Commodity Price Surge Sets Stage for Global Food Crisis in New Year

Here we go again

By Barry Grey
WSWS.org

The price of traded food staples such as wheat, corn and rice soared 26 percent from June to November, nearing the peaks reached during the global food crisis of 2008, according to the Food Price Index kept by the United Nations’ Food and Agriculture Organization. The price surge has continued in December, with foodstuffs and basic commodities hitting new highs and expected to climb further in 2011.

China embraces GMO foods, debates regulatory framework

By Reuters

China’s National People’s Congress, or parliament, is proposing legislation on the management of genetically modified (GMO) food, the official Xinhua news agency said in a report seen on Monday. The legislation will cover the import and export of GMO food and production, development and research of GMO grains.

The Nature of Garden Giving

By Anna Archibald
Mother Earth News

Over the last few years, the idea of urban gardening has caught on among many city-slicking organic-lovers. And while the idea of having a rooftop garden or an edible window arrangement is nice, not all longing to dig in the dirt are able to in their tiny apartments. Likewise, not all who have a larger plot of land know what to do with it. Enter Urban Garden Share, a website that allows gardeners seeking a place to grow food and people with extra gardening space to find each other.

Fresh Food in Winter

By Tabitha Alterman
Mother Earth News

For those who want to eat local and in-season food, winter is the time of year that creativity in the kitchen is most valuable. This winter, get excited about the foods that are in season, which include some tasty fruits, savory greens, nourishing veggies and hearty meats.

Winter is upon us — time to slow down, stay in and conserve energy. And just as it’s a great time to take stock of another passing year, it’s also the perfect time to take stock of your pantry reserves. Turn to the comfort of foods you’ve put by and the convenience of pantry staples, such as beans, grains and pasta. And, as always, get excited about the foods that are in season, which include some tasty fruits, savory greens, nourishing veggies, hearty meats and an abundance of fresh mushrooms.

Fewer pesticides and higher yields and incomes

Thanks to this training, all the farmers working in this production area have improved their techniques and yields have doubled or tripled.

By FAO

West African farmers have succeeded in cutting the use of toxic pesticides, increasing yields and incomes and diversifying farming systems as a result of an international project promoting sustainable farming practices.

Around 100 000 farmers in Benin, Burkina Faso, Mali and Senegal are participating in a community-driven training programme (West African Regional Integrated Production and Pest Management (IPPM) Programme) executed by FAO.

Working in small groups, called Farmer Field Schools, smallholders are developing and adopting ‘good agricultural practices’ through learning-by-doing and hands-on field experiments. To grow healthy crops, IPPM promotes soil improvement and alternatives to chemical pesticides such as the use of beneficial insects, adapted varieties, natural pesticides and cropping practices. Marketing and food safety issues are also part of the training programme.

Intrastate Commerce Act

The following is Tenth Amendment Center approved legislation to nullify federal overreach into virtually everything through a distortion of the “Interstate Commerce Clause” (Art I Sec 8 Cl 3). Activists, we encourage you to send this to your state senators and representatives – and ask them to introduce this legislation in your state.

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SUMMARY

Provides that all goods grown, manufactured or made in (STATE) and all services performed in (STATE), when such goods or services are sold, maintained, or retained in (STATE), shall not be subject to the authority of the Congress of the United States under its constitutional power to regulate commerce.

Top 10 Survival Downloads You Should Have

By Modern Survival Online

There are tons of good downloads in the Survival Database Download section of this website. For this article – I have selected 10 that everyone should have either printed and put away, or placed on a USB drive – or better yet both.

Europe to ban hundreds of herbal remedies (Codex)

By Jeremy Laurance
The Independent

Hundreds of herbal medicinal products will be banned from sale in Britain next year under what campaigners say is a “discriminatory and disproportionate” European law. With four months to go before the EU-wide ban is implemented, thousands of patients face the loss of herbal remedies that have been used in the UK for decades.

Petition to Stop Atmospheric Testing & Weather Modification Programs

By Rosalind Peterson
Agriculture Defense Coalition

PETITION TO STOP ATMOSPHERIC TESTING & WEATHER MODIFICATION PROGRAMS

WHEREAS, agricultural crop and tree health could be adversely impacted by climate change produced by experimental weather modification programs, atmospheric heating and testing programs, and increasing air pollution from the chemicals used in those programs;

WHEREAS, a wide variety of trees and other vegetation are showing signs of declining health or have died out;

WHEREAS, honey bee and wild pollinator populations are in steep decline;

Rosalind Peterson: The Chemtrail Cover-Up

By PrisonPlanetTV
At dProgram.net

Rosalind Peterson of California Skywatch was a certified USDA Farm Service Agency Crop Loss Adjustor working in more than ten counties throughout California. She now spearheads a watchdog group that monitors uncontrolled experimental weather modification programs, atmospheric heating and testing programs, and ocean and atmospheric experimental geoengineering programs Peterson is at the forefront of the chemtrail research field and how the unexplained patterns that scar our skies are “causing detrimental human health effects and environmental degradation.”

