Portside

Perhaps this pandemic’s devastation will promote a debate on the failures of our ragged social safety net.

Healing the dual miseries of COVID-19 and economic insecurity requires relief sufficient to ensure that all individuals, their families and their loved ones can live through this pandemic. The time to go big is now.

With one of five American families living with food insecurity, the new executive orders are greeted as 'the most significant anti-hunger actions in modern times.'

A recent survey on workers and learners in Los Angeles County by the UCLA Labor Center found that “52% have been laid off, terminated, or furloughed from their jobs due to the pandemic.” It is very hard to study with many insecurities in your life.

U.S. farmers say a crisis of farm profitability and increase in food scarcity may be looming, short of major changes in the industrial agriculture system.

A Post-Coronavirus economy can no longer afford to put the Pentagon first. As it turns out, creating jobs through Pentagon spending is among the least effective ways to rebuild the economy.

Before the pandemic and recession, California’s food banks were struggling with an overwhelming need, due primarily to housing costs and large undocumented population. But food banks, meant to be safety nets, fear the worst may be yet to come.

Some activists say the World Bank itself is partly to blame for the conjoined problems of climate change, food insecurity and desertification, by pushing its agenda of large-scale agriculture and mono-crop plantations on the developing world.

The U.S. Congress is fighting over how much to cut food assistance to needy families. Everyone knows that women and their children are the poorest people in America, but strangely, the faces of women have disappeared from the debate and have been absorbed into abstract “needy families.”