agriculture

Other conservation tools at stake in the Farm Bill, too

Although recent reports indicate that the new farm bill will provide a $4 billion increase for voluntary farmer conservation programs, there's more to the conservation policies in the bill than just money. Recent attempts by the conference committee to dramatically weaken the new Sodsaver provision are just one example of the one-step-forward, two-steps-backward approach to conservation the farm bill conference seems to be taking.

The Sodsaver provision was designed to help limit the incentive that subsidy and disaster payments create for farmers to bring new, often environmentally fragile, land into production. The House and Senate versions of the farm bill both contained this new provision, which would have prohibited crop insurance and non-insured disaster payments for production losses to producers in any state who plowed up native grasslands in order to plant crops. This would have also prevented these farmers from receiving regular disaster payments, because farmers must first have crop insurance in order to be eligible for disaster payments.

I read a letter to the editor, the other day, I opened, and read it, it said they was suckas

A trio of fine letters in The NYT today, taking Richard Cohen to task for his reflexive praise of sugar-cane ethanol.

A review of Claire Hope Cummings’ Uncertain Peril

In October 1996, a spokesman for Monsanto told Farm Journal why his company was buying up seed companies left and right: "What you're seeing is not just a consolidation of seed companies, it's really a consolidation of the entire food chain."

Today, Monsanto is the world's largest seed company -- and makes more money selling seeds than chemicals. The company's biotech seeds and traits accounted for 88 percent of the worldwide area devoted to genetically modified seeds in 2006 -- and Monsanto earns royalties on every single one. No one needed to tell Monsanto: Whoever controls the first link in the food chain -- the seeds -- controls the food supply.

What better way to understand the perilous state of industrial food and farming than by starting with the seed? Claire Hope Cummings' new book, Uncertain Peril: Genetic Engineering and the Future of Seeds is a sharp and elegant analysis of the biotech seed debate.

The rhetoric of population in the hunger crisis

Perhaps you saw the recent UNESCO report on the future of agriculture. It calls for a major paradigm shift in agriculture away from fossil fuels toward organic agriculture and greater equity of distribution. Wow, I wonder why no one ever thought of that before?

Seriously, this is the largest single report ever to tell us what we already knew: the status quo is not an option. That is, we cannot go into the future as we are. We all know this on some level.

Let’s raze more Amazon rainforest!

Blairo Maggi is a powerful man in Brazil. He owns a company called Grupo Andre Maggi that runs vast soybean plantations in the state of Matto Grasso, which straddles the Amazon rainforest and what the Nature Conservancy calls “the world’s most biologically rich savanna.” The New York Times has called Maggi “the largest soybean grower […]

Food vs. fuel edition

“To say that biofuels are the culprit [for food-price hikes] clearly underestimates the demand [for food] and really shows a gross misunderstanding of the world food situation.” — Bill Doyle, CEO Potash Corp, the world’s largest fertilizer company, which has seen its share price rise 600 percent in the past two years, quoted April 24 […]

Contact your legislators and take action on the sorry state of the industrial food system

Everyone should take some interest in what they eat and how it is grown. Mostly people think about the price of food, and that is important (unless they make plenty of money, and then it doesn't really matter; they can buy whatever they want). The poor often have little choice: they buy what is available and what they can afford -- and lately they can't afford to buy much. Studies show that given the choice, low-income people would choose to buy fresh, locally grown food, but they seldom have that choice.

What’s causing the sudden run-up in food prices?

A lot of people are wondering what the hell is going on with food prices. Rice, dollars per ton Source: Reuters The price of bulk rice on global markets has tripled since the start of the year, school children in some of the world’s poorest nations are losing access to school-lunch programs, and people in […]

Thoughts on the farm bill and the skyrocketing cost of food

The rising cost of food worldwide is more complex than portrayed in recent articles in The New York Times and the Washington Post.

Like a magician revealing his secrets, the once-invisible farm and food system is drawing scrutiny from the media, policymakers, and the public as we realize how intertwined our farm and food system is with the energy sector and global markets.

But how did we get here? How did our modern, abundant, and affordable food system run aground? In a sector that is global in reach, absolutely essential (we must eat, after all), and includes the politics of saving family farms and ending hunger, there is no simple, singular answer. A lot of it has to do with economics and politics. Most of it has to do with what goes into making a box of cereal, and why we even have boxed cereal.