decided to skip that phase altogether and move to permanent housing immediately. But none of that has been built yet. I will be surprised if even a fraction of what is required is built by December."

Michael Janda | July 6

abc.net.au - A leading commodity forecast predicts that prices for many major Australian agricultural commodities will remain subdued over the next year. The Rabobank Agri Commodities Monthly report says that prices for wheat and oilseeds (such as canola) are likely to fall slightly lower over the near-term, before remaining flat later this year, and gradually recovering into 2010.

The bank says corn prices have been hit in large part by sales from speculators, and wheat prices have also been affected by the growing perception that the 'green shoots' of economic recovery in the US are actually yellow and stunted.

Gawd, the food sucks in America. My bowels are in an uproar right now. What's a guy gotta do to get vine ripened tomatoes? Fresh cucumbers? Arugala in his salad and decent cheese--and not pay an arm and a leg for it? And don't get me started on bread, mkaay?

Everything I have eaten in the last two days tastes like three day old cardboard and Cheezewiz. This whole food thing is going to be a real adjustment. And it is something I was really unprepared for. I've never been a real food hound, eating what's in front of me just like the rest of us. But after a year of eating local, non-industrialized food I can see why people in the rest of the world shake their heads at us.

I'll be taking what I eat a lot more seriously in the weeks to come.

Nicholas D Kristof | NYT

Growing up on a farm near Yamhill, Ore., I quickly learned to appreciate the difference between fresh, home-grown foods and the commercial versions in the supermarket.

...

I’ve often criticized America’s health care system, and I fervently hope that we’re going to see a public insurance option this year. But one reason for our health problems is our industrialized agriculture system, and that should be under scrutiny as well.

A terrific new documentary, “Food, Inc.,” playing in cinemas nationwide, offers a powerful and largely persuasive diagnosis of American agriculture. Go see it, but be warned that you may not want to eat for a week afterward.

(It was particularly unnerving to see leftover animal bits washed over with ammonia and ground into “hamburger filler.” If you happen to be eating a hamburger as you read this, I apologize.)

Johannesburg | June 17

IRIN - It will take at least ten years to develop a variety of staple grain that will survive in the climates caused by global warming in most parts of Africa, and the continent has less than two decades in which to do it, warn the authors of a new study.

"The countries have to start developing varieties now, but many of these countries don't have breeding programmes," said Luigi Guarino, one of three authors of a study to be published on 19 June in the US journal, Global Environmental Change. "This study, we hope, at least raises the flag."

The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), an international scientific body, has predicted that food production in Africa could halve by 2020 as global warming pushes temperatures up and droughts become more intense.

The new study by researchers at Stanford University's Program on Food Security and the Environment, in the US, and the Rome-based Global Crop Diversity Trust, noted that "For a majority of Africa's farmers, warming will rapidly take climate not only beyond the range of their personal experience, but also beyond the experience of farmers within their own country."

_{Previously posted articles:
** Africa: The Second Scramble for Africa Starts
** Researchers urge rules to stop 'land-grabbing' worsening hunger
** Foreign land grabs for food could fuel unrest
** China's new export: farmers
** Financial crisis may worsen food crunch it eclipsed
** Rich countries launch great land grab to safeguard food supply}

Renee Schoof | Washington | June 16

McClatchy - American agriculture has become increasingly dependent on foreign sources of natural gas, a key ingredient in the nitrogen fertilizer that farmers use to get high yields of crops such as corn and wheat.

Now, a California start-up company is preparing to open a plant that will make fertilizer in the U.S. and reduce fossil fuel emissions from agriculture.

Nothing exotic needed, said the company, SynGest of San Francisco. The raw ingredient for the same ammonia-based fertilizer farmers have used for decades is something many already have and don't really need: corncobs.

Food is the new fur for the celebrity with a conscience

Actors, designers, pop stars have all got behind the hot new ethical campaign: food. From saving species to investigating conditions for pigs, star quality is pushing it to the foreground.

