Food is a key driver of climate change. How our food gets produced and how it ends up on our tables accounts for around half of all human-generated greenhouse gas emissions. Chemical fertilizers, heavy machinery and other petroleum-dependant farm technologies contribute significantly.

The impact of the food industry as a whole is even greater: destroying forests and savannahs to produce animal feed and generating climate-damaging waste through excess packaging, processing, refrigeration and the transport of food over long distances, despite leaving millions of people hungry.
Continue reading “Food and climate change: the forgotten link” at Grain….

Here’s another take on the fair trade issue which of late has been under criticism for its less than convincing performance in helping out poor farmers

Today, on World Fair Trade Day, we have something else to feel guilty about. That fair-trade cup of coffee we savour may not only fail to ease the lot of poor farmers, it may actually help to impoverish them, according to a study out recently from Germany’s University of Hohenheim.

The study, which followed hundreds of Nicaraguan coffee farmers over a decade, concluded that farmers producing for the fair-trade market “are more often found below the absolute poverty line than conventional producers.

“Over a period of 10 years, our analysis shows that organic and organic-fair trade farmers have become poorer relative to conventional producers.”

continue reading fixing the fair trade coffee here….

Learn how to setup the Legowo System here….

read the full howto on Building a Biogas Plant to Supply a Farm Household at the FFTC archive….

Contact Info:

Department of Agriculture and Forestry Extension,
Ministry of Agriculture and Rural Development, Vietnam
Fax: (84 4) 823 6403, 2002-07-01

FarmFriday is back again after a long rest and today we feature this machine  developed by the Department of Agriculture of Thailand. We got this from our friends over at FFTC.

This machine attempts to resolve the following problem encountered using manual sowing “for a consistent spread, farmers have to constantly cast the seeds from their shoulders by hand. As a result, they suffer from extreme fatigue by the end of the day. Consequently, they are often unable to complete sowing on schedule, thus resulting in low yields and high costs.

To overcome this problem, the Agricultural Engineering Research Institute (AERI), Department of Agriculture, Thailand has successfully designed and developed a paddy seedling sowing machine that can be installed with a pesticide sprayer of any make, either a specific pesticide sprayer or a multipurpose sprayer.

Continue reading about the Multi-Purpose Paddy Sowing Machine here…

Contact Info:

Agricultural Machinery Development and Testing Group,
Agricultural Engineering Research Institute
Department of Agriculture, Thailand
Paholyothin Road, Chatuchak, Bangkok 10900 Thailand
Tel: 66-2940-5582
Fax. 66-2940-5582
E-mail: aed@doa.go.th, 2005-12-01

In Climate Loan Sharks, the World Development Movement and the Jubilee Debt Campaign reveal that the UK is pushing $1.1 billion of climate loans, via the World Bank, on some of the poorest countries in the world.

For example Grenada’s debt is already 90 per cent of GDP, yet it is to be lent a further $22 million, over 3 per cent of the country’s GDP. Lending to such debt burdened country is at best irresponsible and at worst willfully dangerous.

The UK, and other rich industrialised countries in the global north, owe a debt to countries in the global south as compensation for the devastating effects of climate change they have the primary responsibility for creating. A key part of this compensation is providing finance to poorer countries to help reduce the negative impacts of climate change on their lives and livelihoods.

Continue reading and download the FREE ebook “Climate loan sharks: how the UK is making developing countries pay twice for climate change”…..

This week in Cape Town, the World Bank will decide whether to approve new climate adaptation loans for five countries. In Bangladesh and around the world, campaigners are resisting these loans and urging their governments not to accept new debt for climate change. More than 50 organisations from countries due to receive the loans recently signed a statement opposing the concept of climate loans, which was initially invented by the UK.

Continue reading Why Bangladesh doesn’t want climate adaptation loans…..

Last Saturday, 2nd July 2011, the plenary of the 37th FAO Conference ratified the Resolution introduced by the Philippino delegation (see attached text),   supported by more than 15 countries, without any opposition, requesting  UN General Assembly  to declare in 2011 the International Year of Family Farming-IYFF, to be implemented during 2014.

The IYFF World Consultative Committee and the World Rural Forum, presents in Rome, were allowed to express gratitude to the FAO Conference after the approval of the IYFF Resolution.

During the process towards the final approval of the Resolution, several Ambassadors informed us that the worldwide dimension of the IYFF Campaing, with supporters in the 5 continents, were essential factors in favour of obtaining a general consensus.

In this respect, we would like to express our deepest gratitude to each and every organization, entity, government, person, adhered to the Campaign, as we are enjoying a collective success.

We have now to confront the great challenge of going deeper into the many crucial issues and aspirations of the hundreds of millions of women and men farmers, at national and world levels, in order to make  the 2014 IYFF a great milestone in solving problems, finding solutions to the rural people, the real leaders, the true inspiration of our common Campaign.

Draft resolution subbmited by Philippines (see page 5)

“He received a total of 92 votes out of 180 votes cast, winning over former Spanish Foreign Minister Miguel Ángel Moratinos Cuyaubé, who received 88 votes. There were no abstentions.

The election took place on the second day of the biennial 191 member nation Conference of FAO, which also will vote on the Organization’s budget for 2012-2013.” (FAO Media)

With his past experiences in addressing hunger concerns in his native Brazil, being a key player in Brazil’s successful Zero Hunger initiative and his “pledge to focus on reforming the agency, strive for consensus in decision-making and tackle food price volatility”, FAO it seems will be more energized to tackle worldwide hunger and poverty.

Related News:

Dr. José Graziano da Silva’s Statement to FAO Council

Civil Society Welcomes New FAO Chief

Graziano’s five major challenges

If, however, we look back over the past two decades, we can observe that except for the current downturn, hunger has been on the increase. Between the early 1990s and 2007, we had periods in which food prices were low and economic growth was strong, but hunger kept rising. What does this mean? It means that the improvement in the current hunger picture is only the result of the reversal of recent crisis effects. It also means that there is a fundamental structural problem with our food system that goes beyond temporary increases and decreases in food prices. That the food problem is rooted in poverty and radically unequal distributions of income and assets, within and across countries, which influence both food production systems and food consumption patterns.

continue reading…