Do you remember having earnest childhood exhortations to ‘eat up everything on your plate because there are plenty starving in Africa’? It seems that Gordon Brown does and took it to heart. We now have the political equivalent, a war on waste. Only with the current obesity panic it is don’t buy it in the first place rather than eat it.
Food waste is an important problem. All those ‘buy one get fifteen free’ offers and use by dates that suggest that your Worcester Sauce will turn into nuclear waste at a particular time in a couple of years don’t help either. However, to suggest that this is anything other than peripheral in a crisis that affects the supply and price of basic staple grain crops is to duck the important issues. The world food system is a bit more complicated than that.
How about the dysfunctions of a fully commercialised and heavily monopolistic capitalist food system? How about the monopoly over supply and retail exercised in the developed world by the big supermarkets? How about the continuing dispossession of highly productive small farmers? How about the displacement of local markets by global ones? How about cash cropping as a substitute for food production, of which biofuels is only the latest emanation? How about the erosion of sustainable rural communities? I could go on adding to the list and you can explore more here.
Malnutrition kills millions annually. Millions of poor people that is. Cutting down on that extra banana, which you bin when it goes manky, will only reduce the income of farmers rather than save the world.
Twenty Four years ago this battle was taking place at another academic institution, Sunderland Poly, where another band of left wing antisemites were banning the student Jewish society.
Both then and now, the protagonists wrongly think of themselves as fearless defenders of Palestinian rights.
Also 24 years ago Durham University established the Durham Palestine Educational Trust. This aims to assist social and economic development in Palestine through the fostering of links with Palestinian institutions (not boycotts of Israel or Israeli academics). Specifically, they fund two scholarships for Palestinian students to study at Durham each year.
Now, as then, this is of much less interest to Palestine’s self proclaimed champions. Make a donation here.
Florian Hassel reports [G]… on the absurd prosecution of the [now sacked] curator of the Moscow Tretyakov Gallery, Andrei Erofeyev, and the director of the Andrei Sakharov Museum, Yurii Samodurov, who are alleged to have instigated a “national dispute” by insulting the Russian Orthodox religion with their “Forbidden Art 2006″ exhibition: “The exhibition has ‘had a psychologically and morally negative effect on the visitors’ and ‘threatened the integrity of visitors’ personalities and destroyed their existing world views’ due to the ‘extreme force of the psychologically traumatic influence’ according to the prosecution. If convicted, the curators could face a fine, an extended suspension from work or up to five years in a prison camp.”*
First of all, thanks for all the hard work on DSTPFW - consistently one of the most entertaining, thought provoking and contrarian (in a good way!) blogs on the net. It really is one of my favourites.
Secondly, don’t know if it is any interest to you, but I have just blogged on something I noticed on the Guardian website. I’m absolutely flabbergasted to discover that they have been taking advertising from the BNP - in particular for two support staff positions for their one Greater London Assembly member.
NB. Do not watch if you think Viacom are going to come and steal your kids. You thick fucking wanker.
One other thing — isn’t the US of A’s media political shite ever so fucking intricate and ever so byzantine? We in Europeland are not worthy of such high level discourse.
