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Arabica Robusta

The Cutting Edge: Peak Food: Blaming the Victims - 0 views

  • Why is that the government-backed report discussed in today's Independent, says nothing about the institutions who are primarily responsible for food wastage, the supermarkets, the multinational food chains? If the government is genuinely concerned about food wastage in this country, why won't they do something about the fact reported by the same newspaper in February, that:"Retailers generate 1.6 million tonnes of food waste each year...
  • Driven by capitalist imperatives for short-term profit maximisation and long-term cost-minimisation, global agribusiness has established an international food production system that is, basically, dying.
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    Driven by capitalist imperatives for short-term profit maximisation and long-term cost-minimisation, global agribusiness has established an international food production system that is, basically, dying.
Arabica Robusta

BRAZIL: Agribusiness Driving Land Concentration - IPS ipsnews.net - 0 views

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    From the census figures by state, analysts observe that in areas like São Paulo, the planting of more sugarcane is associated with a 6.1 percent increase in land concentration compared to the previous census, thanks to incentives for the production of biofuels, like ethanol.\n\nThose responsible for the IBGE survey, presented Sept. 30, said the situation in the state of São Paulo shows that one of the main factors in the concentration of land ownership is the expansion of agribusiness and large monoculture crops for export, such as soybeans and maize.
Arabica Robusta

Meet the Opposite of Monsanto -- These Are the Folks That Really Feed the World | Alternet - 0 views

  • while Monsanto’s lobbyists were pulling out the full court press on members of the House to protect agribusiness payouts in the Food and Farm Bill, SNAP benefits for almost 2 million families in need were slashed. If Monsanto is trying to end hunger, you have to wonder where their priorities were during Food and Farm Bill negotiations. GMOs are the antithesis of food sovereignty—patented technology that robs communities of the ability to feed themselves.
  • In April, a long-term study on soil health published in Crop Management demonstrated that organic farming not only improves soil quality, but can also boost yields per acre. Many previous studies have shown that small to medium-sized organic farms growing diverse crops are highly productive, sustaining communities and the land.
Arabica Robusta

World Bank and UN carbon offset scheme 'complicit' in genocidal land grabs - NGOs | Naf... - 1 views

  • In west Kenya, as the UK NGO Forest Peoples Programme (FPP) reported, over a thousand homes had been torched by the government's Kenya Forest Service (KFS) to forcibly evict the 15,000 strong Sengwer indigenous people from their ancestral homes in the Embobut forest and the Cherangany Hills.
  • Under the REDD scheme companies in the developed world purchase carbon credits to invest in reducing emissions from forested lands. Those credits turn up on the companies' balance sheets as carbon reductions. In practice, however, REDD schemes largely allow those companies to accelerate pollution while purchasing land and resources in the developing world at bargain prices.
  • A letter to the Bank in March by No REDD in Africa network (Nran) – a group of African civil society organisations - signed by over 60 international NGOs accused the Bank with the above words of "both admitting its complicity in the forced relocation of the Sengwer People as well as offering to collude with the Kenyan government to cover-up cultural genocide."
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  • ony La Viña, Dean of the Ateneo School of Government and chair of the intergovernmental REDD negotiations at the climate conferences in Copenhagen and Durban, said: "The carbon markets, when up and running, need to support the forest stewardship of the people who live there, and not provide national governments with yet another tool to dispossess their citizens from the natural resources they have cared for and depended on for generations." According to the No REDD in Africa network, it is precisely because indigenous people and their rights are not factored into REDD principles that their implementation could lead to outright genocide.
Arabica Robusta

Palm oil shows need for socially aware research - SciDev.Net - 0 views

  • The question of exactly what kind of research is needed, and who should conduct it, was elegantly stated by Robert Guimaraes Vásquez, a leader of the Shipibo-Conibo indigenous people of the Peruvian Amazon, who made an emotional statement calling European consumers to realise they are “drinking our blood” when they consume products derived from palm oil. 
  • His lament was that governments currently rely on data from palm oil companies to decide which parts of a forest to give to which firms, but this data is tinged with bias. 
Anuj Singh

Connecting Global food and agriculture Suppliers and Buyers with Indian supplier - 1 views

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    Connecting Global Buyers with Indian Suppliers foodindiamart.com is the First and Exclusive and the largest online B2B Web portal catering to the Food Industry and trade exclusively for global buyers planning to source products and services from India. The portal has listings of manufacturers, sup
Arabica Robusta

IPS - Food Security and the Failure of Mechanisation in DRC | Inter Press Service - 0 views

  • Mechanisation was expected to transform agriculture in the Democratic Republic of Congo’s central province of East Kasaï. But a project to offer tractors for ploughing land has fallen flat. Meanwhile, many households don’t have enough to eat because agricultural production in this mineral-rich province is too low.
  • He said that would encourage smallholders to progressively abandon the hoe, because they would all like to cultivate larger plots and produce more.
  • Back in 2007, the provincial governor proclaimed agriculture the “priority of priorities”. The announcement was greeted warmly by farmers, who saw this as a new beginning for the agriculture and livestock sectors, which had declined steadily for three decades, following the liberalisation of artisanal diamond mining in 1982.
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  • “They charged me 35 dollars per hectare to rent a tractor, besides the charge for the tractor operator and his assistant. I also had to pay for 40 litres of diesel at 2.50 dollars per litre. It was too expensive for me,” Mudila told IPS. “We are in a diamond-rich province where people have lost sight of how agriculture works,” said Tshibanza. “It makes no sense to want to have access to the tractor service for free. The tractors have to be maintained and their parts replaced.”
Arabica Robusta

