Canada Well Positioned To Capitalize On Growing Food Demand

When, in 1965, Bob Dylan wailed, I ain t gonna work on Maggie s farm no more, he was echoing the mental picture almost all of us have about conditions on the farm. The dirty thirties largely spawned the identification of farming with grinding poverty, primitive technologies and capricious commodity prices, and the image has

Update From East Africa: People Pushed To The Brink

Canadian Foodgrains Bank executive director Jim Cornelius is on a study leave in Kenya and Ethiopia. Last week he sent this observation from southern Ethiopia, which is experiencing its worst food crisis in 60 years. Unlike the major Ethiopia famines in 1972 and 1984, which were concentrated in the northern highlands of Ethiopia, this food


The Climate Change Conundrum

ith the June 20 crop insurance past, farmers and their crop insurance agents are pulling on their galoshes to assess the W damages from yet another spring with too much water. Cattle producers are worrying about winter feed supplies as they watch flood waters inundate their hayfields. We are told this year is one for

Zimbabwe Lacks Funds To Transport Food Aid Minister

Zimbabwe does not have the money to transport food aid to areas experiencing acute shortages, Agriculture Minister Joseph Made said on March 21. The country wants to send its entire 270,000 tonnes of grain reserves to provinces that are worst hit by drought and where 1.7 million people need aid, but the Grain Marketing Board


Battling World Hunger By Increasing Global Production?

U. S. farmers began to believe that they had a responsibility to increase production and exports so that the hungry of the world could be fed. For some time now, we have focused our attention on the twin issues of production and exports of major crops as a way of examining the export-oriented policies that

Foreigners Buying African Farms A Good Thing

The outsourcing of food production in Africa by some Asian and Middle-Eastern countries will boost global stocks and may help stave off future food crises, the World Bank says. In the aftermath of last year’s food crisis, capital-rich nations who lack sufficient arable land to feed growing populations started buying or leasing large portions of


Is Africa Selling Out Its Farmers?

For centuries, farmers like Berhanu Gudina have eked out a living in Ethiopia’s central lowlands, tending tiny plots of maize, wheat or barley amid the vastness of the lush green plains. Now, they find themselves working cheek by jowl with high-tech commercial farms stretching over thousands of hectares tilled by state-of-the-art tractors – and owned

Global Food Security Plans Too Narrow

Global plans to reduce hunger by boosting food production are too narrowly focused on farming without considering how to slow population growth or halt climate change, longtime environmental analyst Lester Brown said Sept. 29. The Obama administration and leaders of other wealthy nations have promised to spend more money and coordinate efforts to reduce the


Starvation In An Age Of Plenty

Other countries’ domestic and foreign policies are often at the root of food disasters What is it about Africa? With its tropical climate and rich soil, it should be able to feed its teeming millions many times over. Yet too often Africa becomes a metaphor for famine and hunger. In 1984-85 a horrified world responded

International Trade Helps Solve Food Crisis

International trade is part of the solution to the global food crisis and not one of its causes, the head of the World Trade Organization says. Global integration represented by trade enabled food to be transported from where it could be produced efficiently to where there was demand, said WTO Director General Pascal Lamy. Geography