Good Food is Everybody's Business
Three women from USAID Urban Gardens Program prove that urban agriculture can improve lives of people living with HIV through economic empowerment as well as social engagement.
Going “off the grid” has connotations of romance and counter-culture in the US, but to 600 communities across rural Latin America, off the grid means they will remain poor and under-developed. Imagine what can happen when each community is given solar panels and, in some cases, a back-up wind generator to produce renewable and clean energy.
Washington apple growers are in trouble! It was a late spring, a cool summer, a long damp fall, and the apple trees are covered with ripe fruit. Unfortunately, it’s late October and cold, wet weather is just around the corner. If those apples don’t get picked soon they’ll rot on the tree.
We offer the following interview with Devon Peña to highlight issues that are facing farmers across the US as well as around the world. Challenges like farm worker shortages – is it an immigration issue or worker welfare issue? Or corporate control by Big Ag, Big Food, and Big Org (as in organics)? Or commodity speculation by the world’s stock markets which is driving the cost of basic food stuffs beyond the reach of millions? Or factory farming that have mastered the “art” of growing and killing animals faster and on a larger scale than ever before? We’ll bring you information on all those issues this week, and we start with a “food commons.”
People like Will Allen and Erika Allen, his daughter, have been able to convince Chicago’s politicians that for-profit businesses like urban farms can be an economic engine, not just for the farmers and their employees, but for the city in the form of tax revenues. A well-functioning urban land use policy will allow small farms and food related businesses to put people to work, to generate income, and to pay taxes.
With an eye to the future, a federally-funded program is underway that is designed to help Americans eat healthier foods and fend off ailments stemming from obesity, including heart disease and diabetes by bringing together retailers, farmers, and consumers. Seattle’s Healthy Foods Here (HFH) program operates synergistically.
Notice how the retailers’ pledge initiative recounted in Big Retailers Make Pledge of Stores for ‘Food Deserts,’ (The New York Times, July 20, 2011) is entirely top-down and makes no mention of empowering local neighborhoods to support their own independent grocers?
This will be the first of several columns and interviews resulting from a recent 4-day Congress for New Urbanism Conference, otherwise known as CNU 19, held this year in Madison, Wisconsin, home of dairy, bicycles, and wacky politics. How many other states have a quarter of their state senators up for recall or host tractor protest rallies around the state capitol, have 6 months of winter, and a burgeoning organic foods industry?
