Tagged: Food for 9 Billion
Decidedly unmodern rice varieties helping India’s poorest farmers
Photo by CIAT International Center for Tropical Agriculture via Flickr, used under a Creative Commons license (CC BY-SA 2.0)
I was pleased to discover yesterday that the public media project Food for 9 Billion has been continuing apace. (For my entries on a number of earlier reports in the series, follow this post’s “Food for 9 Billion” tag.)
Introducing a recent piece from reporter Sam Eaton, Larisa Epatko writes at the website of the PBS NewsHour,
When a cyclone hits India, the sea-drenched soil can remain salty for years. Farmers are finding new high-yield rice seeds are not withstanding the salty onslaught as well as seeds developed more than a century ago.
In [this] “Food for 9 Billion” report, Sam Eaton travels to Eastern India to find out how the Ganges River delta, packed with more than 4 million people, is faring four years after Cyclone Aila hit the region.
Find Eaton’s fascinating video report here.
For more, check out this photo slideshow at The Guardian by Jason Taylor; its focus: “Debal Deb, a scientist, ecologist and farmer who is building a seed bank in India’s Odisha state, has helped to preserve 920 varieties of indigenous rice using traditional methods. Committed to working with local communities, he hopes to help make farmers independent of large corporations and GM crops, and help secure their access to local seed varieties.”
Food for 9 Billion: Eating with climate change in mind
In the December holiday hubbub, I missed 2012’s final installment in the great yearlong public media project, Food for 9 Billion. It’s a deceptively simple piece that manages to encapsulate many of the complexities in being a conscientious eater in the modern world. Jon Miller, executive director of Homeland Productions, goes shopping with (the awesomely named) chef Spike Gjerde and Roni Neff, an expert on the connections between climate change and our food systems.
Find the Marketplace audio story here (or transcript here), and then check out Neff’s four steps toward a climate-friendly diet.
Grilled oysters. Photo by kslee via Flickr (CC BY 2.0)
Food for 9 Billion: The disappearing Mediterranean diet in Greece
As tourists dine on Greek cuisine in the western-Crete city of Chania, many locals have turned to cheaper, processed American-style food like burgers and pizza. Photo by Cyber Monkey (Eleonora Gorini) via Flickr (CC BY-NC-ND 2.0)
Yesterday brought another installment in the yearlong, public-media project Food for 9 Billion. Reporter Jon Miller takes us to Greece and the island of Crete:
Today Greece has the one of the highest obesity rates in the world. The proportion of overweight children — about 40 percent — may be the highest, except for some Pacific islands. The problem’s especially bad in Crete, home to what could be the world’s healthiest diet. So what gives?
“It has to do with many factors,” said Christina Makratzaki, a local dietitian who also battled obesity as a teenager. We met at a waterfront café full of European tourists.
“In the ’50s and ’60s, the people, they were poor, but they were healthy,” she explained. “They were eating very good foods — the olive oil, the olives, the green leafy vegetables that are our treasure. But they were enforced in a way because of their poverty to use these things.”
Then people here got a little money — from tourism, from agriculture — and everything changed.
“Now, we have many choices,” she said.
Like processed food from the supermarket and fast food on the street. And soda and doughnuts and ice cream. All of it cheaper to buy, easier to prepare — and, especially for children, harder to resist — than what grandma used to make. And then there’s the marketing — a relentless bombardment of ads aimed at kids for products like soft drinks and breakfast cereal and processed meat.
For more, including photos, Marion Nestle describing the “nutrition transition,” and details of what struggling Greek governments are doing (or not) to fight obesity, check out the print or audio versions of Miller’s piece here.
Food for 9 Billion: Small farmers and supermarkets in southern Africa
Photo of a new supermarket in Lusaka, Zambia, by andresmh (Andrés Monroy-Hernández) via Flickr (CC BY-SA 2.0)
The latest installment in the yearlong, public-media project Food for 9 Billion comes from Gretchen Wilson reporting from Zambia and Lesotho:
Supermarket chains are rapidly expanding all over Africa. And they’re not just changing the way people shop. They’re transforming the way food is produced in a region where agriculture provides almost 60 percent of all jobs.