The Guardian - It is, by anybody's standards, an arresting image: a truly beautiful photograph of a luscious, radiant creature, all shiny eyes and silky skin. And Greta Scacchi, who is pictured clutching the cod to her naked body, doesn't look bad either. In the months and years to come, this picture, flashed throughout the British media last week, will doubtless come to be seen as the seminal image for a particular moment, when the gruelling, knotty business of campaigning around food issues finally became sexy.

The use of celebrity skin to push an ethical issue is nothing new, of course. In the 1990s, Peta - People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals - convinced a bunch of supermodels, including Naomi Campbell, to appear in the buff under the legend "I'd rather go nude than wear fur". But fur is just so passé. And, in any case, Campbell proved just how fickle the modern celebrity can be by soon deciding that actually, come to think of it, she would much rather wear fur than go nude, and did so on the catwalk in Milan.

Where celebrities are concerned, it seems, food is the new fur. The current set of images featuring Scacchi alongside actress Emilia Fox, director Terry Gilliam and actor Richard E Grant, were launched to back the cinematic release of The End Of The Line, a film about the threat of overfishing - but they are only a part of it. Tomorrow, Paul McCartney and his daughters Stella and Mary are launching a campaign to convince the public to go meat-free for one day a week. Another movie, Food Inc, which looks at the excesses and foul side-effects of industrial food production has just been released in the US and will shortly arrive here. Plus there is a major investigation by environmental campaigner Tracy Worcester into the dark underbelly of the global pig-rearing business which is about to be screened on digital channel More4. Food, and more importantly, really bad food, is hot.

What marks out these campaigns is their sophistication. It began a couple of weeks ago with the news that Nobu, the global high-end chain of Japanese restaurants favoured by the glitterati, was still serving bluefin tuna despite it being an endangered species. The restaurant had added a note to its menu pointing out the threat to the magnificent bluefin and inviting diners to ask for an alternative, but had refused to stop serving it, unlike big-name chefs such as Gordon Ramsay and Jamie Oliver.

Johann Hari | June 6

The Independent - The process of trawlering is an oceanic weapon of mass destruction

In the babbling Babel of 24/7 news – where elections, bailouts and beheadings blur into one long shriek – the slow-motion stories that will define our age are often lost. An extraordinary documentary released next week, The End of the Line, forces us to stop, and see. Its story is stark. In my parents' lifetime, we have killed 90 per cent of the world's fish. In my lifetime, we will finish off the rest – unless we change our ways, fast. We are on course to be the people who wiped fish from the earth.

The story begins in the sleepy Canadian resort of Newfoundland. It was the global capital of cod, a fishing town where the scaly creatures of the sea were so abundant they could be caught with your hands. But in the 1980s, something strange happened. The catches started to wane. The fish grew smaller. And then, in 1991, they disappeared.

It turned out the cod had been hoovered out of the sea at such a rapid rate that they couldn't reproduce themselves. But the postscript is spookier still. The Canadian government banned any attempts at fishing there, on the assumption that the few remaining fish would slowly repopulate the waters. But 15 years on, they haven't. The population was so destroyed that it could never recover.

A growing number of scientists are warning that we could all be living in Newfoundland soon. Professor Boris Worm of Dalhousie University published a detailed study in the prestigious peer-reviewed journal Nature saying that at the current rate, all global fish populations will have collapsed by 2048. He says: "This isn't some horror scenario, it's a real possibility. It's not rocket science if we're depleting species after species. It's a finite resource. We'll reach a point where we run out."

Megan Rowling | June 4

Reuters -

International food experts and African politicians are pushing for guidelines to prevent the surging trend of rich investors buying land in developing countries from hurting poor farmers and causing food crises.

The amount of land under negotiation in deals to help cash-rich countries in the Gulf and Asia secure food supplies for their growing populations has reached 15 to 20 million hectares, roughly equivalent to cropland in Germany or France, estimates the Washington-based International Food Policy Research Institute (IFPRI). The monetary value is a huge - $20 to $30 billion.

IFPRI argues in a new policy brief that there are both opportunities and threats for poor nations - many of them in east and southern Africa - that are leasing or selling vast tracts of their land to foreign investors.

On the positive side, land acquisitions have the potential to inject much-needed investment into agriculture and rural areas, boosting food production and jobs. But that depends on the terms and conditions.

