Musings on sustainable food systems, agriculture vs. agroecology, and more!
In a way it’s almost funny – all this time a lot of the food policy community’s attention is drawn to seed laws in the US, dissecting Supreme Court cases and hidden Congressional amendments, while at the same time the European Commission is drafting what seems to be at least equally harsh legislation with a … Continue reading What's Happening to EU Seed Diversity?!
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?!
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?
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?
If you find 37 minutes time in the next couple of days, I can only recommend that you listen to one of the latest episodes of the Freakonomics podcast, called “100 Ways to Fight Obesity“. It is an episode built out of the recording of a brainstorming session that features some of the most well-known … Continue reading Unorthodox Solutions to Combat Childhood Obesity – the Freakonomics Brainstorm
After Japan was hit by an earthquake, a tsunami and a nuclear meltdown in 2011, it was clear that recovery would take a while. This was particularly true in the agricultural sector of the coastal regions affected by the catastrophe, where rubble- and sea water-soaked soils made planting nearly impossible. Overall, irrigation canals, roads and … Continue reading After the Tsunami – Which Way Forward for Japanese Agriculture?
Chances are, you would be hard-pressed to place nations such as Micronesia, Kiribati, Nauru, the Marshall Islands, Palau, the Solomon Islands, Papua New Guinea, and Tuvalu on a map. However, these eight tiny Pacific island-states might be decisive in protecting one of the last remaining healthy tuna fisheries in the world, as this article reports.
A friend of mine sent me a link to this paper titled “Ready-to-use food-allocation policy to reduce the effects of childhood undernutrition in developing countries” – originally more as a “look at what weird things get published” link, but as I read through the abstract, it got me thinking…