Native African Vegetables Could Help Solve Food Crises

by: NourishingthePlanet

Tue Jul 20, 2010 at 12:29:29 PM PDT

Ever heard of the Bambara Bean? How about Nyimo or Vignea Subterranea or the African Groundnut? No matter what you call it, this little bean, which is indigenous to tropical Africa, is highly overlooked by scientists, development agencies, and humanitarian programs, even though it packs a lot of nutrition. The bean may have originated in Mali, but it's also popular in Zimbabwe, Nigeria, Burkina Faso, and Cameroon. It is now widely distributed and grown in Asia, parts of Northern Australia, and South and Central America and is often found for sale on street corners in Johannesburg.

Haiti's lost pigs and the folly of modern is always better

by: mental_masala

Sun Jul 04, 2010 at 15:44:17 PM PDT

As magazines from advocacy groups go, World Ark from Heifer International is pretty spunky.  It covers controversial topics - climate change, colony collapse disorder, and so on, always with some angle that favors Heifer's work, of course -- that other magazines might not touch for fear of riling up donors.  In a recent issue they looked at one of the myriad tragedies to hit Haiti: the loss of their Creole pig, an animal that had been on the island since the time the Spanish arrived. The animal was well adapted to the climate and conditions, helping peasants feed themselves or make a living.

But an outbreak of African swine fever in the early 1980s and the incredibly corrupt Duvalier government put an end to the breed.

The Gardens are Greener Over There...in Cuba

by: foodgirl

Mon May 17, 2010 at 17:18:17 PM PDT

Cubans have been doing what Americans and Canadians only dream about -- eating locally, organically and sustainably -- for over 15 years. Here's what we can learn from them.

Jorge Carmenate edges his stocky, mid-40s frame under the canopy of a neem tree and our small, pink-cheeked group follows suit. Even in the mid-morning, the heat in central Cuba is searing. Carmenate welcomes us to El Rabanito, a three-hectare market garden in a mixed commercial and residential neighbourhood in the city of Ciego de ávila. He's thrilled that yet another group of Canadians and Americans have come to see what is one of the nation's top-producing organopónicos, the urban organic farm co-operatives that are the cornerstone of how Cuba manages to feed its 11.4 million citizens, using as little as five per cent of the energy that it takes us North Americans.

KFC Thinks Hunger is Funny

by: Jill Richardson

Mon May 03, 2010 at 11:39:02 AM PDT

When introducing a bunless sandwich, the obvious question is: what happens to all the buns? To celebrate the launch of the Double Down, KFC will do some good by donating the "unneeded" sandwich buns to feed the hungry....it's great to find a good home for some of those 'unneeded' KFC buns at food banks around the country.

Great. Hungry people serve as a prop to promote their new ultra-bad-for-you sandwich, and the buns - which are not good enough for their paying customers - will go to the needy. All at a time when economic conditions force large numbers of Americans to subsist on low cost fast food (like KFC) and whatever they can get from food banks.

What sick, inconsiderate, conscienceless marketing exec came up with this idea at KFC? And which other sick people at KFC gave it the thumbs up? I am writing this in light of a recent post on this blog, "The Stress of Food Bank Food," which describes in detail what it is like to live on food from a food bank. And that was written by somebody who knew that his several days of lousy, meager, unhealthy foods were short term as they were part of an experiment.

Imagine being a child whose introduction to the world is a household so unstable that meals are never a given because your parents - try their might - cannot always provide for you? Or the shame of being that parent, who wants to give his or her child everything a child needs but still cannot. Think about the fear as the days of the month tick by and your salary and food stamps run low, knowing that at some point the money - and the food - will run out and your only hope of eating comes from a food bank. Is that funny to KFC? And will those people who line up at food banks be better off thanks to KFC's donation of refined, nutrient-devoid bread spiked with high fructose corn syrup?

