American bureaucrats, seed sellers, food company executives and farmers seek the prizes that are likely to come if the United States ends its trade restrictions against Cuba.
Though just down the road from each other, the country's tech capital and one of the country's largest farming regions are only now starting to work together—with only a little culture clash.
If farmers and tech entrepreneurs can find common ground, our food supply will benefit.
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Food movement advocates and consumers, driven to forge alternatives to industrial agribusiness, have neglected the labor economy that underpins ‘local’ food production,
The new film, Cesar Chavez: History is Made One Step at a Time, doesn't capture the diversity of the farmworkers' movement. "When I was a farmworker, before the strike, we lived in different worlds - the Latino world, the Filipino world, the African-American world and the Caucasian world," Eliseo Medina as interviewed by David Bacon for In These Times.
The movie, Cesar Chavez, documents his life and his role in the 1965 Delano Grape Strike. An aspect of the film is the largely forgotten contributions of Filipino Americans to the farm labor movement. Since the 1920s, when Filipinos first learned to organize into unions in Hawaii, Filipinos were important leaders in organizing farmworkers to fight against unfair working conditions.
Very few people can avoid struggling daily with the avalanche of bad food and the culture and propaganda surrounding it. Near-hysteria or simple answers lead to unachievable situations and nonsolutions. More effective would be shifting the food culture, the relevant business models and public policies - a gradual and concerted movement toward making production and consumption simply "better." That is what the good food movement should be about.
Inventing Internet drones; Farm-fresh data; Big Snoopy is listening; Bay of tweets; NSA database from ACLU; Gender inequality in all media
Driest conditions in 100 years could hit the nation’s food basket hard, affecting half of US fruits and vegetables.
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