Portside

In Africa, there’s a particularly prominent initiative driving corporate agriculture’s agenda — Bill Gates’s Alliance for a Green Revolution in Africa (AGRA). AGRA’s results are devastating for small-scale farmers.

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.

There are no quick fixes to the state’s water woes – and so many impoverished residents remain exposed to unsafe water.

Reader Comments: Return of Fascism; 2/3 Support Wealth Tax; CNN and Democratic Debate; Imminent Danger(?) - Soleimani Murder; Biden and Buttigieg; Boeing; Australia; Spain; Pesticide Use; Chesa Boudin; Missouri Seeks to Burn Books, Jail Librarians;

Concerned citizens should provide their local elected representatives with examples of pesticide reduction policies that have been successful elsewhere and ask them to pass and implement such a policy locally.

Bayer and Monsanto have a long history of collusion to poison the ecosystem for profit. The Trump administration should veto their merger not just to protect competitors but to ensure human and planetary survival.

Citing an alarming increase in the incidence of childhood cancers and neurological disorders, the Pesticide Action Network’s new study concludes pesticide use is having a devastating impact on the health of children in agricultural communities. A child’s growing body is particularly vulnerable to the harms of pesticide exposure. Yet, according to the report, children in agriculture communities are being exposed to a “double dose” of pesticides.

Salon reporter Lindsay Abrams speaks with biologist Tyrone Hayes, subject of a new mini-documentary, and the director, Jonathan Demme. Agrochemical giant Syngenta has followed Hayes, besmirched his reputation, and threatened him and his family’s well being for revealing the potential health dangers of one of our most commonly used herbicides.

Most workers in the U.S. look to the Occupational Safety and Health Administration (OSHA) for standards to protect them from exposure to hazardous chemicals. Protection for farmworkers from pesticides is left to the EPA's authority under the Worker Protection Standard of the Federal Insecticide, Fungicide and Rodenticide Act ("FIFRA"), a standard that is far more lenient than OSHA rules and is fundamentally inadequate.

Midwest farmers douse their fields in chemicals as insects grow resistant to Bt Corn