"Thousands from Cancún"–Mass March Planned by Via Campesina Against U.N. Climate Talks

<script type="text/javascript" src="http://www.democracynow.org/embed_blog_v1/300/2010/12/7/thousands_from_cancun_mass_march_planned_by_via_campesina_against_un_climate_talks"></script>

Obama Authorizes Settlements for Native Americans, Black Farmers

And President Obama has signed into law a pair of multi-billion-dollar settlements resolving longstanding lawsuits over the mismanagement of Native American land trusts and discrimination against African-American farmers. Under the Cobell settlement, $3.4 billion will be paid out to more than 300,000 Native Americans to settle claims over unpaid royalties on seized lands. African-American farmers will receive just more than $1.1 billion under the Pigford II settlement for having been systemically denied aid and loans by the U.S. Department of Agriculture.

Down With the Clown - Retire Ronald.org

It was a seminal moment. For the first time, breaking all convention, Ronald turned to the TV cameras and addressed himself to his viewers directly. It had never been done before, and it set off a revolution the consequences of which we still struggle to fight. When Ronald Reagan ended his presidential debate with Jimmy Carter in 1979 with “Are you better off than you were four years ago?”, his media savvy changed mass politics forever.

But long before that, another Ronald messed with mass communications no less indelibly, paving the way for today’s politicians and pundits. Appropriately, the first Ronald was a clown. In 1963, sixteen years before Reagan’s fateful piece to camera, Ronald McDonald broke every rule in advertising when he turned to the lens and stunned children by speaking to them directly, saying:

“Here I am kids. Hey, isn’t watching TV fun? Especially when you got delicious McDonald’s hamburgers. I know we’re going to be friends too cause I like to do everything boys and girls like to do. Especially when it comes to eating those delicious McDonald’s hamburgers.”

San Francisco Council Votes to Ban "Happy Meal"

And San Francisco is poised to become the first city to ban the high-calorie children’s "Happy Meal" served at the McDonald’s fast-food chain. The San Francisco Board of Supervisors has voted to bar restaurants from giving toys with meals containing excessive fat and sugar. Under the rule, restaurants would also have to serve fruits and vegetables alongside any meals with toys. The measure awaits a full vote next week. It would go into effect as early as December 2011.

see also "Down with the Clown"

While Warning About Fat, US Pushes Cheese Sales

Domino’s Pizza was hurting early last year. Domestic sales had fallen, and a survey of big pizza chain customers left the company tied for the worst tasting pies.

Then help arrived from an organization called Dairy Management. It teamed up with Domino’s to develop a new line of pizzas with 40 percent more cheese, and proceeded to devise and pay for a $12 million marketing campaign.

Consumers devoured the cheesier pizza, and sales soared by double digits. “This partnership is clearly working,” Brandon Solano, the Domino’s vice president for brand innovation, said in a statement to The New York Times.

But as healthy as this pizza has been for Domino’s, one slice contains as much as two-thirds of a day’s maximum recommended amount of saturated fat, which has been linked to heart disease and is high in calories.

Time To End War Against The Earth - Vandana Shiva

When we think of wars in our times, our minds turn to Iraq and Afghanistan. But the bigger war is the war against the planet. This war has its roots in an economy that fails to respect ecological and ethical limits - limits to inequality, limits to injustice, limits to greed and economic concentration.

A handful of corporations and of powerful countries seeks to control the earth's resources and transform the planet into a supermarket in which everything is for sale. They want to sell our water, genes, cells, organs, knowledge, cultures and future.

The continuing wars in Afghanistan, Iraq and onwards are not only about "blood for oil". As they unfold, we will see that they are about blood for food, blood for genes and biodiversity and blood for water.

  

The war mentality underlying military-industrial agriculture is evident from the names of Monsanto's herbicides - ''Round-Up'', ''Machete'', ''Lasso''. American Home Products, which has merged with Monsanto, gives its herbicides similarly aggressive names, including ''Pentagon'' and ''Squadron''.This is the language of war. Sustainability is based on peace with the earth.

Putting Food on the Table - Noam Chomsky

Putting food on the Table (link)

Noam Chomsky: Patenting life and stealing from women

Consider our world

It is difficult to fathom, but every day the population of our planet is growing and so is the amount of CO2 we are emitting.  BreathingEarth helps you visualize this incredible reality.  There are thousands that are born who face a inevitable existence of hunger, and thousands who are dying from starvation.    

Calculate your ecological footprint

http://footprint.wwf.org.uk/

How many planets do you need to continue living the way you do?  

It Goes against our nature; but the left has to start asserting its own values.

The progressive attempt to appeal to self-interest has been a catastrophe. Empathy, not expediency, must drive our campaigns

So here we are, forming an orderly queue at the slaughterhouse gate. The punishment of the poor for the errors of the rich, the abandonment of universalism, the dismantling of the shelter the state provides: apart from a few small protests, none of this has yet brought us out fighting.

The acceptance of policies that counteract our interests is the pervasive mystery of the 21st century. In the US blue-collar workers angrily demand that they be left without healthcare, and insist that millionaires pay less tax. In the UK we appear ready to abandon the social progress for which our ancestors risked their lives with barely a mutter of protest. What has happened to us?

The answer, I think, is provided by the most interesting report I have read this year. Common Cause, written by Tom Crompton of the environment group WWF, examines a series of fascinating recent advances in the field of psychology. It offers, I believe, a remedy to the blight that now afflicts every good cause from welfare to climate change.

