Food and Agriculture

Richmond’s Black Leaders Dreamed Of Creating An Agrihood

October 6, 2024 Barry Greene, Jr, Next City. Resist! Farming, Food and Agriculture, inclusionary zoning, Richmond, Virginia, zoning

When Richmond, Virginia-based nonprofit Girls for a Change was offered a eight-acre parcel of land from a local benefactor, CEO Angela Patton knew the Black youth development organization could do something special for the neighborhood. “We were sitting on this property for a while trying to just figure out what would it be,” says Patton, who has lived in Richmond’s Bensley suburb for nearly two decades. “Would it be a summer camp for girls? Would it be a community center for the community? Would it be a women’s wellness center?” In 2021, Patton announced their plan to turn the vacant land into the Bensley Agrihood, a permanently affordable housing development featuring 10 affordable homes, four tiny homes, a wellness center and a 1.5-acre working community farm that would serve as an amenity for the neighborhood.

Big Ag’s Road To Brazil

September 24, 2024 Rachel Sherrington and Hazel Healy, DeSmog. Educate! Big Ag, Brazil, climate crisis, COP30, emissions, Energy, Food and Agriculture, G20, New York (NY)

This week, as business and government leaders, investors and campaigners gather for New York Climate Week, DeSmog is relaunching its big agriculture series, which will scrutinise the power of food and farming companies. Agriculture used to play second fiddle to energy when it came to global warming, considered as a nice-to-have. But as global heating continues apace, emissions associated with food are rising fast. Nitrous oxide – a planet-heating gas nearly 300 times as potent as CO2 when measured over 100 years – is accumulating in Earth’s atmosphere at unprecedented levels. Levels of methane – another powerful greenhouse gas critical to reducing emissions – have soared since the start of the decade and are showing “no hint of decline”.

How Feed Black Futures Is Challenging Structural Racism

September 19, 2024 Tina Jenkins Bell, Resilience. Create! Black America, California, Food and Agriculture, Food Apartheid, Racism

Don’t call it a food desert. “Food apartheid” is closer to the truth. Describing a place as a food desert, says food sovereignty activist Sophi Wilmore, “implies that this is a natural phenomenon—that the lack of healthy, fresh, nutritious foods in certain neighborhoods is par for the course, normal, organic.” On the contrary, says Wilmore: The real issue is structural racism, and unjust systems that keep people impoverished, hungry, and positioned for incarceration. Wilmore is the co-executive director of Feed Black Futures, a community-based, Black, queer-led food sovereignty organization in California that connects Black and brown farmers with Black mamas and caregivers whose lives and families have been impacted by incarceration and the criminal legal system.

The Urban Gardens Where Gender And Climate Justice Grow

September 15, 2024 Peter Yeung, Next City. Create! Ecuador, Food and Agriculture, Gender equality, Urban Farms

Up in the lung-busting altitudes of Quito, Ecuador’s capital city, 71-year-old Maria Achiña and 70-year-old Alegria Irua are busy digging up soil and plucking weeds from their modest allotment of kale, onions, broccoli and cilantro. The green-fingered pair are part of a group of local women who till the land beside the neighborhood’s health clinic, which is free to them under the city’s celebrated participatory urban agriculture project focused on gender, climate and food justice. “It gives us good food to eat and a bit of income to help pay the bills,” says Achiña, who lost both her husband and daughter in recent years. “And besides, us old ladies, we need to fill our time with something.”

Pesticides Make Living In Farm Towns As Risky As Smoking

August 31, 2024 Shannon Kelleher, In These Times. Educate! Cancer, Farming, Food and Agriculture, Health Care, Pesticides, rural communities

People who don’t farm, but live in U.S. agricultural communities where pesticides are used on farms, face an increased cancer risk as significant as if they were smokers, according to a new study. The study, published July 24 in the journal Frontiers in Cancer Control and Society, analyzed cancer incidence data from nearly every U.S. county and looked at how that data corresponded to federal data on agricultural pesticide use. Researchers reported that they found the higher the pesticide use, the higher the risk for every type of cancer the researchers looked at. “Agricultural pesticide use has a significant impact on all the cancer types evaluated in this study (all cancers, bladder cancer, colon cancer, leukemia, lung cancer, non-Hodgkin lymphoma, and pancreatic cancer."

