Peer2Politics

“Over the past thirty years, the ability of global finance to affect aspects of everyday life has been increasing at an unprecedented rate. The world of food bears vivid testimony to this tendency, through the scars opened by the 2008 world food price crisis, the iron fist of retailing giants that occupy the supply chain and the unsustainable ecological footprint left behind by global production networks.

“We have picked up our fossils and minerals because they have been lying around. We have done so more and sometimes less judiciously. They have been sources of wealth, power and injustice. They have received no valuation beyond cost of extraction and competitive bidding for degrees of scarcity.

 

The co-author of a new book on reconciliation with the land reflects on a Brazilian community that models “abundant kingdom homesteading.” 

“In Empires of Food: Feast, Famine and the Rise and Fall of Civilizations, authors Evan D.G. Fraser and Andrew Rimas examine current problems with the global food system by taking a look at examples from world history. The authors, who previously wrote Beef: The Untold Story of How Milk, Meat, and Muscle Shaped the World, show the reader how current problems in the food system and the environment are not unique to today’s world, but are similar to problems faced by civilizations throughout history. Fraser and Rimas examine how both governments and individuals in modern times are repeating the same mistakes that caused the downfall of some of the most powerful empires in history.

 

“Water Governance for 21st Century, by Shiney Varghese at the Institute for Agriculture and Trade Policy, makes a compelling case urging advcates and policy makers to advance an approach combining the commons framework and the Public Trust Doctrine principles. Shiney notes that the tendency of recent trends to rely on market and rights–based policies has exaccerbated the failures in water governance. These approaches do not “solve problems such as poor management, existing over-allocation or failing water governance.”