Opinions
How has the world allowed hunger to grow, rather than reducing hunger by half, the world’s solemn international commitment in 1996?
The Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations in its 1999 report “The state of food insecurity in the world” (FAO 1999) assured us that we had the tools to achieve the World Food Summit target of h...
The art of doing nothing: agricultural policy making in Cuba
(December 3, 2009) The 26 of July 2007 speech by Raúl Castro, the then newly incoming Cuban President, was a breakthrough in the history of public pronouncements by Cuban revolutionary leaders. Probably for the first time, the country’s president acknowledged that the economic system was tied up ...
Rethinking food production for a world of eight billion
Lester Brown is founder and president of the Earth Policy Institute. This article was adapted from Chapter 9, “Feeding Eight Billion Well,” in Lester R. Brown, Plan B 3.0: Mobilizing to Save Civilization (New York: W.W. Norton & Company, 2008), available for free downloading and purc...
Isaias Afewerki and Eritrea: a nation’s tragedy
(July 11, 2009) It is rare that a country's entire condition can be summarized in a single word. That is true of Eritrea today, however, and the word is tragic. There are many indices of this tragedy, among them Eritrea's appalling record in hunger, poverty, human rights and freedom of the press. Bu...
The global financial crisis and its effect on poor people in the United States (shunted aside in times of prosperity and even more in recession)
(May 13, 2009) As everyone knows, there has been a world financial crisis leading to a world economic crisis. This editorial indicates how poor people and others in the Unites States have been affected by the financial and associated economic crisis. Before the financial crisis Since the R...
What do you call someone who eliminates hundreds of thousands of American jobs, deprives millions of adequate health care and nutrition, undermines sc...
What do you call someone who eliminates hundreds of thousands of American jobs, deprives millions of adequate health care and nutrition, undermines schools, but offers a $15,000 bonus to affluent people who flip their houses?...
Unemployed people, without jobs, can’t get help from welfare programs either! State-run welfare programs have been declining in spite of big sp...
Unemployment has been increasing sharply, but so far state welfare programs do not seem to be rising to the challenge....
Stumbling on their sense of entitlement–the business (and government) elite just doesn’t recognize that their exorbitant income levels are...
Barack Obama gets it sometimes, Nancy Pelosi and John Boehner not so much. ...
A food agenda for Obama: now is the time to reinvent America’s farm and food policies
San Francisco — Within hours of former Iowa Gov. Tom Vilsack's nomination last week as Agriculture secretary, websites were humming with well-documented critiques of his affinity for genetically engineered crops, agribusiness giant Monsanto, heavily polluting factory farms, and other Big Farm inte...
The Pentagon is muscling in everywhere–it’s time to stop the mission creep
We no longer have a civilian-led government. It is hard for a lifelong Republican and son of a retired Air Force colonel to say this, but the most unnerving legacy of the Bush administration is the encroachment of the Department of Defense into a striking number of aspects of civilian government. Ou...
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