“The main problem of the small farmer is market access,” [Joyce] Chitja [of the African Centre for Food Security] said. “How will they put it into the marketplace?”
As supermarkets spread, they could lift millions of small farmers out of poverty by buying from them. Or competition from big commercial farms could ruin them.
As Wilson continues,
In Zambia, the farmers’ union is politically powerful. So when [South African supermarket chain] Pick n Pay opened its stores, the government insisted it buy at least half its goods from Zambian suppliers. Today, more than three-quarters of the stores’ produce comes from within the country.
On their own, small farmers often struggle to supply the quantities and quality the big grocery store chains need. In Zambia, some producers work together. Near Lusaka, an independently-owned packhouse consolidates produce from about 60 farmers, who bring their tomatoes or onions in pick-up trucks — or even wheelbarrows — whenever they can.
Like all the previous installments, this Food for 9 Billion story is interesting and informative and takes us to places we might not otherwise go. Head here for the full print and audio versions, along with a photo slideshow.
Food for 9 Billion: Catfish farming in Vietnam
Photo by T-Oh! & Matt via Flickr (CC BY-NC-ND 2.0)
Yesterday Marketplace ran yet another installment in the ongoing public-media project, Food for 9 Billion. In it, reporter Sam Eaton takes a close look at Vietnam’s pangasius aquaculture, AKA catfish farming. As Eaton describes,
Jose Villalon, who heads the World Wildlife Fund’s aquaculture program, says pangasius may be the perfect factory fish.
It grows fast. It can breathe air through its mouth if things get too crowded. And, unlike carnivorous fish like salmon, it thrives on a mostly vegetarian diet.
“When you look at ponds like this and you see the production output of them and you see how the fish are feeding efficiently,” Villalon said. “This is going to be how the future will receive its marine protein.”
Intensive systems like this can feed a lot of people, but there’s also the potential for things to go terribly wrong. Rivers get polluted. Diseases run rampant. Forests and wetlands get bulldozed into new ponds. This is why Jose Villalon and WWF are here in Vietnam working with big producers like [Duong Ngoc] Minh [head of Vietnam’s largest catfish farming operation]. They hope to create a new model for industrial-scale fish farms that puts the planet on equal footing with profits.
“Right now we’re at this transition where aquaculture’s being produced in traditional ways and it’s not yet being asked to be responsible,” he said.
It’s a fascinating story, so check out the full audio or print version, along with photos and a video teaser, at Marketplace’s website. Then head here to learn about the World Wildlife Fund’s aquaculture program on pangasius.
Food for 9 Billion: Ghana
Today brought another installment in the ongoing public media project, Food for 9 Billion. Marketplace aired a feature from reporter Jori Lewis examining a longstanding concern for African farmers: soil. “[F]or thousands of years subsistence farmers have been taking nutrients out of the soil and not putting them back. In effect, farmers are mining the soil.” Eventually, the herbicide glyphosate (AKA RoundUp) caught on with some farmers. But an alternative approach has yet to find widespread support, despite the need. “No-till systems also need cover crops to prevent erosion and other plants to deliver more nutrients to the soil. But all that has been a harder sell to Ghanaian farmers than glyphosate and fertilizer. After all, why let the dirt rest and recharge when chemicals can help it produce without interruption?”
Head here for the full audio, transcript, and photos.
Picture from a meeting with innovative farmer Joel Yiri, Jirapa Village in Ghana. He started developing his plot of land by using manure from his pigs when he realized the soil had become infertile. He is also serious about keeping a record of all input costs and revenues, meaning that he now can track loses and change crops and production techniques accordingly. Read the accompanying story on the CGIAR Research Program on Climate Change, Agriculture and Food Security (CCAFS) blog at the post, “We should not farm anymore like our grandfathers did,” by clicking on the image. Photo: P. Casier (CGIAR) via Flickr.
The Conscientious Omnivore 