A more caring entity would use the money spent on these buns and instead provide food banks with nutritious, high quality food that will benefit those who rely on food banks. But, of course, the budget for these buns no doubt came out of KFC's marketing budget, not their "social responsibility" budget. Thus, the recipients of the buns are no more than a prop to KFC. The hungry people are only there as a joke to portray how unnecessary the buns are for the new sandwich that substitutes two patties of fried chicken for bread. The Double Down itself is sick, but this stunt is sicker. And sadder still is that American food banks rely on this kind of "generosity," where corporations give them whatever they cannot sell (or in this case, whatever serves their latest marketing campaign) and then pat themselves on the back for their generosity. I would like to see the execs of KFC - all of them - try living a week on food bank rations and then reconsider their donations.

The Stress of Food Bank Food

by: Jill Richardson

Mon May 03, 2010 at 11:25:52 AM PDT

But to our surprise, meager and nutrient-free rations, growling stomachs and low-grade headaches weren't as hard on us as the psychological strain.

Please read this, as Wayne is sharing some insights that may be brand new to those of us lucky enough to never rely on food banks.

New study on bananas and fertilizer in Africa

by: mental_masala

Sun Feb 21, 2010 at 10:59:08 AM PST

Via Science Daily I ran across a news release from the African NGO International Institute of Tropical Agriculture (IITA) about bananas and fertilizer that illustrates the complexity of the agricultural system in the developing world.

IITA calls themselves "Africa's leading research partner in finding solutions for hunger and poverty" and is involved in many activities, including improving agricultural biodiversity, building or supplying seed banks, and investigating biological controls for pests. They receive funding from a wide variety of NGOs and governments, including the Gates Foundation, various national governments, U.S. AID, Rockefeller Foundation, and W.K. Kellogg Foundation.

Rats, cats and food security

by: la motocycliste

Mon Jan 25, 2010 at 13:06:11 PM PST

Preserving Apples

by: la motocycliste

Wed Dec 09, 2009 at 16:05:28 PM PST

Using appropriate technology to help farmers

by: mental_masala

Fri Nov 27, 2009 at 10:48:09 AM PST

The annual report from Michigan Technological University's (MTU) Mechanical Engineering-Engineering Mechanics (ME-EM) department ended up on my desk the other day. Since I know a few alums from that department, I took a look inside. No news about my acquaintances, but I found an interesting story about a collaboration between MTU and the Peace Corps and one of the projects undertaken as part of the program.

MTU has the first and only collaboration like this, where a student takes classes on campus (including classes on field engineering and rural development), works a standard Peace Corps tour of duty (training + two years), and then returns to MTU to write a report and give a oral presentation.  Upon completion of the requirements, he or she receives a master's degree from the ME-EM department. Although MTU is unique in its offer of a degree, the school is not alone in its interest in the developing world: dozens of engineering schools have students who are using their education to help solve problems in the developing world. Engineers Without Borders, for example, has chapters at almost 200 colleges and universities; they also have chapters for working engineers.

The State of Hunger in America

by: Jill Richardson

Thu Nov 19, 2009 at 11:52:43 AM PST

The report also tells how many children are going hungry. Children are often shielded from hunger as they are provided with WIC or school breakfast and lunch, and their parents are eager to give them food even if it means the parent goes hungry. Even still, 506,000 households had children going hungry. That's an increase from 323,000 households in 2007.

As you might expect, households with incomes near or below the poverty line, single parent households, and black or Hispanic households were the most likely to be food insecure. Also, inner city and rural families are more likely to be food insecure than those in the suburbs. The most food insecure region is the South, while the least food insecure region is the Northeast.

Last, many of the food insecure households surveyed used government programs or other charitable programs to help meet their food needs. In the previous month, 55% said they used one or more of the the National School Lunch, Supplemental Nutrition Assistance, or Special Supplemental Nutrition Program for Women, Infants, and Children programs in the previous month.  Also, in the past year, 20% used food pantries and 2.6% ate one or more meals at a community emergency kitchen.

I've pasted the Community Food Security Coalition's response to the report below.

Spending on Food vs. Transportation

by: beany

Tue Jul 21, 2009 at 20:57:44 PM PDT

I found an interesting graphic that broke out the average American's expenditures visually and the numbers were based off of the Department of Labor's and U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics' surveys in 2009. The percentage of expenditures spent on food was 12.4% (7% of food expenditures were consumed at home and 5.4% of food expenses spent outside the home). This 12.4% did not include tobacco (0.7%) or alcoholic beverages (0.9%).

