Opinions
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...
Is the US ‘post-racial’? Have we actually moved beyond race?
For 18 months, I traveled the country interviewing voters. Not one of them uttered the word. It's not a word my friends or I ever use, so I probably heard it first on cable news or read it in a newspaper. And now everybody's throwing it around more than ever....
Obama’s not black, he is half black and half white
We call him that -- he calls himself that -- because we use dated language and logic. After more than 300 years and much difficult history, we hew to the old racist rule: Part-black is all black. Fifty percent equals a hundred. There's no in-between....
The pitfalls of Africa’s aid addiction
Where I come from in West Africa, we have a saying: "A fool at 40 is a fool forever", and most African countries have now been independent for over 40 years....
Obama needs a Secretary of Food, not a Secretary of Agriculture
As Barack Obama ponders whom to pick as agriculture secretary, he should reframe the question. What he needs is actually a bold reformer in a position renamed “secretary of food.”...
Stopping a global meltdown
When the finance ministers of the world's top economies convened in Washington last month, around the annual meeting of the International Monetary Fund, they developed a remarkably successful international strategy for responding to the financial crisis, which had reached panic proportions in the ma...
The human right to food and globalization
(October 11, 2008) The proclamation of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights by the United Nations General Assembly in 1948 was an essential part of the globalizing vision of the United Nations Charter. This vision was formed during World War II, heavily influenced by the Roosevelt administratio...
Farmer in chief (a letter to the President-elect about food policy)
It may surprise you to learn that among the issues that will occupy much of your time in the coming years is one you barely mentioned during the campaign: food....
The Administration and Congress mobilize to bail out giant financial institutions, but no rescue for the hungry
When social services advocates like me hear that the cost of the federal bailout of the finance sector might top a trillion dollars, we're not quite sure how to process such a massive figure....
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World Hunger Education
Service
P.O. Box 29015
Washington, D.C. 20017 -