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 people that food policy must stay front…
Category: Economics
Four ways COVID-19 will change food systems and food security
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 for possible outcomes. These open…
Whatever Happened to Election Debates on Economics?
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 electoral politics of the…
The Pillars of Cheap Food are Cracking
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 imports of cheap fossil fuels,…
Are We Seeing the End of Supermarkets?
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 add 40 new supercenters to…
SLOWMONEY
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. For social investment promoter Woody Tasch, however, the crash was an aha moment that led him to take his stand: the buck slows here. Modeling his efforts…
The All-But-Secret Trade Deal Between Canada And Europe Needs A Close Look
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” deal covering Canada and 26…
New Book Explains Why Big Cities Back Hometown Food
As a local food enthusiast, I often wonder: why is it that places most removed in their landscape from farms, most outward-turning in their economy, most cosmopolitan in their culture, most multicultural in their backgrounds, most futuristic in their outlook — North American cities such as San Francisco, Seattle, Vancouver, Chicago, Toronto, New York and Boston — are the very…
Labor Day Lesson: Coalition of Immokalee Workers Turn Tables For Migrant Workers
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 some 4000 members, to respond…
Agro-Ecology Is the Oldest and Newest Form of Bio-Mimicry: Count the F Words
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 peasant and Indigenous styles of…