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The Indus Basin of Pakistan
This study, Indus basin of Pakistan: the impacts of climate risks on water and agriculture was undertaken at a pivotal time in the region. The weak summer monsoon in 2009 created drought conditions throughout the country. This followed an already tenuous situation for many rural households faced with high fuel and fertilizer costs and the impacts of rising global food prices. Then catastrophic monsoon flooding in 2010 affected over 20 million people, devastating their housing, infrastructure, and crops. Damages from this single flood event were estimated at US dollar 10 billion, half of which were losses in the agriculture sector. Notwithstanding the debate as to whether these observed extremes are evidence of climate change, an investigation is needed regarding the extent to which the country is resilient to these shocks. It is thus timely, if not critical, to focus on climate risks for water, agriculture, and food security in the Indus basin of Pakistan.
eBook
I Am Not a Tractor!
I Am Not a Tractor!celebrates the courage, vision, and creativity of the farmworkers and community leaders who have transformed one of the worst agricultural situations in the United States into one of the best. Susan L. Marquis highlights past abuses workers suffered in Florida's tomato fields: toxic pesticide exposure, beatings, sexual assault, rampant wage theft, and even, astonishingly, modern-day slavery. Marquis unveils how, even without new legislation, regulation, or government participation, these farmworkers have dramatically improved their work conditions.
Marquis credits this success to the immigrants from Mexico, Haiti, and Guatemala who formed the Coalition of Immokalee Workers, a neuroscience major who takes great pride in the watermelon crew he runs, a leading farmer/grower who was once homeless, and a retired New York State judge who volunteered to stuff envelopes and ended up building a groundbreaking institution. Through the Fair Food Program that they have developed, fought for, and implemented, these people have changed the lives of more than thirty thousand field workers.I Am Not a Tractor!offers a range of solutions to a problem that is rooted in our nation's slave history and that is worsened by ongoing conflict over immigration.
eBook
Feeding the Future
A century ago, only local charities existed to feed children. Today 368 million children receive school lunches in 151 countries, in programs supported by state and national governments. InFeeding the Future, Jennifer Geist Rutledge investigates how and why states have assumed responsibility for feeding children, chronicling the origins and spread of school lunch programs around the world, starting with the adoption of these programs in the United States and some Western European nations, and then tracing their growth through the efforts of the World Food Program.
The primary focus ofFeeding the Futureis on social policy formation: how and why did school lunch programs emerge? Given that all countries developed education systems, why do some countries have these programs and others do not? Rutledge draws on a wealth of information-including archival resources, interviews with national policymakers in several countries, United Nations data, and agricultural statistics-to underscore the ways in which a combination of ideological and material factors led to the creation of these enduringly popular policies. She shows that, in many ways, these programs emerged largely as an unintended effect of agricultural policy that rewarded farmers for producing surpluses. School lunches provided a ready outlet for this surplus. She also describes how, in each of the cases of school lunch creation, policy entrepreneurs, motivated by a commitment to alleviate childhood malnutrition, harnessed different ideas that were relevant to their state or organization in order to funnel these agricultural surpluses into school lunch programs.
The public debate over how we feed our children is becoming more and more politically charged.Feeding the Futureprovides vital background to these debates, illuminating the history of food policies and the ways our food system is shaped by global social policy.
eBook
Conceptual Frameworks in Scientific Inquiry and the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention’s Approach to Pesticide Toxicity (1948–1968)
This article examines the rise of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention’s (CDC’s) small but influential program on the human toxicology of synthetic pesticides after World War II. For nearly 20 years, scientists working in the CDC’s Toxicology Section conducted a range of laboratory, field, and clinical studies to assess whether pesticides, such as dichlorodiphenyltrichloroethane (DDT), caused harm to humans. Applying an industrial hygiene approach to study pesticide toxicity, the team used the symptoms of poisoning as their criteria for harm and consistently found that, when used as intended, pesticides were generally safe for humans. In the post–Silent Spring era, these findings were increasingly challenged as the field of toxicology developed and different ways of understanding pesticide toxicity gained greater acceptance. While it is easy to dismiss the CDC’s findings as excessively narrow, examining how the team arrived at their conclusions provides an instructive lesson about the powerful ways conceptual frameworks shape scientific inquiry and the unexpected ways data can be reinterpreted in different problem contexts. (Am J Public Health. 2019;109:1548–1556. doi: 10.2105/AJPH.2019.305260)
Journal Article
Food sovereignty or the human right to adequate food: which concept serves better as international development policy for global hunger and poverty reduction?
