 Editor’s note: Michael Kugelman is the senior program associate for South and Southeast Asia at the Woodrow Wilson International Center for Scholars and lead editor of The Global Farms Race. You can follow him @michaelkugelman. The views expressed are his own. This week in Washington, the World Bank is hosting its annual conference on land and poverty. The Bank has identified improved land governance as this year’s theme. It’s a wise decision, given that poor land governance in developing world agricultural settings has spawned a destabilizing global trend – one fueled, in part, by financial support from the Bank itself. In recent years, food-importing regimes from Asia and the Gulf, spooked by high food prices and lacking the land and water resources to grow crops at home, have obtained land overseas to use for agriculture. Private investors from the U.S., Europe, and Asia, recognizing the profit potential of precious agricultural land, have joined this scramble for the world’s soils. Nearly $30 billion in private capital is projected to be invested in farmland by 2015, and pension funds and asset managers have recently joined forces to attract even more capital for farmland financing. Read the full story - The global farm grab is on - on the Fareed Zakaria GPS blog.
Sorry, kid. No money, no lunch. Students at an Attleboro, Massachusetts, middle school went hungry this week, if they had a negative balance on their pre-paid lunch cards. Five cents of debt was enough for cafeteria employees at the Coehlo Middle School to instruct kids at least one day this week to dump out the food they would have normally eaten, CNN affiliate WJAR in Rhode Island reported.  Editor's note: The Southern Foodways Alliance delves deep in the history, tradition, heroes and plain old deliciousness of Southern food. Today's contributor, Emilie Dayan, writes a weekly SFA blog series called "Sustainable South" about food and the environment, nutrition, food access, food justice, agricultural issues and food politics. To some, Bonita Conwell is a farmer. To others, a butcher. For rural Southern women and youth in agriculture, she is an advocate for economic and social justice. No matter how you frame her, Conwell is a tour de force in the Delta region of Mississippi, and her influence extends up the Mighty Mississippi to Chicago and westward to Houston, Texas. Based in Mound Bayou, Mississippi, Conwell is the driving force behind Robert’s Meat Market. Built in 1985, the market found success in providing Mississippi-made meat products to Southerners living in Chicago. To the west, Conwell sells the greens of her sweet potato crops - a part of the root that is usually discarded - to an African market in Houston. SFA director John T. Edge is such a fan of Conwell's sweet potato greens that he included them on his list of the top ten dishes of 2012 for Garden & Gun magazine. Editor's note: The Southern Foodways Alliance delves deep in the history, tradition, heroes and plain old deliciousness of Southern food. Today's contributor, Emilie Dayan, writes a weekly SFA blog series called "Sustainable South" about food and the environment, nutrition, food access, food justice, agricultural issues and food politics. It is National Farmworker Awareness Week. Chef Andrea Reusing preluded the week with an informative TEDxUNC talk in Chapel Hill. A lot of us are obsessed with food. “We argue about whether pork tastes better if the pig eats peanuts or if the pig eats acorns…But there is a problem,” she says. We often ignore something that is much more fundamental to the way we live: The lives of the people who harvest the food we eat.  President Barack Obama marked the start of Passover Monday night with a Seder at the White House. It's a yearly tradition for the president that began on the campaign trail in 2008. "This has been a very, very powerful event for the president," Deputy White House Press Secretary Josh Earnest said Monday, adding that Obama planned to use the Seder plate given to him by Sara Netanyahu last week during his trip to Israel. Plenty of traditional foods pack an emotional whallop, but few of them back it up with a sensory punch as strong as horseradish's. The pungent root is a key part of a Passover Seder plate (along with salt water-dipped vegetables, a shank bone, a hard boiled egg, a sweet paste of apples and nuts called charoset, and a bitter vegetable - often lettuce) and symbolizes the harsh lives of the Israelites before they were delivered from slavery in Egypt. Editor's note: Ron Finley is an artist, designer and co-founder of lagreengrounds.org. He spoke at the TED2013 conference in February. TED is a nonprofit dedicated to "Ideas worth spreading," which it makes available through talks posted on its website. As a lifelong resident of South Central Los Angeles, I refuse to be part of the social system that breeds problems rather than solutions. South Central is a "food desert" where the lack of healthy food alternatives leads to obesity and preventable disease. I have raised my sons in South L.A., and it is heartbreaking to see so many young kids on a trajectory to nowhere, potential high school dropouts prey to gangs, drugs, violence and incarceration. So where do we start to create positive change?  Protestors have taken to the streets of Beverly Hills accusing Urasawa, one of the country’s most exclusive and expensive restaurants, of theft. The victims however, are not the well-heeled patrons but are instead the servers and kitchen staff who were cheated out of compensation. Urasawa, a world renowned Japanese restaurant, has been ordered to pay fines and back wages because it failed to pay overtime or provide breaks to employees. Previously: |
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