India’s food security and stockholding program uses precisely the same policies that the U.S. used in its early farm policy coming out of the Great Depression. Exactly the same: price supports, food reserves, administered markets, subsidies. The U.S. government used them because they work. India and other countries should be allowed to use them, too. Because they work.
Crops and Commodities
WTO and Food Security: Biting the Hand that Feeds the Poor
India’s National Food Security Act (NFSA), is one of the most ambitious food security initiatives in the world, planning to buy food grains from small-scale farmers to distribute to some 840 million poor Indians, two-thirds of the country’s people.
Food Fight: the Battle Over Sri Lankan Food Production
Once known as ‘the granary of the East’, Sri Lanka’s food production has suffered over recent decades, with civil war, natural disaster, and failed policy all contributing to a fall in domestic food production and a rise in imports. In 2016, Sri Lankan President Maithripala Sirisena published an ambitious three-year agricultural plan to build a ‘toxin-free nation.’ The plan reimagines the country’s agricultural future based on the principles of agroecology: an approach which prioritizes sustainable and people-centered practices over corporate profit.
Bananageddon Film Examines How to Save America’s Favorite Fruit
America’s favorite fresh fruit, bananas, face extinction as we know them. New documentary examines how a shift in agriculture can save bananas and the workers who produce them.
15 Gleaning Initiatives Fighting Food Waste
With 133 billion pounds of food ending up in landfills, gleaning organizations across the country are working with farmers to help fight food waste and food insecurity.
Vote With Your Turkey: How Your Holiday Purchase Can Save Lives
Americans eat approximately 40 million turkeys on Thanksgiving and another 22 million for Christmas. Consumers have an opportunity this holiday season to help move turkey producers away from misusing life-saving medicines.
The Tea Industry: A Model for a Sustainable Future
First discovered 5,000 years ago in China, tea is the most consumed beverage in the world, besides water, and more than half of Americans drink tea on a daily basis. Consumers are increasingly demanding fair trade, organic practices, and sustainable farming.
Inside the Global Ten-Year Effort to Save Wild Relatives of Major Crops
The Crop Trust is scaling up a ten-year effort to catalog, conserve, and prepare the genetics of wild relatives of major food crops, called crop wild relatives (CWRs), in light of increasing stresses to agricultural systems including climate change and population growth.
Thirst for Avocado Leaves Plantations Dry
United States avocado consumption has doubled in the last decade straining local environments in exporting regions such as Michoacán, Mexico, where a loss of forest cover and underground water reserves has increased their risk of fires.
The Plight of Jamaica’s Small-Scale Coffee Farmers to Climate Change
BCFN Alumni Anne-Teresa Birthwright discusses how climate change is pushing small-scale coffee farmers in Jamaica towards new realities.
