Food and Agriculture

COVID-19 Will Double Number Of People Facing Food Crises

April 22, 2020 World Food Programme. Educate! COVID-19, Food and Agriculture, Global Recession, Poverty

The COVID-19 pandemic could almost double the number of people suffering acute hunger, pushing it to more than a quarter of a billion by the end of 2020, the United Nations World Food Programme (WFP) warned today as it and other partners released a new report on food crises around the world. The number of people facing acute food insecurity (IPC/CH 3 or worse) stands to rise to 265 million in 2020, up by 130 million from the 135 million in 2019, as a result of the economic impact of COVID-19, according to a WFP projection. The estimate was announced alongside the release of the Global Report on Food Crises, produced by WFP and 15 other humanitarian and development partners. In this context, it is vital that food assistance programme be maintained, including WFP’s own programmes which offer a lifeline to almost 100 million vulnerable people globally.

Milk From Wisconsin Farms To Be Given To People In Need

April 22, 2020 Sam Brink, WAOW.com. Create! COVID-19, Dairy Farm, Food and Agriculture, Hunger

The Hunger Task Force is joining forces with several other Wisconsin organizations to help the underfed and the unemployed during the coronavirus pandemic. They are partnering with Dairy Farmers of Wisconsin and the Department of Agriculture, Trade & Consumer Protection to recover and distribute Wisconsin milk across Wisconsin. Some dairy farmers were dumping their milk as demand fell. A large portion of the dairy industry's demand comes from schools and the food industry. In a press release sent early Wednesday morning, the Hunger Task Force said it will commit up to $1 million to the Wisconsin Dairy Recovery. The money will be used to buy it back from dairy farmers and supply it to those in need.

My Parents Have Always Been Essential Workers

April 21, 2020 Monica Grover, NCRC.org. Educate! COVID-19, Essential worker, Food and Agriculture, health

Where do we get our food? Who stocks our local store shelves? Who rings us up at the cash register? Who bags our groceries? Who is deemed an essential worker in the age of the coronavirus? It is elderly shop owners who are stacking cans of soup, packing bottles of juice and soft drinks into coolers, making sure we have bread, milk, eggs and our local newspaper. It is people with underlying health conditions who are reaching out to suppliers to ensure that shelves are fully stocked with toilet paper, detergent, hand soap, chips, cookies and alcohol for you. It is immigrants putting their lives at risk to serve us, their community and our country at large. We all rely on people like my parents, owners of a small grocery store in Maryland. We need them to ensure that we all get through this crisis and they need our support in return.

Pandemic May Turn People Back To Local Farms

April 20, 2020 Polly Fitz, Door County Pulse. Create! COVID-19, Economic shutdown, Food and Agriculture, Local Economy, New Economy

At Waseda Farms in Baileys Harbor, store manager Sayard Geeve said, “The phone is ringing off the hook.” Flying Tractor Farm in Sturgeon Bay has been selling more of its meat products. Cold Climate Farms in Nasewaupee is getting calls from people asking whether its staff can ship food. As the COVID-19 outbreak spreads throughout the country and here on the peninsula, local farms are affected differently from many other operations. Farmers with products available now are coming up with new ways to safely get their food to customers, and as they prepare now for the outdoor growing season, they’re dealing with uncertainty about what their customer base will be this summer. Farms that produce year-round have seen an important, regular revenue source dwindle or disappear.

Long Breadlines Form Outside Of Food Banks

April 20, 2020 Alan Macleod, Mintpress News. Educate! COVID-19, Food and Agriculture, Food distribution, Recession

At least 10,000 cars line up in an orderly fashion in San Antonio, all full of hungry, increasingly desperate people. Thousands already arrived the night before just to get a chance to eat. “We just can’t feed this many,” said the CEO of the local food bank that Texans have descended upon. It is a scene playing out across the country; 1,300 cars swamped the drive-thru Greater Pittsburgh Food Bank. The United Center, home to the Chicago Bulls and Blackhawks, has been transformed into a huge food warehouse, as COVID-19 has driven a wedge through the cracks in American society, where tens of millions of people now face unemployment and hunger. Some have claimed that the food lines are a glimpse into what a future American socialist state would look like.