Progressives, he shows, have been suckers for a myth of human cognition he labels the enlightenment model. This holds that people make rational decisions by assessing facts. All that has to be done to persuade people is to lay out the data: they will then use it to decide which options best support their interests and desires.

Solving Africa's Hunger: The Industrial Free, Small Ecological Farming Approach

Africa is hungry - 240 million people are undernourished. Now, for the first-time, small African farmers have been properly consulted on how to solve the problem of feeding sub-Saharan Africa. Their answers appear to directly repudiate a massive international effort to launch an African Green Revolution funded in large part by the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation.

Instead of new hybrid seeds, chemical fertilisers and pesticides, family farmers in West Africa said they want to use local seeds, avoid spending precious cash on chemicals and most importantly to direct public agricultural research to meet their needs, according to a multi-media publication released on World Food Day (Oct. 16).

"There is a clear vision from these small farmers. They are rejecting the approach of the Alliance for a Green Revolution in Africa," said report co-author Michel Pimbert of the International Institute for Environment and Development (IIED), a non-profit research institute based in London.

"These were true farmer-led assessment where small farmers and other food producers listened and questioned agricultural and other experts and then came up with their own recommendations," Pimbert told IPS.

Serving the wrong master

"Food and agriculture policy and research tend to ignore the values, needs, knowledge and concerns of the very people who provide the food we all eat — and often serve instead powerful commercial interests such as multinational seed and food retailing companies," he said.

The United Nations Special Rapporteur on the Right to Food, Olivier De Schutter, backs the need for a fundamental shift in food and agricultural research to make it more democratic and accountable to society.

FDA Barring Food Makers from Advertising Products as GMO-Free

The FDA meanwhile appears to be enforcing a policy of barring food producers from trumpeting that their products don’t contain genetically modified ingredients. According to the Washington Post, the FDA has sent a "flurry of enforcement letters" to companies that have advertised GMO-free products on their labels. The warnings come on top of existing policy not to require food makers to disclose if their products do contain GMOs. Congress member Dennis Kucinich said, "This, to me, raises questions about whose interest the FDA is protecting. They are clearly protecting industry, and not the public."

How Factory Farms Make You Sick

Factory farms makes you sick. Let us count the ways. Just last week, more than half a billion eggs recalled. 

Why? Salmonella poisoning.  More than 1,300 people sick.

Just last week, a recall of more than 380,000 pounds of deli meat products distributed nationwide to Wal-Mart stores.

Why? Possible contamination with the bacterium Listeria monocytogenes.

The bacteria can cause listeriosis – a rare but potentially deadly disease.

Move over Animal Farm.

Here comes Animal Factory.

Haitian Farmers Commit to Burning Monsanto Hybrid Seeds

"A new earthquake" is what peasant farmer leader Chavannes Jean-Baptiste of the Peasant Movement of Papay (MPP) called the news that Monsanto will be donating 60,000 seed sacks (475 tons) of hybrid corn seeds and vegetable seeds, some of them treated with highly toxic pesticides. The MPP has committed to burning Monsanto's seeds, and has called for a march to protest the corporation's presence in Haiti on June 4, for World Environment Day.

In an open letter sent of May 14, Chavannes Jean-Baptiste, the Executive Director of MPP and the spokesperson for the National Peasant Movement of the Congress of Papay (MPNKP), called the entry of Monsanto seeds into Haiti "a very strong attack on small agriculture, on farmers, on biodiversity, on Creole seeds..., and on what is left our environment in Haiti."1 Haitian social movements have been vocal in their opposition to agribusiness imports of seeds and food, which undermines local production with local seed stocks. They have expressed special concern about the import of genetically modified organisms (GMOs).

For now, without a law regulating the use of GMOs in Haiti, the Ministry of Agriculture rejected Monsanto's offer of Roundup Ready GMO seeds. In an email exchange, a Monsanto representative assured the Ministry of Agriculture that the seeds being donated are not GMO.

Student Food Initiative:

       The Student Food Initiative (SFI) is a collective of students at Juniata College who—through assorted opinions and tactics—collaborate out of an interest and concern for the state and future of our current
food system.

We realize the danger of eating more than thinking.

Therefore, we are invested in exploring, communicating, and acting for a just, connected and responsible food system. In order for us to engage in the process of influencing the workings of the food system, we must consider all spheres: personal, local, national and global.

We ask questions that challenge the paradoxes of our world: the simultaneous existence of 1 billion overweight people and 1 billion starving people.

We try to connect the relationships between the worsening state of our environment and the production, distribution and consumption of food.

We realize the current food system was born out of a history of global inequality and exploitation that has continued, and changes only in form.

 We are conscious of the increasing corporate control over the majority of the food system and its institutions.

 We recognize the inhumane practices of major agricultural industries: the widespread use of harmful poisons and misinformation, the exploitation of small farmers, and the enslavement of farm workers.

We emphasize the fact that most of the farmers in the world are women and coincidentally the most economically and physically vulnerable group.

We entertain the complexity of our current food situation, which must now provide for a growing population, function within a globalized market, and satisfiy a consumptive culture.

We bare this knowledge with serious responsibility, argument and research.

Through our actions, we hope to not only minimize our impact on the environment and human beings, but also to actively supplement and support a new way of producing, living, and consuming.

We confidently support new local, organic, low-input food systems and stand boldly in solidarity with the acceleration of food sovereignty.

We are interested in pursuing and creating open dialogues and debate to learn about new ways of improving our relationship with food and the people who are involved at all levels of the food system.

 For if “we are what we eat,” we would like to know what it is that we “are.”