The Nation
Vandana Shiva

We are in a food emergency. Speculation and diversion of food to biofuel has contributed to an uncontrolled price rise, adding more to the billion already denied their right to food. Industrial agriculture is pushing species to extinction through the use of toxic chemicals that kill our bees and butterflies, our earthworms and soil organisms that create soil fertility. Plant and animal varieties are disappearing as monocultures displace biodiversity. Industrial, globalized agriculture is responsible for 40 percent of greenhouse gases, which then destabilize agriculture by causing climate chaos, creating new threats to food security.

But the biggest threat we face is the control of seed and food moving out of the hands of farmers and communities and into a few corporate hands. Monopoly control of cottonseed and the introduction of genetically engineered Bt cotton has already given rise to an epidemic of farmers’ suicides in India. A quarter-million farmers have taken their lives because of debt induced by the high costs of nonrenewable seed, which spins billions of dollars of royalty for firms like Monsanto. Read Full Article »

Posted in Opinion/Editorial

Mercola.com
By Dr. Mercola

As you’re probably aware of by now, there’s a war being waged against raw milk. It’s nothing less than an unconstitutional assault on one of your most basic rights, i.e. your right to choose what you want to eat and drink, and one of the excuses used to defend the violent persecution of those who dare sell this healthful food is that unpasteurized (raw) milk endangers human health.

But is raw milk really a major source of foodborne illness?

NOT according to the US government’s own data! Read Full Article »

Posted in Opinion/Editorial

The US agriculture system is prepared to help farmers through the current severe drought, avoiding mass rural migration. But a famine in Somalia has caused over 135,000 to flee while many are dying each day from hunger.

Oxfam America
Jim French is a farmer from Partridge, KS who also works on agriculture policy for Oxfam America

The telephone rang at 6:30am. It was my wife, “We had twenty four hundredths of rain last night.” I savored every word as if they were drops slowly soaking into parched earth.

The extreme drought has taken its toll on the region’s agriculture.The winter wheat harvest was lessened by thirty to sixty percent. Rain fed corn has mostly been abandoned or cut for feed. Rangeland grass has long stopped growing. Read Full Article »

Posted in Opinion/Editorial

Press of Atlantic City
By Margaret Mellon and Doug Gurian-Sherman

By 2050, the world will have to feed 9 billion people, adapt to climate change, reduce agricultural pollution and protect fresh water supplies – all at the same time. Given that formidable challenge, what are the quickest, most cost-effective ways to develop more productive, drought-, flood- and pest-resistant crops?

Some will claim that genetically engineered, or GE, crops are the solution. But when compared side-by-side, classical plant breeding bests genetic engineering. Coupled with ecologically based management methods that reduce the environmental harm of crop production, classical breeding could go a long way toward producing the food we will need by mid-century.

Producing better crops faster certainly would help the world feed itself, but genetic engineering has no advantage on that score. Not only can classical breeding programs introduce new varieties about as fast as genetic engineering, technical improvements are making classical practices even faster. Read Full Article »

Posted in Opinion/Editorial

An old North Dakota farm is a laboratory for growing food when water runs short.

Yes! Magazine
by Frederick Kirschenmann

I learned the important lessons about water very early in my life. My father and mother began their life on our family farm in North Dakota in 1930. Their years as beginning farmers were thus spent in the midst of the Dust Bowl. My father understood intuitively that the devastation was not solely about the lack of water; it also was about the way land was farmed. The weather, including the scarcity of rainfall, was the immediate cause of the Dust Bowl, but the farming methods of that era had left the land vulnerable to incredible soil loss. As a result my father became a radical conservationist, and from the time I was five years old I can remember him admonishing me to “take care of the land.” As far as he was concerned, that was the most important moral duty imposed on any farmer—not only for the sake of the land, but also for the economic survival of the farmer.

Consequently, water has never been an isolated “thing” for me. I understood from my father’s tutelage that water was only one part of a complex web of living relationships that included, among other things, soil, climate, biodiversity, and husbandry. He understood ecology before most people had heard the word.

No Separate Parts

Although the science of ecology has been evolving for decades, it has barely begun to influence agriculture in the 21st century. We still manage farms as if all of their parts, including water, are separate entities. However, that method of farming is becoming increasingly dysfunctional, and the philosophy that informs it is being questioned more rigorously. Read Full Article »

Posted in Opinion/Editorial