Musings on sustainable food systems, agriculture vs. agroecology, and more!
We are all aware of inflation and have surely heard older relatives’ tales of paying 10 cents for ice cream, a nickel for a bag of sweets or 1 mark for a bar of chocolate. The good old times with ridiculously cheap prices (mind you, from today’s perspective) often cause heavy sighs of nostalgia. But … Continue reading Chocolate: the German Gold Standard
If you were asked to design an efficient, responsive, economical system to deliver food aid to poor people in a hunger crisis due to food price spikes, how would you do it? a) Buy grain from your country’s farmers, put it on big boats, ship it across an ocean, hire some trucks, drive the trucks … Continue reading Shift in U.S. Food Aid Policy At The Horizon?!
I recently read this brief history of the use of nitrogen fertilizer, and it was so interesting to learn more about this crucial agricultural input! In my agricultural economics classes, we often use nitrogen as an input for our examples, so it was good to beef up my knowledge about it. Maybe you will discover … Continue reading 10 Things I Didn't Know About Nitrogen Fertilizer
[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?feature=player_embedded&v=lcSL2yN39JM#at=867] If you ever feel powerless or overwhelmed by the challenges we are facing to reform our food system, just watch the video above. Steve Ritz, an educator from the poorest congressional district of America, the South Bronx in New York, talks with contagious enthusiasm and energy about how he founded the “Green Bronx Machine“. His … Continue reading The Power of the Green Bronx Machine
Sometimes, maybe we are just expecting too much of people. Over the past years, food nutrition labeling has become all the rage and research has put great emphasis on the question whether food labeling (especially related to caloric and fat content) makes a difference in purchasing decisions. The results are mixed, with some studies finding (small) … Continue reading Do You Understand What You Eat?
Environmental economics might be one of the most curious and demanding disciplines, since it tries to combine two fields at the opposite ends of the ideological spectrum – environmentalists on the one hand and economists on the other, the one trying to preserve every last bug for the benefits of biodiversity while the others coolly … Continue reading Is Taxing Meat a Viable Green Policy Option?
Click here to access the interactive map! After looking up some information for yesterday’s post, I realized that the International Food Policy Research Institute has a great visualization tool of their last World Hunger Index report online. Click on the country of your choice to find out where it ranks on the Index and to … Continue reading A Map of Hunger
Here is a mind-boggling Sunday statistic for you: India is estimated to have more undernourished people than all of Sub-Saharan Africa combined. I had to re-read that sentence three times before really grasping its consequences. I think especially in academia, we are now so used to think of India as an “emerging economy”, a “model … Continue reading India On the Verge to Legally Implement Right to Food
Coffee is a vital crop in Burundi. It accounts for 60-80% of the country’s export revenues, and 55% of the population is dependent on coffee growing for their livelihoods. Thus, a reform of the coffee sector could make a huge difference for this country’s development – it currently ranks as the third-poorest nation in the … Continue reading Coffee Reform in Burundi: Same Old, Same Old SAP?
One of the first writers that got me (as so many others, I presume) interested in food politics was Michael Pollan. His book “In Defense of Food” , along with “The Omnivore’s Dilemma” and “A Botany of Desire”, really flipped the switch in my mind on what kind of politics I wanted to specialize in. Well, today … Continue reading The Biography of a Cow