food
Capitalism and food: Let them eat junk
An interview with Rob Albritton
March 2010 -- Rob Albritton’s Let Them Eat Junk: How Capitalism Creates Hunger and Obesity (2009), published by Arbeiter Ring Press in Canada and Pluto Press in the UK, offers a welcome and urgently needed analysis of “how the profit fixation of capital has led us deeply into a dangerously unsustainable system of food provision, a system that totally fails when it comes to distributive justice and to human and environmental health” (p. 201). His analysis takes us inside capitalism and shows how its “deep structures” manage our agricultural and food systems in irrational ways.
Socialist Project’s Relay magazine recently asked John Simoulidis to interview Robert Albritton about his book and current global struggles to address the failures of our agriculture/food system. Posted at Links International Journal of Socialist Renewal with permission.
Zimbabwe: Despite Mugabe's opportunism, radical land reform is necessary
United States: The rise of bagel capitalism
By Harry Targ
Declaration of the Africa People's Movement on Climate Change
Confronting the climate crisis: Preparing for Copenhagen and beyond
Nairobi, Kenya,
By Tony Iltis
July 18, 2009 -- US President Barack Obama used his African heritage in his July 11 speech to the Ghanaian parliament in Accra as justification for proceeding to blame Africa’s problems on its own people.
He acknowledged historical Western crimes, but denied that ongoing suffering is caused by the current policies of the West. Western aggression and exploitation, Obama claims, are things of the past. A July 15 Los Angeles Times editorial said: “It was the same message about good governance they’d heard from presidents [Bill] Clinton and George W. Bush. No new programs or initiatives for Africa. But just because the message is old doesn't mean it's not worth repeating.”
Obama played up his own ancestry to appeal to his audience. He referred to the indignities his grandfather suffered under British colonial rule in Kenya, including being briefly imprisoned during the independence struggle of the 1950s and ’60s.
G8 and Africa: Some give, plenty of take
By Yash Tandon
World farmers’ alliance Vía Campesina challenges food profiteers (excerpt from new pamphlet)
Review by John Riddell
La Vía Campesina: Globalization and the Power of Peasants by Annette Aurélie Desmarais. Fernwood Publishing, 2007.
May 31, 2009 -- The neoliberal assault that has driven labour into retreat over the last two decades has also sparked the emergence of a peasants’ international, La Vía Campesina. Based in 56 countries across five continents, this alliance has mounted a sustained and spirited defence of peasant cultivation, community and control of food production.
Annette Desmarais’s book on La Vía Campesina has given us a probing and perceptive account of the world peasant movement’s origins, outlook and activities. (”La Vía Campesina” means “Peasant Path” or “Peasant Way”. See “Peasants or Farmers?” at the end of this article.)
Mexico's Revolutionary Workers Party (PRT) statement on swine flu epidemic
Statement by the Revolutionary Workers Party (PRT)
April 30, 2009 -- The health emergency brought about by the swine flu epidemic has important political and social repercussions, in addition to consequences for public health, that need to be explained in the midst of the confusion and distrust that contradictory governmental versions generate. It is also necessary to open the way to scientific information, truth and political criticism.
Australian agriculture -- a carbon-neutral future?
By Renfrey Clarke
May 8, 2009 -- With its belching cows and giant diesel-powered tractors, the farm sector is widely understood as an important contributor to Australia’s impact on climate change. Just how important, however, is not often recognised.
In its latest National Greenhouse Gas Inventory, for the year 2006, the Australian Greenhouse Office calculates the share of national greenhouse gas emissions coming from agriculture and stock-raising at 15.6 per cent, expressed as carbon dioxide equivalent. Though substantial, this figure is much less than the 49.9 per cent attributed to “stationary energy”, which consists mainly of power station emissions.
But scientists are increasingly recognising the figure of 15.6 per cent for the farm sector as misleading –- and only partly because the official greenhouse data count the tractors and other farm machinery under the headings of stationary energy.
Mike Davis: Capitalism and the flu
Agri-biz at root of swine flu? Real News Network report, April 30, 2009.
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April 27, 2009 -- Socialist Worker (USA) -- Mike Davis, whose 2006 book The Monster at Our Door warned of the threat of a global bird flu pandemic, explains how globalised agribusiness set the stage for a frightening outbreak of the swine flu in Mexico.