What struck me was the figure on transportation. The average American spent 17.6% on transportation.

Now think about that for a minute...

There are penalties for driving without a insurance, without proper registration and one can't go anywhere without a tank full of the ever rising cost of gasoline.

But there is no penalty for spending too little on food.

And I suppose that is reflected in that pie chart.

Breaking: Gates Foundation Does Something Good

by: Jill Richardson

Wed Jul 08, 2009 at 12:50:45 PM PDT

Worldwatch Institute will assess the impacts of a range of farming techniques on the environment and agricultural productivity. The project will provide stakeholders, including policymakers, farmer and community networks, and international donors, with research on practical solutions for creating sustainable food security.

In other words, they are going to try some sustainable agriculture and see what happens. Nice. Here are the specific things they say they will try:

• Adding nitrogen-fixing plants into crop rotations as a low-cost solution for enriching soils and breaking weed and pest cycles;

• Overcoming freshwater shortages with rain harvesting, efficient irrigation, micro dams, and cover cropping;

• Strengthening local breeding capacity, including the use of farmer-run seed banks and genetic markers of important crop traits;

• Tapping international carbon-credit markets to reward farmers for enriching their soils and planting carbon-sequestering tree crops;

• Involving women farmers in decision-making at all levels.

Better yet? They are partnering with groups like World Neighbors, Ecoagriculture Partners, Heifer International, Rodale Institute, Slow Food International, International Fund for Agricultural Development, and the Global Water Policy Project. Very exciting! The end result of the project will be the Institute's 2011 annual report "World 2011: Nourishing the Planet," which will share the project's findings.

Roundup Ready Sugarbeets

by: Karen Hedwig Backman

Wed Jun 10, 2009 at 10:59:17 AM PDT

Engineered by chemistry industry giant Monsanto...

Farms and the Pitfalls of Regulation

by: DennisP

Wed May 27, 2009 at 09:42:58 AM PDT

Graduate training is a lot like brainwashing.  The student thinks her/his professors are smart and know what they are talking about. They all use models, day after day, and the essence of graduate training is that the students model themselves after the way that their professors think. Do they stop and ask "Is this the right way to think about the real world?"  Of course not.  For one thing, the simple models ARE essential.  The world is complicated and we need to simplify it down to essential elements to begin to understand how it works. And this approach works very well for chemistry and physics, because the systems they try to understand are basically rather simple systems.

Even in economics we have gained a tremendous amount of understanding about how humans behave in response to scarcity and incentives. But social systems are almost infinitely more complicated than physical systems.  There are no fixed parameters we can rely on. What we come out with are at best qualitative descriptions of how humans behave. The only numbers we use are statistics, with fairly large uncertainty bands around our best estimates.

So the student graduates and gets a job that encourages them to use their graduate training - the simple models - on the job, on a "professional" job. After all, a farmer would not want to hire a Ph.D. in economics to work on the farm; the student thinks they deserve a "professional" salary and they probably aren't used to working with their hands, and certainly not as hard as the farmer does.  The student wants to use their brain, not their hands; that's why they went into graduate school, after all, and that's what fascinates them, not the hours under a hot sun or pouring rain.

My point in all this is that they come to think that using simple models is the right and only way to think about the world.  That is just the way their brains have been programmed to work. After all, the models are in many circumstances really productive of a better understanding. And also, many of our grad students are people who have gone from undergrad school directly into grad programs, with no years of work history in the real world.

Another problem is that these models are all mechanistic.  They are just more or less complicated formulas, with a few, simply-interracting variables. Write down the model, plug in the numbers and see what you come up with. They respond the same way every time you run the model.  

Now some economic models are VERY complicated: they have (literally) hundreds of variables and equations. You might say they are so complicated that no one really understands how they work.  Funny thing, though, is that they can only predict the short-run future, say the next quarter or two or three.  But the longer the prediction time horizon, the worse their predictions. Because the world is constantly changing, which means the starting points for prediction in these models are constantly changing, or that their parameter values are constantly changing. So their predictions become worse and worse.  Trying to predict what will happen 2 years from now is virtually impossible, other than in rather general terms.

