Congress is quietly trying to finalize the farm bill. Surprise, surprise: Negotiations are beset by clashing, and likely irreconcilable, House and Senate visions for this omnibus legislation that shapes US agriculture/hunger policy for 5 years
How a Chicago collective approaches a worker-owned farm through an intersectional and holistic lens that understands that our community’s issues can be addressed in part by sustainable farming and food justice educational programs.
Populism is an ideological chameleon—often supplemented with whatever authoritarian, nationalist or socialist inclinations held by those leading the particular movement—populist victories can (and often do) manifest in all manner of terrible ways around the world. Other times, they change the political realm for the better.
Sixty miles south of the Arizona border, the devastation from a toxic spill has led to an epochal battle between a transnational mining conglomerate and an alliance of miners and farmers.
Inventing Internet drones; Farm-fresh data; Big Snoopy is listening; Bay of tweets; NSA database from ACLU; Gender inequality in all media
FARM subsidies were much more sensible when they began eight decades ago, in 1933, at a time when more than 40 percent of Americans lived in rural areas. Farm incomes had fallen by about a half in the first three years of the Great Depression. In that context, the subsidies were an anti-poverty program. Now, though, the farm subsidies serve a quite different purpose.
Protesters are levying a broad range of concerns about public policies that devastate Colombia's workers, indigenous, and Afro-Colombian communities. The US-Colombia Free Trade Agreement has forced small farmers to compete with subsidized US products, made them more vulnerable to market fluctuations, and eroded their protections and social safety nets through the implementation of neoliberal policies domestically.
While the TPP is in many ways like NAFTA and other existing trade agreements, it appears that the corporations have learned from previous experience. They are carefully crafting the TPP to insure that citizens of the involved countries have no control over food safety, what they will be eating, where it is grown, the conditions under which food is grown and the use of herbicides and pesticides.
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