Where Local Sustainable Food Policy Meets Action
UN’s Food and Agriculture Organization Calls Food and Hunger a “Crisis Within a Crisis” of COVID-19 Food often suffers from the problem that it can’t get no respect as a public policy issue. But the United Nations’ Food and Agriculture Organization has been quick off the mark to produce a flurry of food-related briefings reminding [...]
It’s too early for precise answers to questions about the coronavirus pandemic’s long-term impacts on the ways food is produced, processed, distributed, eaten, recycled and appreciated. But my experience managing food policy issues in Toronto for one of the world’s leading city-based public health departments gives me some searching questions that can help us prepare [...]
Dangerously low levels of sustainability in the food industry may skyrocket to the top of the to-do and worry-about lists of business executives, government officials, and perhaps even environmentalists and shoppers. Late last month, KPMG, one of the top professional services companies in the world, released a report called Expect the Unexpected: Building business value in a [...]
Tears have been wiped dry, major resignations are in, and thoughts about ways of overcoming disproportionate misrepresentation allowing Harpers Conservatives to turn 39 per cent of all votes into a majority government are in the hopper. But the sleeper issue on the political agenda continues to doze. One reason why all pundits are talking about [...]
The worldwide price level of food is taking a great leap upward for the second time in less than five years. My bet is that this food price hike will match a rise in oil prices for wrenching impact on geopolitics, especially as the two are intimately connected. Food cannot be fertilized and shipped without [...]
I grew up with the habit of Thursday nights as the time when family shopped together at the local supermarket, and I always assumed, for good or ill, that supermarkets were permanent. It’s now clear that old style super-markets are on their way out. Beginning this month, Wal-Mart Canada kicks off its one-year agenda to [...]
A lot of people blame fast buck artists for bringing on the 2008 economic crash, but few have yet looked to slow money artistry to get the economy moving in a better direction.
Robert Assange need to be free so he can create some wikileaks buzz around all-but-secret but all-but- done trade deals that will lock Canada into policies that ban most of the tools needed to protect a local and sustainable food supply, no matter who wins the next federal elections. Discussions leading to an all-embracing “bilateral” [...]
With Labor Day just a few weeks away and badly in need of an event to celebrate, an historic agreement was signed on August 24. Written in legalese, the statement commits Sodexo, a gigantic global food service company employing some 500,000 workers to partner with the Coalition of Immokalee Workers (CIW), a tiny organization of [...]
Imitation is the highest form of flattery, and the intricate form of food production practiced by peasants through much of Asia and South America still express that flattery in relation to Nature. In the Global North, all food production except hunting and gathering is commonly referred to as agriculture. But in the Global South, the [...]
Every minute of the thousand minutes of meeting time by the G20 muckety mucks costs Canadian taxpaying hosts a million dollars, critics complain. But the Return on Investment could be as high as 557 to 1 if G20 governments gathered in Toronto follow their own pledge from last year’s meet in Pittsburgh, which pledged to [...]
President Barack Obama’s efforts at reforming the U.S. approach to medical care won’t win many imitators in other countries. Indeed, he’s likely to be upstaged in global health debates by First Lady Michelle Obama’s campaign against childhood obesity. Lady Obama launched a Let’s Move anti-obesity campaign on February 9, and is already catching up with [...]
March, when next season’s crops are due to be planted in Haiti, is less than a month away. For the tens of thousands who have left the rubble and despair of Haiti’s capital to find shelter in some 500 camps throughout the countryside, it could be their chance to plant a new life for themselves [...]