Author: WHES

South American commodity boom drives deforestation and land conflicts

BOGOTA, Colombia — A commodity boom has helped pull millions out of poverty across South America over the past decade. It has also unleashed a new scramble for oil, minerals and cropland that is accelerating deforestation and fueling a new wave of land conflicts from Colombia to Chile.

2015: The year Republicans strike back at Obama food policies

The Obama administration is becoming increasingly involved in what Americans put on their dinner plates and in their cereal bowls, from requiring school children to be served fruit to eliminating trans fats in doughnuts. But the new Republican Congress is already laying the groundwork to push back in 2015.

Hard winter for California farm workers

In October in California’s farmworker towns, unemployment rates begin to rise when the harvests end. In Coachella, not far from the wealth of Palm Springs, one of every eight workers has no job. In Delano, where the United Farm Workers was born in the grape strike 50 years ago, it’s one of every four, as it is in other small towns of the southern San Joaquin Valley. In the coastal farming towns of Santa Maria and Lompoc, the unemployment rate is 13.8 and 15.5 percent, respectively. In the Imperial Valley, next to the Mexican border, the unemployment rate is over 26 percent in Brawley and Calexico.

The college trap that keeps people poor (Series)

FORT WORTH — Chelsey Stone had already escaped so many of the traps that keep poor children in poverty for life. She recalls begging neighbors for dinner when her mother sold their food stamps for drug money. She slept on the trampoline outside when the heroin showed up and her mom locked the door and the binges began. When she rebelled as a teenager, it was with poster board: She plastered her house with bright signs warning, “Do Not Throw Needles Away Here.