Local And Just

A couple of years ago, food prices became a hot button issue in international affairs.  Food riots were seen in several countries in the Global South, as those with the lowest incomes were most susceptible to substantial rises in prices of basic products such as wheat and rice. While food prices did subside somewhat since [...]

My previous two articles on my trip to India and Bangladesh have focused on political issues – the right to food and land reform.  This article will have a different focus, examining one of the particular projects that I had the opportunity to visit. This story takes place in the district of Nilphamari in northern [...]

After visiting several rural communities in India and Bangladesh, it became abundantly clear that access to land is a fundamentally important issue in addressing hunger.  In the communities that we visited people largely were employed as share croppers or agricultural day labourers, both of which were positions through which one could often not adequately support [...]

One fairly regularly hears about people campaigning for, or discussing the idea of, the ‘right to food.’  But what does that actually mean for people who are hungry?  Does it improve lives or merely become a piece of governmental phraseology? India provides one example of how the right to food has been used as a [...]

Have you been to talk on food justice issues lately?  Have you attended a conference?  A presentation?  If you have, you are probably pretty convinced that food justice is an important issue.  Indeed, nearly all of the events that I have attended on food issues have been populated predominantly by the converted, those who are [...]

A recent study by Kevin Hall at the National Institute of Diabetes and Digestive and Kidney Diseases in the United States discovered that food waste in the United States has reached 1400 calories per person per day. To put this in perspective, this is only slightly less than the average Ethiopian’s daily caloric consumption. And this is just from supermarket to home, not even from farm to supermarket.