Farming While Black

August 29, 2024 Next City. Create! Black America, Farming, Food and Agriculture, Racial Justice

Once upon a time, 14%of farmers in the United States were Black. That was in 1910. But that number has dwindled. Today, Black farmers comprise less than 2% of all growers across the country. On this week’s episode, our host Lucas Grindley notes: “That's more than 14 million acres of lost land.” This loss, along with the discrimination and violence perpetrated against African-American farmers and the current movement of more Black people returning to agriculture and land stewardship, is the subject of the documentary “Farming While Black,” which was released in 2023. Mark Decena, the writer and director of the documentary, describes it as a Venn diagram of social justice, climate justice and food sovereignty.

Axios Report Reveals Rampant Forced Labor In Grocery Supply Chains

August 19, 2024 Coalition of Immokalee Workers. Educate! Food and Agriculture, Forced Labor, Grocery Stores, Immigrant Rights, Krogers, Worker Rights and Jobs

A stunning report in Axios paints a damning picture of widespread farm labor abuse in the US agricultural industry outside the protections of the Fair Food Program. Yet while federal prosecutions of forced labor operations grow more common in agriculture, many massive food corporations like the grocery giant Kroger continue to turn a blind eye to the extreme abuses of some of the most vulnerable workers at the bottom of their opaque supply chains, according to a shocking report, months in the making, by Richard Collings of Axios. Meanwhile, according to the report, the lack of adequate resources for state and federal authorities to protect farmworkers is only making matters worse, and is likely allowing even more widespread exploitation of the agricultural workers who put food on our tables to go undetected.

The Farmers Who Can’t Afford Farms

August 14, 2024 Joseph Bullington, In These Times. Educate! Black America, Black Farmers, Food and Agriculture, Student Debt, Worker Rights and Jobs

Running a small farm is complicated enough. For Tessa Parks — who raises cattle and hay with her spouse, Wyatt, on the gentle, farmed-over hills outside Northfield, Minn. — the challenges include bottle-feeding calves, braving bad weather to check on the herd at pasture and dealing with customers at the farmers market. Climate change doesn’t make it easier, as it lends intensity to droughts and storms and increases livestock disease risks. But for Parks, a 28-year-old beginning farmer, the complexities don’t end there. Farming, for her, also means juggling relationships with five different landowners the couple rents a patchwork of hayfields and pasture from.

World’s Biggest Meat And Dairy Companies Spend More On Ads Than Cutting Emissions

July 22, 2024 Clare Carlile and Brigitte Wear, DeSmog. Educate! Big Dairy, Big Meat, False Solutions, Food and Agriculture, greenwashing, Report

Global meat and dairy giants are investing just a fraction of their revenues into cutting emissions despite being among the world’s largest polluters, according to new estimates. Company spending on advertising outstripped that on low-carbon solutions, the report by campaign group Changing Markets Foundation found, as corporations ramped up attempts to win consumers over with their green credentials. The meat and dairy sector – responsible for over 14 percent of global greenhouse gas emissions – has come under increasing pressure in recent years to tackle major climate harms. The New Merchants of Doubt, published on Thursday, examines the climate targets, lobbying records and advertising campaigns of 22 of the largest livestock companies

Urban Farms Are A Lifeline For Food-Insecure Residents

July 15, 2024 Kimberly Izar, Next City. Create! Food and Agriculture, Food Security, New Jersey (NJ), Urban Agriculture

In Montclair’s Third Ward is a tiny farm with big community value. In the summertime, Montclair Community Farms transforms its less-than-10,000-square-foot lot into a space with something for everyone: a garden education program for children, a job training site for teens, and a pop-up produce market for Essex County residents. “People really love being here,” says Lana Mustafa, executive director of Montclair Community Farms. “It’s really developed into something really beautiful and productive and community-oriented.” On a breezy afternoon in early June, bunches of lettuce, bok choy, parsley, and garlic scapes begin to sprout and ripen. Some are even ready to harvest. Mustafa and her team are preparing inventory for their Monday farmers market, where several dozen shoppers use their SNAP or WIC benefits to buy fresh produce.

