Opinions
Growth or safety net? Eradicating extreme poverty is no longer a pipe dream. But first governments must agree on their approach
“I AM not aware of any maternal deaths in the community in the past two or three years,” says the medic on duty at a remote rural clinic in the Terai, Nepal’s lowlands. ...
How to bring farmers markets to the urban poor
For almost 20 years, I’ve sold tomatoes, basil, lettuce, kale and other vegetables at the Takoma Park Farmers Market on Sundays during the summer season. It’s one of several markets my wife helped start at the dawn of the farmers market movement....
America’s sinking middle class
In some respects, 1988 has the feel of an alien, distant era. There was no such thing as the World Wide Web then. The Soviet Union was still around; the Berlin Wall still standing....
The mismeasure of poverty
THE Census Bureau reported yesterday that the poverty rate in America held stable between 2011 and 2012, at about 15 percent. According to the official measure, poverty today is higher than it was in 1973, when it reached a historical low of 11.1 percent....
A new bracero program wiil hurt farmworkers
Most media coverage of immigration today accepts as fact claims by growers that they can't get enough workers to harvest crops. Agribusiness wants a new guest worker program, and complaints of a labor shortage are their justification for it....
Mindlessly gutting food stamps
Among the many scars of the recession, the most intolerable should be the pangs of chronic hunger that still assail a stunning 14.5 percent of the nation’s households, according to the Department of Agriculture’s latest survey. A decade ago, the figure was 11 percent — a group defined as regul...
Dishonor among African election thieves
Zimbabwe had its presidential elections on 31 July 2013. Elections as in rigged. Robert Mugabe, the senile octogenarian and the only president since Zimbabwe gained independence in 1980, ‘won’ for the seventh time by 61 percent of the vote. His Zimbabwe African National Union – Patriotic Front...
Love for labor lost
It wasn’t always about the hot dogs. Originally, believe it or not, Labor Day actually had something to do with showing respect for labor....
The servitude of immigrant guestworkers
THE words “guest workers” and “strike” are not often seen together. Yet twice this summer, members of a group of more than 150 Jamaican guest workers who clean luxury Florida hotels and condos walked off the job....
Let’s drop “feed the world”—a plea to move beyond an unhelpful phrase
After years of participation in public discussions about agriculture, I’ve developed something of an allergy to the catchphrase “feed the world.”...
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