"The potential here is great. The question is the extent to which this translates into benefits for the poor and smallholders in the developing countries becoming hosts to these arrangements," said IFPRI research fellow Ruth Meinzen-Dick. "The question is, do these people...get new jobs and income, or do they lose access to the land they have been relying on?"

There's also a fear that, with many east African countries suffering food shortages, renting out land to foreign governments and companies to feed people overseas will make hunger at home even worse.

Moscow | June 4

Reuters - Major grain exporter Russia, plans to raise its output by some 25 percent to 133-136 million tonnes a year in the coming years and aims to contribute to global food security, President Dmitry Medvedev said Thursday.

He said the country was ready to support long-term foreign investment in its agriculture.

"Russia is aware of its responsibility and is now committed to realising its enormous agricultural potential and bringing grain production to such a level as to ensure, together with other major agricultural producers, food security for a substantial part of the world population," Medvedev said.

"High-quality soft wheat is most in demand, since both developed and developing countries use it for flour production. Thus, contributing to the global food security, Russian grain substantially ensures food supply in a number of countries."

In the current 2008/09 crop year Russia aims to export 21 million tonnes of grain, mainly wheat, to some 50 countries, Medvedev said in remarks distributed by the Kremlin ahead of the World Grain Forum, which starts on Saturday in St. Petersburg.

I was on a mission yesterday when I walked down to the Radisson SAS Hotel for breakfast. (A meal there is probably as much as my hotel was, near the train station. Bucharest photos can be found here, by the way.)

"What would you like for breakfast, sir?" The waiter asked me.

"Two scrambled eggs, toast and eight strips of bacon," I said.

"Excuse me? Eight slices?" He asked.

"Yes, eight," I said. "If you have a whole pig back there I'll take it, actually!" I smiled.

He frowned, a puzzled look coming over his dark Gypsy eyes.

"Listen," I said. "I've been traveling in Muslim countries for almost six months and I want pork!"

"Okay," he said, taking a step back from the strange American.

"You have bacon, yes?"

"Of course," he said.

More after the jump.

Alok Jha | May 29

The Guardian - The battle for the Arctic's hidden mineral riches is likely to intensify after a survey revealing the energy reserves present beneath the ice.

A map of potential oil and gas reserves in the region, published today in Science, shows that about 30% of the world's ­un­exploited gas and 13% of oil lie under the seas around the north pole. Billions of barrels of oil and trillions of cubic feet of gas lie within the Arctic ­circle, where, until now, permanent ice has prevented drilling.

The report is likely to further stoke international competition for mineral, tourism and shipping rights in the region. Exploration and drilling for oil and gas have become easier as climate change forces the ice to retreat, and all countries with borders inside the Arctic circle are fighting to claim their share. "For better or worse, limited ­exploration prospects in the rest of the world ­combined with technological advances make the Arctic increasingly attractive for ­development," said Paul Berkman of the Scott polar research institute at the University of Cambridge, who specialises in the politics of the Arctic.

I'm not much of a chef. I bought a huge marinated pork loin from Costco, brought it home, cut it in half, wrapped it in tin foil, tossed it on my mom's propane grille, lit it up, set all three burners to high, then walked away to watch a Minnesota Twins baseball game on TV for a few minutes while the grille warmed up.

Just for a few minutes...

Tragically, it was a really exciting, dramatic baseball game. A real barn-burner. Twins won, and then I thought, "Oh shit. What about the pork loin?" I raced to the grille, whose thermometer was pegged at 550 degrees Fahrenheit.

For three hours. Oops.

Martin Hickman | May 2

The Independent - Does your shopping basket contain KitKat, Hovis, Persil or Flora? If so, you may be contributing to the devastation of the wildlife-rich forests of Indonesia and Malaysia, where orangutans and other species face extinction as their habitat disappears.

It's an invisible ingredient, really, palm oil. You won't find it listed on your margarine, your bread, your biscuits or your KitKat. It's there though, under "vegetable oil". And its impact, 7,000 miles away, is very visible indeed.