A Coastal Revolution In Hospital Food

July 14, 2024 Tim Lydon, The Tyee. Create! Food and Agriculture, Health Care, Hospitals, Indigenous foods

As executive chef and director of traditional foods at the Alaska Native Medical Center in Anchorage, Amy Foote brightens patient menus with healthy Indigenous foods, including moose, salmon, fiddleheads and more. “Traditional foods connect patients to their land and culture, which can help with healing,” says Foote amid the clattering pans and hissing pipes of the hospital’s large kitchen. Incorporating traditional foods is no small task for a hospital serving over 5,000 meals daily to patients and their visiting families. But the Alaska Native Tribal Health Consortium, which runs the hospital, is investing in the cause. As part of that, says Foote, its food service recently went “self-op,” meaning it no longer contracts out.

Mexico Scores Major Victory Against Bayer-Owned Monsanto

July 11, 2024 Nick Corbishly, Naked Capitalism. Resist! AMLO, Bayer, Corn War, Food and Agriculture, Food Sovereignty, GMOs, Mexico, Monsanto, Victory

After a four-year legal battle on multiple fronts with Mexico’s AMLO government, Monsanto has finally thrown in the towel. Last Tuesday, Mexico’s National Council of Humanities, Sciences and Technologies (Conahcyt) announced that two Mexican divisions of Monsanto — now subsidiaries of German chemicals giant, Bayer, which in 2018 acquired Monsanto in arguably the worst ever corporate merger — had dropped their law suits against the Mexican government over its intention to ban genetically modified corn. As readers may recall, Mexico’s outgoing President Andrés Manuel Lopéz Obrador signed a presidential decree in 2020 seeking to ban all use and importation of GMO corn and the toxic weedkiller, glyphosate.

Lessons Of Desert Oases For Eco-Resilient Transformation

July 3, 2024 David Bollier. Create! Deserts, Environment, Food and Agriculture, Global South, History, The Commons

To the Western mind, the presence of lush oases in the middle of deserts is a strange aberration, almost a dream. What moderns fail to appreciate is that oases are actually deliberate human creations, socio-ecological examples of commoning. Colonial powers may see oases as a miraculous fantasy, but locals realize that their cultures of interdependence over the course of millennia have made oases possible, enabling them to collect and sustain natural flows of water in arid climates. Safouan Azouzi, a scholar of the commons, grew up in Gabès, Tunisia, where as a boy he lived within ancient traditions that sustain oases in the desert.

SCOTUS Overturns ‘Chevron’ Deference, Massive Transfer Of Power To Courts

June 30, 2024 Sharon Zhang, Truthout. Educate! Chevron, Chevron Deference, Corporatism, Environment, Food and Agriculture, Health Care, SCOTUS, Supreme Court, Worker Rights and Jobs

The Supreme Court ruled along ideological lines on Friday to overturn a 40-year-old doctrine known as Chevron deference in a seismic decision that could see a major erosion of federal administrative rule in issues of public health, labor rights, environmental protection, food safety, and more. The Court ruled 6 to 3 in a pair of decisions that hands a massive amount of control over federal regulatory powers to the courts, overturning the doctrine that allowed federal agencies to have interpretive authority when there was any ambiguity in a law. Chevron deference allowed experts at federal agencies — as people better situated to make decisions on issues within their regulatory purview — to interpret statutes rather than judges.

New Protections Empower H-2A Agricultural Workers To Organize

June 29, 2024 Tina Vásquez, Prism. Educate! Farmers, Food and Agriculture, Immigrant Rights, Worker Rights and Jobs

Agriculture is rife with labor violations and abuse, but thanks to a new rule going into effect this month, the industry’s most vulnerable migrant H-2A workers now have better protections to organize against unfair treatment from American employers. The H-2A Temporary Agricultural Program allows American employers to bring migrant workers to the U.S. with visas to perform temporary or seasonal agricultural jobs that could not be filled by American workers. Unlike other visa categories, there is no cap on the number of H-2A workers who can work in the U.S. each year. The program has exploded in recent years because of ongoing labor shortages in the agricultural industry, where labor violations run rampant. In 2023, the Department of Labor (DOL) certified nearly 380,000 H-2A jobs, compared to 79,000 in 2010.

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