Subjects Archives: Agriculture

Although Mexico has maintained a ban on genetically modified (GM) corn since the 1990s, the move by Mexican President Andres Manuel Luiz Obrador (AMLO) in 2020 to eventually ban the import of GM corn in order to promote domestic cultivation of native varieties has threatened to spark a trade war with the United States.

Campesinos high up in the beautiful Andean valley of Gavidia are working to preserve the native potato and the way of life that goes with it.

What links Karl Marx, William S. Burroughs, Dalit struggles in India and the Yetties’ famous Muckspreader Song? Ed Emery writes on the centrality of excrement, both metaphorical and literal, to the modern world.

THE Modi government, ever solicitous of corporate interests, has launched a plan whereby real estate developers and other corporates will be allowed to destroy large swathes of India’s forest cover for starting projects that rake in profits. It is amending the Forest Conservation Act to remove those forest patches that are not deemed as such by the government from protection under the Act.

PROINPA is a grassroots campesino organization promoting food sovereignty, endogenous seed production, and an agroecological transition.

The passenger pigeon. The Tasmanian tiger. The Baiji, or Yangtze river dolphin. These rank among the best-known recent victims of what many scientists have declared the sixth mass extinction, as human actions are wiping out vertebrate animal species hundreds of times faster than they would otherwise disappear.

We shouldn’t treat cannabis like heroin. But we shouldn’t treat it like ketamine either, as a federal agency now recommends.

Highlighting the climate crisis is not ‘alarmism’, as critics say. Big Business wants an exclusive focus on climate because it downplays the true reasons for alarm.

It is long past time we end our mad rush to burn the planet to the ground.

In 40 years, Amazon rainforest lost an area equivalent to France; at this rate, catastrophe is imminent, say scientists.

The industrialized food system is a major source of greenhouse gas emissions, but it is not a major topic at climate talks.

Economists have put forward all kinds of fallacious arguments to justify the prolonged fall in per capita food spending, and hence in nutritional intake, in India, such as mechanisation leading to lower energy needs, change in the age structure of the population, change in tastes and so on. 

This accumulation of tragic evidence, against all the denialist narratives, makes it undeniable that the climate crisis is already here, among us.

The most recent report from the Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations (FAO) has revealed positive news for Venezuela.

The air is plasticized, and we are no better protected from it outdoors than indoors.

In 2017, the World Bank determined that the income threshold for poverty, which had been set at $1.90 per day, was far too low. They set the new poverty line at $2.15 per day, which accounted for over 700 million people.

Climate change is making weather more extreme. This tool shows how many people across the United States face risks right now from wildfires, flooding, tropical storms, or extreme heat.

“Nothing less than a just global transformation… is required to ensure human well-being,” researchers wrote.

Farmers from across the Americas are working together to envision a new food system based on food sovereignty and political justice.

How is it that a country like Argentina, with its vast rural territory, longstanding agricultural tradition, and capacity to produce food for hundreds of millions of people, is plagued by hunger and malnourishment?