The emerging concept of food sovereignty refers to the right of communities, peoples, and states to independently determine their own food and agricultural policies. It raises the question of which type of food production, agriculture and rural development should be pursued to guarantee food security for the world population. Social movements and non-governmental organizations have readily integrated the concept into their terminology. The concept is also beginning to find its way into the debates and policies of UN organizations and national governments in both developing and industrialized countries. Beyond its relation to civil society movements little academic attention has been paid to the concept of food sovereignty and its appropriateness for international development policies aimed at reducing hunger and poverty, especially in comparison to the human right to adequate food (RtAF). We analyze, on the basis of an extensive literature review, the concept of food sovereignty with regard to its ability to contribute to hunger and poverty reduction worldwide as well as the challenges attached to this concept. Then, we compare the concept of food sovereignty with the RtAF and discuss the appropriateness of both concepts for national public sector policy makers and international development policies. We conclude that the impact on global food security is likely to be much greater if the RtAF approach predominated public policies. While the concept of food sovereignty may be appropriate for civil society movements, we recommend that the RtAF should obtain highest priority in national and international agricultural, trade and development policies.
Journal Article
From Reconstruction to Development: The Early Years of the Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO) and the Conceptualization of Rural Welfare, 1945-1955
This paper examines the early years of the Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO) and its conceptualization of 'rural welfare', an approach that foresaw the modernization of agricultural societies and the alleviation of poverty through improvements in labor, housing, health, education of people working in agriculture. Based on the correspondence of FAO officials and experts, the paper shows how in the late 1940s, the Rural Welfare Division, under the leadership of its Director Horace Belshaw, promoted a low-modernist and local-sensitive approach to rural development that emphasized the subjectivity of welfare and that was skeptical of top-down development programs. As the paper argues, Belshaw's holistic understanding of rural communities was abandoned in the early 1950s in favor of an increasingly technical development consultancy, characterized by short-term interventions rather than by an intellectual and scientific debate about the larger implications of development.
Journal Article
The Evolution of Food Security Governance and Food Sovereignty Movement in China: An Analysis from the World Society Theory
Originating in a 1983 Mexican Government Program, the term ‘food sovereignty’ was coined in 1996 by La Via Campesina—a global peasant network—to address concerns within the civil society for food security. Rather than to accept the neoliberal framework of mainstream food security definition and governance, the food sovereignty movement seeks to view food security as the right of peoples to define their own food and agriculture systems with limited corporation intervention. As a result, food production should be geared toward the domestic and local markets and not toward international trade that only benefits corporations. This food sovereignty movement was inducted into China in 2013 just as China’s agricultural systems were shifting toward a more corporate-centric structure that increasingly exploits the small-scale farmers. A question was hence raised: How have the global civil society networks influenced the Chinese civil society and promoted China’s local food sovereignty movement? Through the world society theory, the author has identified social forums, such as international conferences and social media channels, as an expedient means for interactions. However, as the Chinese government continues to develop a corporate-centric food security governance system and tighten its civil society space, the impacts of China’s food sovereignty movement remain unclear.
Journal Article
Nature Rx: Nothing New Under the Sun?
Crnic and Kondo (p. 1371) examined two public health interventions. separated by more than a centuiva that took very similar approaches to very different arrays of health issues affecting urban children. The clear similarities raise a perennial question: is history repeating itself? If so. is that because we failed to learn history's lessons, or does history inevitably follow a cyclical pattern regardless of'our attentiveness to its lessons? Perhaps the repetition is mere illusion. no more than the form of story the authors chose. These meta-historical questions may best be answered by a robust exploration of the yawning gulf of decades between the two moments Crnic and Kondo examined. Of course, a full accounting is far beyond the scope of their short comparative essay. and although it is even less reasonable to expect this article to fill that void. I offer. in the crudest outline. some of the most salient factors reinforcing the turning away from nature-centered approaches to health a century ago. a glimpse at factorssustainingthat indifference for more than seven decades. and the changes in the last 30 years that rekindled interest in the power of nature contact in health promotion.
Journal Article
Hunger
Rigorously researched, Hunger: A Modern History draws together social, cultural, and political history, to show us how we came to have a moral, political, and social responsibility toward the hungry. Vernon forcefully reminds us how many perished from hunger in the empire and reveals how their history was intricately connected with the precarious achievements of the welfare state in Britain, as well as with the development of international institutions committed to the conquest of world hunger.
eBook