On Tuesday, after some public tokenizing and horse trading, President-elect Joe Biden’s transition team crowned dairy industry lobbyist and former Agriculture Secretary Tom Vilsack to lead the Department of Agriculture. Vilsack won out over House Majority Whip Jim Clyburn’s pick, Rep. Marcia Fudge, who was also backed by progressives.
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With just one cabinet appointment, President-elect Joe Biden could tackle economic inequality, the rural/urban divide, climate change, the growing mistrust of science, systemic racism and even the coronavirus.
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"World Agriculture Towards 2030/2050" is a major report predicting global agricultural trends (Alexandratos & Bruinsma, 2012). It was produced by the economics division of the UN Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO). In its abstract the FAO authors make a prominent disclaimer. Its projections, they stress (both on p. i and p. 7), are not to be used for normative purposes; that is, their report is not a prescription of how the global food system should develop.
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This World Food Day (October 16) amidst the ongoing pandemic and the devastating impact of the climate crisis, a Food Systems Summit is being planned a year from now by the United Nations, to fulfil the realization of the Sustainable Development Goals.
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The spread of intensive farming is threatening to jeopardise the world’s chances of meeting the terms of the Paris agreement on the climate crisis, as the increasing use of artificial fertiliser and growing populations of livestock are raising the concentration of a key greenhouse gas to levels far beyond those seen naturally.
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Cory Booker says the massive challenges facing the US right now are all tied to a “savagely broken food system”. And last week, his most recent challenge to that system gained new momentum, when a coalition of 300 farm, food, and environmental advocacy organizations sent a letter to Congress urging legislators to pass a bill that would eventually eliminate the country’s largest concentrated animal feeding operations.
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The report says this "catastrophic decline" shows no sign of slowing. And it warns that nature is being destroyed by humans at a rate never seen before. Wildlife is "in freefall" as we burn forests, over-fish our seas and destroy wild areas, says Tanya Steele, chief executive at WWF.
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Political conventions traditionally feature an orgy of corporate lobbyists and big money courting public officials. You’d think such displays wouldn’t factor into a convention-at-home setup in 2020. After all, where would the lobbyists and hangers-on congregate? The answer is, apparently, on Zoom.
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Addressing what it calls the industrialization of the organic farming movement, OrganicEye announced the filing of a formal legal complaint against one of the country’s largest producers of certified organic milk, Natural Prairie. According to the organic industry watchdog, animal abuse and serious environmental degradation have been documented, demonstrating that Natural Prairie, with operations in Texas and a new facility under construction in Indiana, violated federal organic regulations.
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In March of 2009, people in the rural Mexican village of La Gloria started coming down with a nasty respiratory infection. The town, located in the state of Veracruz, sat 5 miles from an industrial-scale hog farm. Within a few weeks, clusters of this rapidly progressing pneumonia arose among Mexico City residents.
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