Musings on sustainable food systems, agriculture vs. agroecology, and more!
I just finished my exams on Thursday and am going to be travelling to the airport this morning to explore Bulgaria and Romania with my friend! The prospect makes me feel like this approximately: [youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?feature=player_embedded&v=rDvnUiO-LAk] I have prepared a couple of posts that will go up while I am gone, though it won’t be as often … Continue reading Holiday Break!
Cuba is such a funny case: according to this article, agroecological farming principles are the norm, more than half of its farms use organic production methods, and it is a leader in urban agriculture – but yet, most of these developments are less the result of a coordinated policy shift than a survival mechanism that … Continue reading Cuba At The Crossroads
The challenge with large governments (such as the USA’s) is that they produce huge packages of legislature that only few individuals can understand in its entirety. Thus, everybody focuses on what they are interested or specialized in, and there is the potential to slip things in that legislators aren’t aware of or don’t understand the … Continue reading What Is The "Monsanto Rider"?
Recently, I discovered (via my friend Tereza’s blogpost) an awesome Czech invention that supports self-sufficiency, community and bread-baking in the form of a sourdough map! In order to make sourdough bread, you need to make a pre-ferment (also called starter or lévain), basically a mix of flour and water, which you then expose to the air … Continue reading Sourdough mapping
In my Sustainability Economics class, we also talked about sustainable food choices (one of my favorite topics!) and the nuts and bolts of doing a Life Cycle Analysis of a particular product or diet “from cradle to grave”. Life Cycle Analyses try to assess the environmental impacts of certain behavior, for example the consumption of … Continue reading Can the Mediterranean Diet Save the Planet?
In preparation for my Sustainability Economics exam on Thursday, I decided to combine the necessary with the fun and write about a concept that I will hopefully remember come Thursday – the Planetary Boundary framework championed by Johan Rockström from the Stockholm Resilience Centre. Rockström starts with arguing that the planet has moved into the … Continue reading Transgressing the Earth's Boundaries
“The food crisis can only be conquered with even greater intensification.” “A new ‘Green Revolution’ to match that of South-East Asia is needed to improve yields further.” “Organic farming is a cute idea, but it will never replicate the yields of conventional agri-business.” Who hasn’t heard those arguments? And felt defeated by the challenge to … Continue reading Research Breakthrough: Less Inputs = More Yields?!
We may live without poetry, music and art; We may live without conscience and live without heart; We may live without friends; we may live without books; But civilized man can not live without cooks. He may live without books, what is knowledge but grieving? He may live without hope, what is hope but deceiving? … Continue reading We may live wit…
Recently, whenever you hear about land grabbing, it’s almost automatically linked to foreign direct investment of either big companies or foreign government enterprises that want to secure their own food security. Over the condemnation of the “neo-colonial” foreigners, it’s easy to forget that land grabbing can happen just as easily within countries, setting up urban … Continue reading Vietnam: Where Land-Grabbing goes Local
[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?feature=player_embedded&v=U5e2NB6U9dw] This is a really enjoyable clip describing how successful development work can work: these women in The Gambia traditionally only had access to unproductive, degraded land, since the men were working in the more fertile areas. Yet, the women are the ones that bear the responsibility to feed their families and provide extra income … Continue reading Reclaiming the Land in The Gambia