Food issues

Canadian diets are too heavy in fat, salt and sugar, and both government and industry have a role in changing that.

 Imagining feeding your child this for breakfast:This for lunch:...

Richmond, B.C., has voted to become a GE-free zone and to call for mandatory labelling of GMO products.

President Obama anticipated these criticisms when he addressed “whether this New Alliance is just a way for governments to shift the burden onto somebody else.” He was quick to assure that, even in hard economic times, his administration would continue to make investments in development aid. Let’s make sure that those investments work to prioritize the right to food over corporate profits.

“Antibiotic levels nearly nil” screams the headline from this article in the industry trade publication, National Hog Farmer. It was a piece of spin doctoring in response to IATP’s report earlier this month on the widespread and unregulated use of human antibiotics in ethanol production. Ethanol producers use antibiotics to control bacterial outbreaks during production, which can interfere with the fermentation process and lower ethanol yields.

The Food and Agriculture Organisation of the United Nation’s position on land grabs legitimises the industrial monocultures responsible for the expulsion of farmers and indigenous communities from their lands say Latin American and Caribbean social movements and organisations.

When guerrilla gardeners started a potato patch in a vacant Calgary lot, an alderman showed up with the police to eject them.

If you want to see legislative evidence of the poor treatment of migrants on the North American continent you could start as far back as the United States Naturalization Act of 1790, which established limitations to citizenship based on color of skin. That is, only white people (“free white people… of good moral character”) could be citizens. In Mexico the laws weren’t as explicitly racist, but still limited, in 1854 with the Decreto sobre Extranjería y Nacionalidad de los Habitantes, nearly all benefits, even that of fishing on Mexico’s coasts, to exclusively Mexican citizens.

In the last century and a half since the Decreto sobre Extranjería, in both the United States and Mexico, migrants have been wanted, put to work, granted amnesty, hated, oppressed, expulsed, and just about everything in between. The only thing that has remained constant has been the migrants. They keep moving. And the trend, on behalf of both the U.S. and Mexican governments, has been to pass legislation, including those laws that purport to protect, that makes migrants vulnerable. Vulnerable and exploitable.

The act of feeding 7 billion plus human beings already puts more stress on the planet than any other single activity, so we're going to need to figure out a way to produce more food without further damaging the environment...