Gilles Billen shows that industrial agriculture, propelled by international trade and specialization, has disturbed the nitrogen cycle. This has provoked the crossing of planetary boundaries and endangered the possibility of feeding the world. Alternatives do not require new technologies but different ways of organizing production and regional networks. Lynn Fries interviews Gilles Billen on GPEnewsdocs.
Dr. Asoka Bandarage is an adjunct professor at the California Institute for Integral Studies and the author of a new book, Crisis in Sri Lanka and the World. Sri Lanka has had a minuscule carbon footprint, and yet the country is particularly vulnerable to the effects of climate change, coastal erosion, and flooding. She discusses the convergence of existential climate and debt crises in Sri Lanka, the latter resulting from IMF debt restructuring and the lack of a globally coordinated multilateral sovereign debt mechanism that places traditional and private lenders on an equal footing.
Matin Qaim, Director of the Center for Development Research at the University of Bonn, examines the various aspects comprising food security, namely local and global supply chains, the generation of income for local farmers, investments in the production of nutritious foods, as well as accounting for climate externalities. Attaining food security has become even more difficult given the disruptions around the pandemic, rising inflation, and the failed Black Sea grain deal. He asserts that small-scale farming and agroecological approaches are not necessarily low-tech and that certain technologies, if applied correctly, can assist smallholder farmers.
By reducing our reliance on chemical fertilizers, policymakers could turn the food crisis into a genuine opportunity towards shifting subsidies away from agribusiness-led to agroecological-led farming systems and a managed transition to healthy sustainable patterns of production, explains Jayati Ghosh. Lynn Fries interviews Jayati Ghosh on GPEnewsdocs.
The European Union is exporting more than 10,000 tons of bee-killing neonicotinoid pesticides a year to megadiverse countries despite having banned these chemicals from its own farms to protect pollinators, according to research by Public Eye & Unearthed. Lynn Fries interviews Laurent Gaberell on GPEnewsdocs.
Famara Diédhiou is the West Africa Program Officer at the Alliance for Food Security in Africa (AFSA). He is also one of the producers of a documentary feature film called The Last Seed, which was produced by the Rosa Luxemburg Foundation in cooperation with AFSA, Biowatch South Africa, and PELUM Tanzania. In this interview, Famara discusses why food security is not enough in a country such as Senegal, whose farming practices and dietary consumption have been negatively affected by agrochemical companies. He makes the case for food sovereignty, as well as the establishment of an agroecological approach to farming and rural planning which not only benefits local populations but also facilitates climate adaption strategies. What sort of socio-economic system would create the conditions necessary for this agroecological approach?
Research by Tim Wise (GDAE-Tufts University) is conclusive and fully resonates with claims by Africa’s biggest grassroots movement, the Alliance for Food Sovereignty in Africa: the corporate capture of food systems should be rejected. Donors and government funding must shift to agroecology. This is an interview hosted by Lynn Fries of GPEnewsdocs.
Robert Pollin and Noam Chomsky’s new book is titled, The Climate Crisis and the Global Green New Deal: The Political Economy of Saving the Planet. In this segment, Bob lays out the policies that must be enacted in order to meet the targets set by the IPCC. Bob Pollin joins Paul Jay on theAnalysis.news podcast.