It's too bad so many people are falling into poverty at a time when it’s almost illegal to be poor. You won’t be arrested for shopping in a Dollar Store, but if you are truly, deeply, in-the-streets poor, you’re well advised not to engage in any of the biological necessities of life — like sitting, sleeping, lying down or loitering. [...more]
In writing Diet for a Small Planet, I learned one simple truth: Hunger is not caused by a scarcity of food but a scarcity of democracy. But that realization was only the beginning, for then I had to ask: What does a democracy look like that enables citizens to have a real voice in securing life's essentials? Does it exist anywhere? Is it possible or a pipe dream? With hunger on the rise here in the United States-one in 10 of us is now turning to food stamps-these questions take on new urgency. [...more]
Debaters on population usually take two sides: either they see it as a huge problem facing humanity, or that it's a non-issue. They're both wrong. This polarized debate has generated lots of heat and little light over the last half-century. According to the combatants, population growth is either the biggest problem facing humanity, or it is a complete non-issue. [...more]
How to turn a lawn into lunch, swap preserves, glean, boost your food security, live the good life. [...more]
Petroleum supplies slowly dwindle as demand rapidly soars. So the prices of gasoline and oil that supply modern societies with their industrial production of food will go up, up, and away. A radically different future than the oil-energized twentieth century is dawning. [...more]
Jared Diamond is no doom-and-gloomer; he's a Pulitzer Prize winning author of thoughtful, carefully researched books about the rise and fall of societies. Diamond is best known for Collapse: How Societies Choose to Fail or Succeed and Guns, Germs, and Steel: The Fates of Human Societies, both of which are among my top-recommended books of all time. [...more]
Taking up valuable land and growing edible crops for biofuels poses a dilemma: Is it ethical to produce inefficient renewable energies at the expense of an already malnourished population? David Pimentel and his colleagues from Cornell University in New York highlight the problems linked to converting a variety of crops into biofuels. Not only are these renewable energies inefficient, they are also economically and environmentally costly and nowhere near as productive as projected. [...more]
Rapidly warming climate is likely to seriously alter crop yields in the tropics and subtropics by the end of this century and, without adaptation, will leave half the world's population facing serious food shortages, new research shows. [...more]
The combined impact of low economic growth and decreased investments in agriculture could cause major increases in malnutrition in developing countries, according to new analysis by the International Food Policy Research Institute (IFPRI). The result could be 16 million more undernourished children in 2020. [...more]
Food prices have soared over the past year. One might think that this would provide a welcome boost to the incomes of the world’s poorest people, most of whom are farmers and farm workers. But it doesn’t work that way, as Raj Patel explains [...more]