As Joel Salatin notes, the four key principles of industrialized production are specialized, simplified, routine, and consistency.  This reduces production to essentially a physico-chemcial formula that can be managed by physical scientists (or the MBAs who try to ape them).  

But the real world of working people is so much more complicated than the models of social scientists. The circumstances of every person's life, and of every firm, are unique, that is to say, different from the circumstances of everybody else's life or firm.  But farms are biological systems, and for that matter, so are the millions of small and large businesses.  For them the key principles are diversification, complexity, flexibility, and living (read: randomness).

Now simple rules can be very useful, as per your example, tracking inventories. But even there they are approximations because of mistakes and failures to properly record numbers.  I know, because the other day my wife had to talk with our pharmacist about being shorted some pills she has to take.  And from his records he concluded that he should give her, free, 50% more pills than she had been shorted. So even relatively simple inventory procedures can be wrong.

So these people trained in using simple models - whether economists or lawyers - try to write laws and rules and reg's that cover the many different circumstances of a wide range of firms.  But of course they are using their simple modelling frame of mind that says all farms are farms, they are mechanized systems that can be easily manipulated by changing the rules (the models) that govern them.  They don't recognize that there are many classes of farms when categorized by incomes (revenues or net incomes?), kinds of products, production methods (CAFO's or free range), etc.  And that the health consequences are very different for these different kinds of farms. And so are the economic consequences.

These problems are worsened when you consider the effects of big money: rules written for dairies will typically be written in a way that favors the large dairies at the expense of the small dairy.  Or for fear of health consequences, rules will be written requiring that all milk sold must be pasteurized thru dairies, it cannot be sold directly off farm.

Then consider that the rules must be applied and enforced by regulators, and more especially by in-the-field inspectors.  These people are not necessarily the best trained or educated.  They will have been trained in basic procedures, NOT in flexibility.  They are looking for "specialized, simplified, routine, and consistent" rules and operations.  They will want to minimize the demands on themselves, to keep the rules as applied in the field simple. They cannot handle diversification, complexity, flexibility, and randomness (or chance). And they have the power of God over producers; they can create an hellacious amount of trouble if they want to. Again we have simple rules simply applied, creating difficult obstacles for producers. See the writings of Joel Salatin for many examples.

And too often the benefits of the rules are presumed rather than demonstrated. Physics and chemistry run experiments constantly to demonstrate that their back-of-the-envelope models are right. Social scientists cannot run experiments for the most part. How often are laws or regulations tested by looking carefully at data to see if the rule is yielding the desired results? And then shutting down the regulatory program if it is not improving public health and safety?

While very good arguments can be made for government regulation (I made such arguments for most of my professional life), writing good rules or setting up effective incentive systems can be very difficult for all the above reasons (unfortunately, I did not give equal time to such complications).  You can't write a good rule or set up an incentive system if you don't truly understand the nature of the industry you are trying to regulate. That's why these NAIS hearings are so important; they have to be inundated with comments pointing out the many different circumstances of different farms and the problems the NAIS will pose for them.  

Kenyans Speak Out About World Hunger

by: Jill Richardson

Mon May 11, 2009 at 13:00:00 PM PDT

Producers of genetically modified foods talk a great deal about feeding the world. However, cumulatively, food shortages don't exist in the world. For example, has anybody ever heard the UN World Food Programme complaining about food shortages? It complains about lack of money to buy it. That goes for the hungry. They've got no money.

For Monsanto et al to proclaim from mountains tops about feeding the world, is rubbish. Growing food for sale yes! Creators of the 3-Vitamins maize say their operation is humanitarian.

Presumably, someone somewhere will dish out free seeds to farmers in sub-Sahara Africa. More rubbish.

From an economic point of view, the hungry will remain hungry, with or without genetically modified food. It's up to governments to rid their countries of causes of poverty and to fight monopolies like Monsanto.