Shiv Chopra to headline Eco Farm Day: Ontario, Feb. 25-26, 2011

Eco Farm Day 2011

Eastern Ontario’s Premier Farm Conference

February 25 – 26, 2011
Ramada Inn, Cornwall, Ontario

The theme of Eco Farm Day 2011 is ‘For the Sake of Food Safety and Security’.  Canada Health whistleblower, Dr. Shiv Chopra, will speak about the safety and security of the food supply. Chronic and acute food-borne diseases emanate from the industrial production of food, involving longer than normal storage and delivery to consumers as highly processed and boxed eatables. The wide use of pesticides, antibiotics, hormones, slaughterhouse wastes, and GMOs poses a phenomenal risk.

The most obvious answer to this dilemma is to grow and consume local organic foods, but the market faces a demand it cannot meet. The outsourcing of organic cultivation to far flung places and even certain deserts across the globe is neither tenable nor acceptable. Strategies will be discussed on how to resolve these issues in the best interests of the public.

US to Vatican: Genetically Modified Food Is a “Moral Imperative”

By Mike Ludwig
t r u t h o u t

Secret United States diplomatic cables released by WikiLeaks detail efforts to promote genetically modified (GM) crops and biotechnology across the globe, including the Vatican, where US diplomats pushed the Roman Catholic Church to support biotech food in developing nations.

Cables from embassies in Spain, Austria and even Pakistan reveal the US diplomats have clearly sided with the biotech industry, even as court cases and public debates over GM food raged in the US and abroad.

Food only an alien would love: Syringed goop

Your food’s in the printer… the machine that lets you create and eat your meal from freshly squeezed syringes

By Daily Mail Reporter

First there were meals we had to make all by ourselves. Then ‘ready made’ meals came along, making life that much easier. But what if you could just print your dinner using food ‘ink’?

Scientists at Cornell University in New York are developing a commercially viable 3D food printer which uses raw ingredients inside syringes.

Studies show pesticides harming Salinas Valley children

By Sheila Kaplan
Investigative Reporting Workshop

Locals call this region the world’s salad bowl. Dole, Naturipe and Fresh Express have farms here, where much of the global fruit and vegetable trade emerges in neat green fields just over the hills from the Pacific coast.

The difficulties facing migrant workers who plant and pick the crops is an old story. But in Salinas, a new story is emerging — one with serious implications for the rest of the country — and an ending that has yet to be written.

It is here that University of California, Berkeley public health professor Brenda Eskenazi and her colleagues have spent the past 12 years studying mothers and children who are exposed to pesticides used in the fields.

Crops Absorb Pharmaceuticals from Treated Sewage

Environmental Pollutants: Soybeans can accumulate drugs and personal care products commonly found in wastewater and solid waste

54% of biosolids produced in the U.S. are recycled as soil amendments

By Rachel A. Zurer
Chemical & Engineering News

Each year, U.S. farmers fertilize their fields with millions of tons of treated sewage and irrigate with billions of gallons of recycled water. Through this treated waste, an array of pharmaceutical and personal care products (PPCPs) make their way unregulated from consumers’ homes into farm fields. Now researchers find that at least one crop, soybeans, can readily absorb these chemicals, which raises concerns about the possible effects on people and animals that consume the PPCP-containing plants (Environ. Sci. Technol., DOI: 10.1021/es1011115). [Image]

Massive food recall from Whole Foods Market in 23 states

By Rady Ananda
Food Freedom

Over sixty different products of prepared pastries, quiches and pot pies containing ingredients from Rolf’s Patisserie, including gingerbread houses, and all sold by Whole Foods Market in 23 states, are being recalled for possible health risk, although no one has become ill.

The FDA recall notices advise that Rolf’s Patisserie products “have been connected to several outbreaks of Staphylococcus aureus (S. aureus) food poisoning,” but  “no illnesses have been reported from consumers.”

How Reindeer Fly

Ingredients of Transition: Community Supported Farms, Bakeries and Breweries

By Rob Hopkins
Transition Culture

Connections have largely broken down between farmers and the communities that, historically, they would have sustained.  This enables communities to feel that there is no apparent connection between themselves and the land around them.  Farmers are left feeling isolated, irrelevant, and end up increasingly producing for distant anonymous consumers, in a model that increases oil dependency, carbon emissions and lowers the quality of food. But community supported agriculture (and bakeries) lead the way toward wholesome, sustainable food sources, writes Rob Hopkins.

Food Rebels, Guerrilla Gardeners, and Smart-Cookin’ Mamas

By Mark Winne

With the advent of industrialism and its widespread application to our food supply – factory farms, genetic engineering, and agricultural chemicals – the struggle between human freedom and authority has reached a critical juncture. In spite of the rapid growth of an alternative food system – local and sustainable food production, farmers’ markets, the public’s rising food consciousness – we become more dependent everyday on industrial agriculture whose representatives insist that it is the only way to feed a hungry world.

In the face of such assertions, we must ask if our dependence on such a system threatens to supplant individual self-reliance. Will personal freedom succumb finally and forever to the dominant voice of authority? Are we at risk of sacrificing our democratic voice to self-appointed governing elites? These are no longer speculative questions suitable only for philosophers, but real-life concerns set squarely on the plate of every eater.

Most Likely to Secede: The Vermont Resolution for Food Sovereignty

By Rob Williams
Vermont Commons

WHEREAS All people are endowed by their Creator with certain inalienable rights, and among these are life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness; and

WHEREAS Food is human sustenance and is the fundamental prerequisite to life; and

WHEREAS The basis of human sustenance rests on the ability of all people to save seed, grow, process, consume and exchange food and farm products; and