Building a More Humane, Robust Way of Putting Food on the Table
Covid-19 outbreaks are now reaching far beyond the meatpacking industry. Migrant farmworkers in fruit orchards and vegetable fields, long the targets of intense exploitation, are seeing their health put in even greater jeopardy as they’re pushed to feed an increasingly voracious supply chain in pandemic-time.
The coronavirus pandemic is overwhelming to comprehend. There are now hundreds of thousands of confirmed cases. Tens of thousands have died. Nations are on lockdown as the disease continues to spread. The planet is in crisis.
How did this happen?
What are the underlying political, economic and environmental structures that paved the way for this global outbreak? Where do pandemics emerge from? Is our capitalist way of life biologically sustainable?
"We now have enough observations of current drought and tree-ring records of past drought to say that we're on the same trajectory as the worst prehistoric droughts."
The western United States is likely being gripped by an "emerging" megadrought partly fueled by the climate crisis, says a study published Friday.
Researchers claim the region's 19-year drought, from 2000–2018, already rivals that of any over the past 1,200 years.
Scientists are tracing the path of Sars-CoV-2 from a wild animal host – but we need to look at the part played in the outbreak by industrial food production
Where did the virus causing the current pandemic come from? How did it get to a food market in Wuhan, China, from where it is thought to have spilled over into humans? The answers to these questions are gradually being pieced together, and the story they tell makes for uncomfortable reading.
170 Dutch academics sign manifesto for sustainable, equal and diverse societies based on international solidarity
The following statement, signed by 170 academics from eight universities in the Netherlands, has been widely reported in the Dutch press, becoming a focus for discussion on how to avoid repeating past mistakes when in planning for the future.
"To truly be resilient, our system must shift to one that relies on small and medium producers and independent, responsible operations."
U.S. food pantries have faced unprecedented demand while billions of dollars in produce has gone to waste due to supply chain disruptions from the ongoing coronavirus pandemic—conditions that are renewing calls for reforms to make the nation's food systems more localized, resilient, and sustainable.
The only way to stop the next deadly pandemic to emerge directly out of livestock or poultry or indirectly out of wild animals subjected to Big Ag-driven deforestation is to end capitalist agribusiness as we know it.
