Musings on sustainable food systems, agriculture vs. agroecology, and more!
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
I was fascinated by this blog post by the blog “Food Governance“, which refers to and summarizes the UN Special Rapporteur on the Right to Food’s report on his mission to the Food and Agricultural Organization (FAO).
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
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
Yesterday I went to a really inspiring event put on by the GIZ under the topic of “Gender, Climate Change and Food Security”, which highlighted different aspects of how gender (in)equality can be highlighted in climate change negotiations and how women are affected by the challenges of adapting rural self-sufficient farming communities to the future … Continue reading A Genius Idea for Gender, Climate Change Resilience and Food Security
In a country where 60% of the population is involved in agriculture, and 70 – 80% of agricultural work is done by women, within the legal system women farmers are still almost invisible. Though 18% of family farms in India are headed by women, only 2% of land is owned by them. According to a study carried out by Oxfam India … Continue reading India's Women Farmers Claim Equal Rights
The other day I went to a free public lecture at ZEF by Roger Leakey, a crop physiologist and tree biologist who presented a new concept for Tropical Agriculture: Agroforestry! As he explained, while most subsistence farmers in tropical areas rely on cereal crops for their day-to-day survival, learning how to domesticate and use trees … Continue reading The Trees of Life