The wildlife-rich forests of Indonesia and Malaysia are being chain-sawed to make way for palm-oil plantations. Thirty square miles are felled daily in a burst of habitat destruction that is taking place on a scale and speed almost unimaginable in the West.

When the rainforests disappear almost all of the wildlife – including the orangutans, tigers, sun bears, bearded pigs and other endangered species – and indigenous people go. In their place come palm-oil plantations stretching for mile after mile, producing cheap oil – the cheapest cooking oil in the world – for everyday food.

Apr 30

DanChurchAid - Young women in Cambodia are being given agricultural training in an attempt to help alleviate poverty and unemployment. These underprivileged women are not only learning about the seasonal cycles of various crops but also how to farm livestock. The intension is, that they can help to secure a better future for their families.

When Uy Vannek left school at the age of 18 with only a third-grade education, no-one thought that she would one day go on to have her own farm, producing vegetables and poultry.

As a child, her family had to endure a poor standard of living. Money was so scarce, her family could not pay for Uy’s education, and she had to leave school early. As a farmer’s daughter, Uy did not have a lot of options.

In Cambodia, farming has traditionally been seen as men’s work, not a career suitable for women, who have instead been expected to take responsibility for housework and sewing.

Luckily for Uy and other women, the organization Ponleur Kumar is of a different opinion.

Simon Montlake | Bangkok, Thailand | Apr 29

CSM - The Asian Development Bank says the cost of inaction could be severe for the region's agrarian-based economies and rapidly growing coastal cities.

Facing rising sea levels, extreme weather patterns, and lower crop yields, countries in Southeast Asia are slowly waking up to the impact of climate change. Coastal towns in Vietnam are strengthening their sea walls. Communities in Thailand are replanting degraded mangroves. Forest practices are being overhauled in the Philippines.

But economists warn that these reactive efforts don't go far enough to tackle the threat to agrarian-based economies, which face potentially huge losses from failed crops and disaster relief. Far better to invest now, they argue, in adapting to more volatile weather before the full impact crashes through the region.

Southeast Asia is seen as highly vulnerable to the impact of climate change because of its reliance on forestry and agriculture, which employs 43 percent of the workforce, and the concentration of large populations along exposed coastlines and rivers. Tens of millions of people live in fast-growing cities along the coast.

Julio Godoy | Berlin | Apr 21

AllAfrica - Sub-Saharan African countries have of late become the target of a new form of investment that is strongly reminiscent of colonialism: investors from both industrialised and emerging economies buy or lease large tracts of farm land across the continent, either to guarantee their own food provisions or simply as yet another business.

In doing so, investors even deal with warlords who claim property rights, as in Sudan.

Non-governmental organisations (NGOs) and activists in Europe are denouncing this land grab in Egypt, Sudan, Cameroon, Senegal, Mozambique and elsewhere in Africa as a new form of colonialism.

Uwe Hoering, a German researcher on development policy for several European NGOs, including the news letter Weltwirtschaft und Entwicklung (World Economy and Development), called these investments "a new form of agrarian colonialism".

Related:
** Rich countries launch great land grab to safeguard food supply ~ 11/22/08
** Graphic: World land grab (pdf)

Geoffrey Lean | Apr 19

The Independent - Marine giants go hungry as fleets scoop up their prey for our fish suppers.

Starving sea life – from whales to puffins, tuna to seals – is being found all over the world's oceans, as the food on which it depends is being fished out, startling new evidence shows. And much of the depletion, ironically, is caused by raising captive fish – for the table.

New figures from the Food and Agriculture Organisation show that the small fish on which birds and marine mammals feed have become the main target of fishing fleets since stocks of bigger fish have become exhausted. Four times as much of these "prey fish" are now brought to shore as half a century ago, and seven of the world's largest 10 fisheries now go after them.

More than four-fifths of this catch does not go directly to feed people, but is ground up into fish oil and fish meal and increasingly used to raise carnivorous species such as salmon in fish farms. A captive fish needs up to 11b of food to put on a single pound in weight. And, as a result, there is less and less left for its natural predators.

"We have caught most of the big fish and are now going after their food," says Margot Stiles, a marine scientist for Oceana, the leading international sea protection pressure group.