No Evil Foods Is Evil To Workers

April 20, 2020 Joe Atkins, Labor South. Resist! COVID-19, Food and Agriculture, Worker Rights, Workplace hazards

No Evil Foods on the outskirts of Asheville, North Carolina, takes pride in being a very cool and hip company. On its web site, it proclaims the following: “No Evil Foods makes meat from nothin’ but plants. We are makers driven to help hungry mouths everywhere recognize the connection between food, kindness to self and others, and environmental impact.” This is a company with a leftist schtick. Among its vegan meat products are Comrade Cluck and the chorizo-like El Zapatista. Its owners like to call themselves “revolutionary leaders”. Well, comrades, Emiliano would not be very happy with No Evil Foods if he were around today. With the coronavirus/COVID-19 pandemic threatening its dozens of employees much like it’s threatening all of us, No Evil Foods has insisted that, as a food operation, it is an essential service to its paying customers, and its workers must continue producing.

Tree Rings And Weather Data Warn Of Megadrought

April 18, 2020 Tim Radford, Climate News Network. Educate! climate crisis, Drought, Food and Agriculture, Megadrought, Water

London – Climate change could be pushing the US west and northern Mexico towards the most severe and most extended period of drought observed in a thousand years of US history, a full-blown megadrought. Natural atmospheric forces have always triggered prolonged spells with little rain. But warming driven by profligate human use of fossil fuels could now be making a bad situation much worse. The warning of what climate scientists call a megadrought – outlined in the journal Science – is based not on computer simulations but on direct testimony from more than a century of weather records and the much longer story told by 1200 consecutive years of evidence preserved in the annual growth rings of trees that provide a record of changing levels of soil moisture.

Without A Country In Which To Love…

April 17, 2020 Vijay Prashad, Tricontinental: Institute for Social Research. Educate! Brazil, Burkina Faso, Food and Agriculture, Land Reform

Burkina Faso, in the Sahel region of the African continent, has been struck hard by the global pandemic; officially reported deaths from COVID-19 are second only to Algeria in Africa. In the past sixteen months, nearly 840,000 people out of twenty million have been displaced by conflict and drought; in March alone, 60,000 people were forced from their homes. Last year, the United Nations calculated that the number of Burkinabè residents who had little access to food was 680,000; this year, the UN estimates that the number will rise to 2.1 million. Conflict over resources and ideology had already greatly strained the region, where the climate catastrophe-generated desiccation of the Sahel has produced a serious agrarian crisis.

Popular Power Will Not Be Quarantined!

April 16, 2020 Ricardo Vaz, Venezuelanalysis. Create! Community organizing, COVID-19, Food and Agriculture, Venezuela

Analysing different future scenarios is a very common exercise for Venezuelan political organisations. With constant US pressure, imagining situations of foreign invasions, military coups, early elections, etc. is natural. Leftist organisations look to describe these scenarios before envisioning what their eventual role would be. Nevertheless, no one was prepared to face the coronavirus. While in the abovementioned examples revolutionary organisations have no problems figuring out where they stand, and where their enemies stand, this context changes everything. The enemy at hand is “invisible,” it cannot be fought on the streets or in a collective fashion. Not only that, there is also the fear of being infected or (worse) of infecting other people.

Food Safety Groups Warn Of Looming Zoonotic Pandemic Due To New USDA Rule

April 9, 2020 Andrea Germanos, Commondreams. Resist! Food and Agriculture, health, USDA

Food safety advocates warned Monday that the U.S. Department of Agriculture's newly implemented rules for pig slaughter are setting the stage for a potential public health disaster—including the possibility of another infectious disease that could come from animals. At issue is the New Swine Inspection System (NSIS), which the USDA finalized in October. Touted by the federal agency as a "modernization" effort, the regulation sparked immediate fears and lawsuits by watchdog groups over its elimination of kill speed limits and weakening of the inspection system. As NBC News previously reported: The new rule will let factory workers, rather than USDA inspectors, remove unsuitable carcasses and trim defects in plants that opt into the new inspection system.

