Fears for the world’s poor countries as the rich grab land to grow food

By John Vidal, Guardian UK
July 3, 2009

The acquisition of farmland from the world’s poor by rich countries and international corporations is accelerating at an alarming rate, with an area half the size of Europe’s farmland targeted in the last six months, reports from UN officials and agriculture experts say.

Fresh: How We’re Supposed to Eat

By Rady Ananda

What do urbanites know about farming? ana Sofia joanes’ Fresh shows us how a sustainable food system operates – by focusing on personal and community stories of change. Fresh is delightful, humorous and charming. What else can be said of a film that opens with, “Pig, pig, pig, pig”? But it also motivates and inspires us to change our way of eating, growing, raising and buying food.

Our Daily Bread a Radically Silent View of Factory Farming

By Rady Ananda

Wanna avoid talking heads telling you about the ills of factory farming? Tired of the sweetness of organic growers and their lifestyle? Then watch Our Daily Bread, which takes a bizarre, potent, and artistically silent view of how the vast bulk of our food is produced.

Going into the Fourth as free people

By The Writers’ Collective and Friends of American Farmers

The Fourth of July is rightly celebrated by picnics and parades and fireworks, all in their own way expressions of freedom.  The freedom to eat what we wish, the freedom to gather publicly, the freedom to broadcast how we feel.  We fought to be free of the tyranny of colonialism and of a king who was bleeding us through taxes.  In the glut of the current political and financial world and the noise from a media that represents powerful business interests, we have a basic democratic task – to hold to the simplicity of freedom and to value its profundity.

Did Sewage Sludge Lace the White House Garden with Lead?

By Josh Harkinson, Mother Jones
June 17, 2009

In March, Michelle Obama delighted locavores when she planted an “organic” vegetable garden on the White House’s South Lawn.

USDA Poised to Approve Widespread, Risky Field Trial of GE Trees (Action Link)

By True Food Network (A project of the Center for Food Safety)

The biotechnology firm ArborGen has asked the USDA for permission to conduct 29 field trials of genetically engineered “cold tolerant” eucalyptus trees in the U.S. For the first time in history, this massive experiment, which is on the verge of being green-lighted, will literally be using nature as the laboratory to test more than 260,000 genetically engineered trees. Scientists across the U.S. are voicing concerns over this proposal.

NAIS ~ to Own a Politician

By Darol Dickinson, Farm Wars

Let’s call him Mr. B. He was a very auspicious Texas businessman and Mr. B planned to stay that way. His success had come hard, taking the highest risks, and no half pint politician was going to pass some bleeding heart law to thwart his achievements. Mr. B volunteered to serve as Republican Fund Raising Chairman and consistently rolled in the donations. He was highly respected by

The Gestapo Food Act, H.R. 2749, Must Be Stopped (Action Link)

By The PEN

Here we have yet another phony food safety bill, which does NOTHING but grant the FDA massive new police powers without actual policy oversight. And it would do NOTHING to solve the actual problem, the stinking cesspools which call themselves “modern” factory farms, the SOLE source of whatever filth there is in our food supply. We don’t need burdensome new tracing regimes to drive small farmers out of business, we already know exactly where the problem is.

New EU regulation on authorising food from cloned animals sparks heated debate

By Rory Harrington, Food Navigator
June 23, 2009

EU chiefs have been criticised for approving a draft regulation on food from cloned animals that could “keep options open” for its eventual authorisation in the region, claimed opponents.