The 'Monsanto Rider': Are Biotech Companies About to Gain Immunity from Federal Law? | ... - 0 views

  • Unless the Senate or a citizen’s army of farmers and consumers can stop them, the House of Representatives is likely to ram this dangerous rider through any day now.
  • Rep. Peter DeFazio (D-Ore.) has sponsored an amendment to kill the rider, whose official name is “the farmers assurance” provision. But even if DeFazio’s amendment makes it through the House vote, it still has to survive the Senate.
  • Jack Kingston (R-Ga.) – who not coincidentally was voted "legislator of the year for 2011-2012" by none other than the Biotechnology Industry Organization, whose members include Monsanto and DuPont.  As reported by Mother Jones, the Biotechnology Industry Organization declared Kingston a "champion of America's biotechnology industry" who has "helped to protect funding for programs essential to the survival of biotechnology companies across the United States."
Arabica Robusta

Expensive policies to acquire poor people's land | openDemocracy - 0 views

  • It seems the first step in appropriating land, is to appropriate vocabulary and a language. Laws and policies that allow for this are full of phrases such as ‘participatory processes’, ‘democratic dialogues’ and ‘development of the nation’.
  • Firstly, with one subsequent clause negating the other, people will have to effectively vacate land first and then be resettled.
  • Secondly, once a project has been sanctioned, and an area is identified for this, the company proceeds to "conduct a survey" and "a list of displaced families is drawn up" to be rehabilitated. A communication plan for awareness creation is to be formulated and executed in the affected area with the onus and cost of the communication of the rehabilitation to be borne by the Project Authorities. So the only communication which a family may receive, is a report testifying to the fact that they have been surveyed, will be displaced, and that their name is on a list indicating this.
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  • Thirdly, this policy applied to only those people who had lost their homestead land. Given that of the 4,004 acres required by POSCO, 3,566 acres are government land, housing over four thousand families working on betel vine plantations, in forests, and as cashew farmers, it is clear that an overwhelming majority of agricultural workers are not landowners with homestead or agricultural land.
Arabica Robusta

ICTSD * US Attempt to Defund Brazil Cotton Institute May Reignite Trade Tensions - 0 views

  • The US$147.3 million annual payments were part of an agreement between the two countries that meant to hold Brazil back from imposing US$830 million in WTO-authorised countermeasures.
Arabica Robusta

Argentina and the magic soybean: the commodity export boom that wasn't | Mark Weisbrot ... - 1 views

  • One of the great myths about the Argentine economy that is repeated nearly every day is that the rapid growth of the Argentine economy during the past decade has been a "commodity export boom". For example, the New York Times reported last week:
  • I haven't seen any economists make the claim that Argentina's remarkable economic growth over the past nine years – which has brought record levels of employment and a two-thirds reduction in poverty – has been driven by soybeans or a commodities export boom. Maybe that is because it is not true.
  • It turns out that only 12% of Argentina's real GDP growth during this period was due to any kind of exports at all. And just a fraction of this 12% was due to commodity exports, including soybeans. So Argentina's economic growth from 2002-2010 was not an export-led growth experience, by any stretch of the imagination, still less, a "commodities boom".
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  • there is no plausible story that anyone can tell from the data to support the idea that Argentina's growth over the past nine years was driven by a "commodities boom." Why does this matter? Well, as economist Paul Krugman noted yesterday, "articles about Argentina are almost always very negative in tone ― they are irresponsible, they are renationalizing some industries, they talk populist, so they must be going very badly." Which, he points out, "doesn't speak well for the state of economics reporting." It sure doesn't.
  • The myth of the "commodities export boom" is one way that Argentina's detractors dismiss Argentina's economic growth as just dumb luck. But the reality is that the economic expansion has been < a href="http://www.cepr.net/index.php/publications/reports/the-argentine-success-story-and-its-implications">led by domestic consumption and investment. And it happened because the Argentine government changed its most important macroeconomic choices: on fiscal, monetary, and exchange rate policies. That is what took Argentina out of its 1998-2002 depression and turned it into the fastest-growing economy in the Americas.
  • By defaulting on its debt and devaluing its currency, Argentina was freed to change its most important macroeconomic policies.
Arabica Robusta

Mark Weisbrot, "Argentina and the Magic Soybean: The Commodity Export Boom That Wasn't" - 0 views

  • One of the great myths about the Argentine economy that is repeated nearly every day is that the rapid growth of the Argentine economy during the past decade has been a "commodity export boom."  
  • I haven't seen any economists make the claim that Argentina's remarkable economic growth over the past nine years -- which has brought record levels of employment and a two-thirds reduction in poverty -- has been driven by soybeans or a commodities export boom.  Maybe that's because it's not true.
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