Musings on sustainable food systems, agriculture vs. agroecology, and more!
Note: I’m back! A year-long PhD-thesis-writing, 4-classes-teaching, sleep-deprived hiatus later, I’m back to comment on pressing issues in food policy and governance as they come my way. First up: a topic dear to my heart – the recurrence of abysmally low coffee prices. This week, coffee Twitter was all up in arms. Futures prices for … Continue reading The Lowest Coffee Price in a Decade
“In the face of a rapidly overheating climate, collapsing fisheries, degraded soil, depleted water resources, vanishing species, and other challenges directly related to agriculture, we can no longer afford to pursue a flawed accounting system.” What is the real cost of food? Does the price we pay reflect the environmental impacts, the public health implications, … Continue reading TEEB AgFood: Calculating the Real Price of Food
I am an unabashed New York Times enthusiast. It’s the only news source that I subscribe to, and its reporting is generally excellent. Thus, once a topic close to my heart is picked up by the NY Times, I rejoice because I look forward to a balanced, informed and insightful analysis. Alas, this is not … Continue reading Imagining A World Without Growth – But Seriously!
Español Ohhhhh ecological economics, where to start… At the conference there were more than 100 different sessions with 3 – 5 presentations each, so it was actually pretty overwhelming to figure out where to go and who to listen to. Plus, one of the great attractions, but also of the main complications is the interdisciplinarity … Continue reading Enough Is Enough [ISEE recap 1]
¡Hola, amig@s! Anybody grilling now at the height of summer? Then the first article might be interesting for you. In fact, all of today’s haul is extremely interesting – there doesn’t seem to be any lag in food news due to summer/vacation time! This is what I was reading today: Mark Bittman (or rather, his … Continue reading Burgers, Cafeterias and Food Waste!
In my agricultural history class, we talked about the vast differences in farming between regions, which is also reflected in the average farm size in different areas. This motivated me to go into more detail about where farm holdings are the smallest or largest, and to do some research on reasons behind it. This is … Continue reading Fun Facts About Farm Size
For my new class, I was assigned the reading “The Limits to Growth: Malthus and the Classical Economists” by E. A. Wrigley. It’s a great primer into the worries classical economists had about the state of the economy, growth and population dynamics, and was interesting enough that I decided to look further into the issue. … Continue reading What Did Malthus Really Say?
Well, after another couple of hours of editing (why does the final version always take so long to get consistent? And why did we nearly forget to include our most important source in the bibliography? Questions…) I finally sent off our Cost Benefit Analysis project to our teacher and thought that since my friend and … Continue reading Drilling in the Rainforest – Is it Worth It? Our Yasuni CBA
You guys. This is one of these speeches where I just want to yell “hear, hear!” after every single sentence – and it is all the more remarkable where Dr. M Jahi Chappell, the director of agroecology and agricultural policy for the Institute for Agriculture and Trade Policy, made this speech: at the World Food … Continue reading "Science ≠ Production, and Production ≠ Food Security" – A Message to the World Food Prize
Today the recipients of the Nobel Memorial Prize in Economic Sciences were announced – three American professors that did important work on predicting stock and bond market prices. While that all sounds fascinating (I’m only partially being ironic here), it drew my attention to a question – what is the importance of agricultural and environmental … Continue reading On (Alternative) Nobel Prizes