Five Million Nigerians Oppose Monsanto’s Plans To Introduce GMO Crops

April 8, 2020 Lorraine Chow, Ecowatch. Resist! Food and Agriculture, GMO, Monsanto, Nigeria

Millions of Nigerians are urging the Nigerian government to reject Monsanto’s attempts to introduce genetically modified (GMO) cotton and maize into the country's food and farming systems. One-hundred organizations representing more than 5 million Nigerians, including farmers, faith-based organisations, civil society groups, students and local community groups, have submitted a joint objection to the country's National Biosafety Management Agency (NABMA) expressing serious concerns about human health and environmental risks of genetically altered crops. The groups' petition follows Monsanto Agricultural Nigeria Limited's own application to NAMBA that seeks to release GMO cotton (Bt cotton, event MON 15985) into the city of Zaria as well as surrounding towns.

COVID19 Threatens Seasonal Farmworkers At The Heart Of The Food Supply

April 6, 2020 Michael Haedicke, The Conversation. Educate! COVID-19, Farm Workers, Food and Agriculture

Many Americans may find bare grocery store shelves the most worrying sign of the impact of the COVID-19 pandemic on their food system. But, for the most part, shortages of shelf-stable items like pasta, canned beans and peanut butter are temporary because the U.S. continues to produce enough food to meet demand – even if it sometimes takes a day or two to catch up. To keep up that pace, the food system depends on several million seasonal agricultural workers, many of whom are undocumented immigrants from Mexico and other countries. These laborers pick grapes in California, tend dairy cows in Wisconsin and rake blueberries in Maine. As a sociologist who studies agricultural issues, including farm labor, I believe that these workers face particular risks during the current pandemic that, if unaddressed, threaten keeping those grocery store shelves well stocked.

COVID-19 And Circuits Of Capital

April 5, 2020 By Rob Wallace, Alex Liebman, Luis Fernando Chaves and Rodrick Wallace, Monthly Review. Create! COVID-19, Ecology, Food and Agriculture, Globalization

COVID-19, the illness caused by coronavirus SARS-CoV-2, the second severe acute respiratory syndrome virus since 2002, is now officially a pandemic. As of late March, whole cities are sheltered in place and, one by one, hospitals are lighting up in medical gridlock brought about by surges in patients. China, its initial outbreak in contraction, presently breathes easier.1 South Korea and Singapore as well. Europe, especially Italy and Spain, but increasingly other countries, already bends under the weight of deaths still early in the outbreak. Latin America and Africa are only now beginning to accumulate cases, some countries preparing better than others. In the United States, a bellwether if only as the richest country in the history of the world, the near future looks bleak.

Call To Action For The US Transition Movement

April 1, 2020 Marissa Mommaerts, Resilience.org. Organize! climate crisis, Food and Agriculture, Sustainability, Transition Town

We are living in a Transition Moment. To those of us who are resilience-minded, this shock to our globalized economy and society, and its ripples in our local communities, did not come as a surprise. We may not have known what form it would take, but we knew it was coming. We have been preparing for years, and now is a time when the skills, the processes, and most of all, the stories and spirit of the Transition Movement and the many other community resilience-building efforts are so needed. Our focus on positive and practical solutions and our vision of a future that is simpler, yet more joyful, abundant, and connected, is medicine for the human soul in these challenging times. Humanity has a common cause, and a noble one at that: protecting the most vulnerable–both physically and financially–in our society.

War And Warming

March 26, 2020 Nathan Albright, VCNV.org. Educate! climate crisis, Food and Agriculture, Migration, Wars and Militarism

On June 5, 2019, senior intelligence analyst Rod Schoonover spoke before a House Intelligence hearing on National Security and Climate Change. “The Earth’s climate is unequivocally undergoing a long-term warming trend as established by decades of scientific measurements from multiple independent lines of evidence,” said Schoonover. “We expect that climate change will affect US national security interests through multiple, concurrent, and compounded ways. Global often diffuse perturbations are almost certain to ripple across political, social, economic, and human security domains worldwide. These include economic damage, threats to human health, energy security, and food security. We expect no country to be immune to the effects of climate change for 20 years.”

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