May 18th, 2015
Via AllAfrica, an interesting look at one of Africa’s largest and most secretive foreign agricultural investment deals: when oil-rich Libya, under the leadership of Colonel Muammar Gaddafi, signed a 50-year, renewable lease for the land with Mali’s government in 2008: Malian farmer Balima Coulibaly and his fellow villagers watched with dread as 100,000 hectares of fertile[…]
Read more »The Deadly Global War For Sand
March 26th, 2015
Via Wired, a fascinating look at the global war for sand: THE KILLERS ROLLED slowly down the narrow alley, three men jammed onto a single motorcycle. It was a little after 11 am on July 31, 2013, the sun beating down on the low, modest residential buildings lining a back street in the Indian farming village[…]
Read more »March 10th, 2015
Courtesy of The Guardian, commentary on global food security: By the time nations once again get round a table in Paris in December to discuss climate change, hunger should be on the menu. Researchers have just warned that a new and aggressive strain of yellow rust fungus is now a threat to Britain’s wheat harvest. Another team has calculated[…]
Read more »Lester Brown: ‘Vast Dust Bowls Threaten Tens Of Millions With Hunger’
February 25th, 2015
Via The Guardian, a report on Lester Brown’s concerns that the world may face the worst hunger crisis of our lifetime: Vast tracts of Africa and of China are turning into dust bowls on a scale that dwarves the one that devastated the US in the 1930s, one of the world’s pre-eminent environmental thinkers has warned.[…]
Read more »February 17th, 2015
Via Le Monde, an interesting (slightly dated) examination of what the closing of Kansas City’s Mercantile Exchange can teach us about how Wall Street stopped treating food like food: Just off of Country Road 518 in Hopewell, New Jersey, sits Double Brook Farm. It’s run by a self-exiled New Yorker but it’s not one of those now-standard upstart[…]
Read more »The Man Who Stole the Nile
February 17th, 2015
Via Harper’s, a slightly dated (2014) but interesting article on an Ethiopian billionaire’s outrageous land grab: Forget about diamond heists, bank robberies, and drilling into the golden intestines of Fort Knox. In this precarious world-historic moment, food has become the most valuable asset of them all — and a billionaire from Ethiopia named Mohammed Hussein Al[…]
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